0:00 Welcome back to Sheamus Poperri. I'm Joe Heshmire and I'm here at the Catholic Creators Conference with Adrien from Sipsa and Braden from the Catacuman. And I wanted to pose a question. So my most viewed video as of the time of recording is a video I did called Do Protestants worship or do Protestants worship God? And the video has gotten a lot of push back, both positive and negative feedback. And so I wanted to talk to two guys who are Protestant converts to Catholicism and kind of nuance the argument and say what can we make of it and you know what are some ways to present it charitably and accurately. So first of all gentlemen thank you so much for joining and why don't we go one at a time and maybe tell us just a a brief bit about yourself, your conversion to
0:45 Catholicism and then also introduce your channel as well. Yeah. Hi. Uh I'm Adrian from Sips with Sarah. I converted. Oh man, let's see. I was an evangelical Christian. I I reverted to Protestantism in 2018. Stayed there for a couple of years and then realized, oh, the early church doesn't really believe what we believe about the Eucharist, about baptism, and things like that. So looking into early church history made me want to find a church that was more in line with that early church. Uh so that eventually led to me becoming a Lutheran, and then eventually a Catholic. And that's a whole other crazy story we can get into, but yeah. Hey, I'm Braden from the Catacuman. Similar story. I feel like a lot of people these days are converting from evangelical kind of non-denominational Baptist streams. And that's how I grew up. I was Baptist, non-denominational, and it really was
1:32 encountering the church fathers. Um recognizing, hey, there's no Baptist in uh in these writings that I'm uh looking at. They believed in regenerative baptism and uh in all these things as as um Adrian mentioned. And uh I just remember um it it was that struggle like can't we can't we just be Anglican or Lutheran? They kind of look like Catholics. Uh we don't have to go all the way. But it it eventually led us um to even just start looking into Catholic arguments u that we hadn't really um considered before because we were taught to think Catholics were kind of out of their minds and know what they were talking about. Didn't read the Bible. So uh definitely turned out to be wrong. So, did you make a stopover in high church Protestantism on your journey into the church or? We didn't. We didn't. And I was actually
2:18 uh working as like an interim youth pastor at a Baptist church whenever we started inquiring and got married, moved colleges, a whole bunch of changes, and we were just like, you know what, we need to figure this out. Go the entire way. And uh you know, it thankfully it didn't it didn't take us too long because I tend to hyperfixate on that sort of stuff. So the the only thing I consumed every single day was just uh that sort of debates all all the things that are freely available online. So that's that's part of the reason why I started the YouTube channel is because I feel like we all recognize the importance of having freely available content online to research these kinds of things. So maybe a good opening question on this would just be did either of you encounter this kind of worship problem objection kind of on your own journeys
3:05 or is it something you heard more about once you'd already become Catholic? H for me it's something that I didn't really consider uh when I was a Protestant. I didn't really think about what what it meant to worship. I I thought you know if I'm singing songs to God, if I'm saying nice things to God, then that is what worship is. Uh but I hadn't encountered that objection at that time. Yeah. Uh so I remember at our non-denominational church, our worship pastor, we had like the worship pastor, the lead pastor, all these things. Um made it very clear like it's not okay here's the songs, that's when we worship and then there's the sermon and then there's the other things. The worship's part of the song. That's that was kind of like the the ideas like you worship when you sing and then you listen to the lecture. The theology at least within
3:52 our perspective was like okay, you worship God when you sing wor praise and worship. You worship God when you listen to the sermon, when you read scripture, all these things. And I do remember whenever I was looking into the Catholic faith, there was this worship problem. Hold up. Worship as we and I I know we're probably going to get into this, but looking throughout scripture whenever uh there is some sort of act of worship that seemed to involve a sacrifice, at least at the pinnacle of it. And so that was something that I started listening to and hearing of, but it it it didn't become a super big problem for me like baptism, like the real presence, which it should it I feel like it should have because um the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist definitely goes with the sacrifice of the mass. So yeah.
4:38 Yeah, I think you you've teed that up very nicely with the sacrificial connection. There's a great quote I've got here. Ever Ferguson, uh, Church of Christ scholar says, "Sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world." And I think this is the key to cracking a bit of a mystery in the Bible. And I, you know, I recently on Catholic Answers Live, someone called in and raised something related to, you know, worship from a Protestant perspective. And I I'm going off of memory here, so I may not get the the conversation exactly right, but I asked him like, "Where do we see worship in the New Testament?" And he said like what place? And he said the synagogue. And that's just wrong. I mean objectively the synagogue is good but the synagogue is a place of teaching. You know like you said like a listening to a lecture or a sermon. It's a place
5:24 of doing like Bible study. But the only time we hear even prayer in the synagogue mentioned together or in Matthew 6 when Jesus says don't pray in the synagogue like the hypocrites do who like to pray in the synagogue and marketplaces. So even there like Jesus isn't saying synagogue bad. It's just taken for granted the synagogue is not a place of prayer anymore than a marketplace is a place of prayer. Like if you're trying to do a public prayer there, it's because you're trying to be seen by other people. So we want to separate the synagogue from, you know, the places of prayer which are, you know, the upper room, the temple, lonely places Jesus goes off to. You, you know, you pray always. So the place of prayer is sort of everywhere. But then there's this special thing called worship that as we see from Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman happens in the
6:11 temple in Jerusalem. Uh you know this is John 4:20 and 21. And so it's like okay so what is worship and how is it different than prayer? And I think you've already started to kind of tea up an answer to that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't have anything to add. That's great. No. Yeah. And it's um seeing the distinction there. It's it's it's hard to imagine at least coming from a Protestant background that there would be at least a hardline distinction between the prayer that we would offer to God and especially if it's like adoration or singing psalms that praise him and things like that. And you think back to uh let's say like the lurggical life of a Jew who's not living in Jerusalem going to synagogue, they would sing the psalms. They would do these things. They would even do do those things during the seder meal in their
6:58 own homes, right? And it's like it's it's it's hard to imagine at least coming from the Protestant perspective and I see why so many people are like you guys don't think Protestants worship God because we don't offer such and such a sacrifice. Um when when looking at those passages saying look we praise him and St. Paul says it's a sacrifice of praise, right? Singing psalms, spiritual hymns, things like that, right? And so, um, and and that that would, like I said earlier, that would be like the pinnacle of what a lot of low church evangelicals would think of when they think of let's go worship. Oh, we're going to go sing a song in church with the congregation. Yeah, I think that's that's very well said. And I don't want to knock that, right? I think this is probably one of the first ways we want to nuance this
7:43 of saying we don't want to say there's literally no act of worship because you know Romans 12:1 where St. Paul says to make sacrifices in your body. This is your spiritual worship. I mean, the first thing to notice there when Jesus talks about worship in spirit and truth in John 4, some people hear that as like disembodied, like we don't do anything with our bodies. We don't need the Eucharist. We don't need an altar. We don't need a church. It's all disembodied to the spirit and truth. Whereas for Paul, spiritual worship is explicitly embodied in Romans 12. But the idea that you can actually worship in the temple of your body in different ways, you know, all the ways you mentioned sacrifices of praise, even the sacrifice of just being inconvenience for the sake of another if done for the glory of God. So we want to affirm
8:30 worship in that sense and still say there's this thing that seems really central to the Jewish concept of worship that's very sacrificial. And if we don't have something like that, we are missing something near the heart of worship, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, as as a Protestant, I always felt like there was something more that I that like something was missing in our Sunday services. I felt like, okay, we're kind of singing songs. We're hearing a maybe even a very good speech, but I feel like there could there should be something more to this. And so, I think that is what I found in the Eucharist. And um it yeah it just so happens that that's what God had in mind. Yeah. Beautiful. I mean it does it does strike me as a non as someone who was never a Protestant that the boundaries
9:17 between church and not church are a lot fuzzier within Protestantism. Like if you're meeting Yeah. I've seen like evangelical churches and strip malls and if you're coming together and you're singing songs together and you're praying together, you could do that in your car. Mhm. So what is it that makes this different? And one thing could be the the gathering, the community. But again, if you've got other people in your car, no, we we wouldn't say that there is a distinction. It's like you can worship in your car, you can worship with other people, you can worship in your house, you can worship alone. If you're singing the same song, right? What's the distinction? Other than there's more people gathered around you. And I I definitely think that in those circles, um it's like, yeah, you can that is still worship. It's the same kind of worship, same value of worship as it
10:03 would be in a in a service. It I mean it's just striking comparing that, you know, you mentioned the early church earlier. Comparing how they spoke about worship, theirs looks much more like the Jewish concept of worship. You know, going back to like the dedicay in the first century or Justin Martyr or St.as in the second century and they regularly will cite to Malachi 1 where Malachi 1 God is rebuking the Jewish priests and saying he's not pleased with the sacrifices are offering at the altar which he calls the table of the Lord which is important because that's later how St. Paul describes the Eucharist and uh that that's going to be something that he sets aside in favor of gathering the Gentiles together and then says from the rising of the sun to its setting, a pure sacrifice will be offered to my name. That doesn't look like they're
10:50 just singing songs. Like that looks like there's some kind of visible objective kind of sacrifice being offered. And St. Paul seems to connect that when in 1 Corinthians 10 he compares the table of the Lord eucharistically to the table of the Lord and the temple and then the table of demons. Uh so 1 Corinthians 10 has a great passage there but then the dedicay Justin martyr and make this connection explicitly. So yeah it makes sense when you read it kind of through that lens but it's fascinating if if that's not the background you're coming from. It just seems like there's something missing there. Yeah. And I wonder if this is probably a tangent, but I wonder if this gets into also how we think of sotiology and um like penal substitution and things like that because if cuz people man like I I
11:38 watch some Protestants who I love, they're great and I watch their YouTube channels, but they describe that God had to pour out his wrath on Christ on the cross because that was the only way that that he could be just and merciful uh perfectly. And we don't have to get into the the differences that we have with penal substitution and all that, but I wonder if this has something to do with that because if worship is us singing songs to God or something, then in what sense are we receiving forgiveness of sins whereas like the in Jewish tradition, they they would sacrifice forgiveness of sins. Uh, and if we don't have a sacrifice for forgiveness of sins and that's just something that happened in the past and that doesn't really happen now, the sacrifice happened on
12:25 the cross and we don't really have anything to do with that now. I feel like that disconnect kind of contributes to that theology in a way. I I have an immediate reaction to that. I don't know if you wanted to jump in first. Okay. The thing that I think a lot of people miss is understanding what sacrifice is. Like something that it it was helpful for me to realize was oh in the New Testament they don't explain how sacrifice works because everyone reading the New Testament in its original context came from either a Jewish or pagan background that had a very similar conception of sacrifice. So we hear sacrifice and we think of just the killing of an animal or the death of Christ. But that's not it. That's not accurate. You know, like you kill the Passover lamb on preparation day on the 14th day of the month of Nissan, but that's not
13:12 enough. As maybe it sounds bad. It's not like there's anything wrong with the blood of the lamb there, but that's not the end of it. So, the example I'd give is like let's say you're let's say you're a kid in a family. You're of the age of reason. 13-year-old kid and your family is poor, does not own the Passover lamb under, you know, Jewish law. you could share the Passover with another family if if you couldn't afford your own lamb. How are you covered by the death of the lamb? Well, you didn't raise the lamb. You don't own the lamb. You're not slaughtering the lamb. Well, the answer is very explicit. The blood is smeared on the doorpost and then you eat the lamb. Like maybe you don't even smear the blood on the doorpost, but you participate in the sacrifice. You become a partaker
13:57 by eating. And again, 1 Corinthians 10, St. St. Paul explicitly says this is how we become partakers in the altar in Judaism. And he also describes how the Eucharist is a participation a partaking in the body and blood of Christ which means we are receiving Christ's body and blood through eating which makes total sense from a sacrificial context. And notice this is not a second sacrifice. This is not ressacrificing the lamb. The lamb isn't like double dead. It's still just as dead as it was. It's a participation in the sacrifice that's already in one sense been accomplished in another sense still needs to be applied. And so once you get that then it's like okay this tells me a couple things because the other thing to add is
14:43 sacrifice requires this other thing an offeratory aspect like you couldn't just you know you you leave the pen open and one of the lambs gets out and gets run over and then say ah that's the one I sacrificed to God. That's not acceptable. That's actually exactly the kind of thing that Malachi 1 is condemning of offering like bad sacrifices. So the offeratory aspect, there's a laying down of Christ's life that he does at the last supper when he offers his body and blood and then freely goes to the cross. And what penal substitution seems again is an outsider to be missing is Christ is the victim, but it's not clear that he's the priest. And Christ is explicitly the priest. In John 10, he says, "No one takes my life from me. lay it down freely and for this reason the father loves me not the father pours out his wrath on me. The father is pleased with the sacrifice.
15:30 You know in these sacrificial offerings in Judaism and even in paganism there was no sense of god or the gods being mad at the sacrifice or at the priest. That's just not how th those worked. So yeah, it just seems like with the right sacrificial context, not only does worship come into clear view, but as you say, satiology changes pretty dramatically if you have a good Jewish understanding of of what the New Testament is talking about, which is just taken for granted within the pages of the New Testament itself. Yeah. It it so it seems like at least under the Old Covenant, sacrifice was something that you were bound to do to make reparation for sin. You take something of your own, whether that be a lamb or whether that be something as simple as grain. There are grain
16:15 offerings and things like that, and sacrifice it, give it up, you know, and it would have some sort of propitiary effect. Obviously, we know from the new covenant that um the the blood of lamb and goats don't take away sin. And that's why we needed the superior sacrifice of Christ. And we offer up Christ sacrifice at the mass every time we go to mass, right? Um, and so what that seems to indicate to me though is that while the sacrifice of the mass is superior to those old covenant forms of sacrifice, those lesser forms were still worship. They were still sacrifices even down to the grain offering, right? And so if I were to give a little bit of push back to the do Protestants worship, um there does seem to be a theology in in the new
17:01 covenant, not only giving a sacrifice of praise, but offer yourselves up as living sacrifices. And um it's it's almost like okay, yes, they don't have um the real presence even if they're these high lurgical traditions. Uh they don't offer the ukar Eucharist as a sacrifice. Many of them don't. And so, but even though they don't do that, they have these lesser forms of sacrifices as baptized Christians being able to offer themselves up to God as true sacrifices, but not the one true superior sacrifice of the new covenant. I think that's a I think that's a very helpful distinction that the places you find the clearest acts of Protestant worship are not the places that immediately come to mind when you imagine like a Protestant uh service
17:46 necessarily. like listening to the sermon is the least adjacent to worship biblically. You know, it's still good. Don't get me wrong. Like the synagogue is good, but the synagogue isn't the temple. And kind of capturing that. Well, like the temple doesn't go away in the new covenant. And I think that a sacrifice theology connected to a theology of temple is really important because the New Testament temple is the body of Christ. John 2, you know, destroy the temple and in three days I'll rebuild it. He's talking about his own body. But then by extension the eucharistic body of Christ, the church's body of Christ is called a temple. And then your own bodies having been transformed into Christ through baptism in the Eucharist, you become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Like you are a temple of God. And when we gather collectively, we gather as temple. And so I I think
18:32 even in terms of the difference between you were talking about like Jewish hymns of old and now there's a deeper sense in which this actually takes on a greater sacrificial context because your body has been uh turned into a temple of God. And and maybe it's worth defining a temple. It's a place of divine dwelling and a place of divine sacrifice. Like if you look at why the temple existed, it was okay, we've got the ark of the covenant. We've got the place where God is and we'd like to be able to build something beautiful to honor his presence. And because we know God is there, this is where sacrifice will be offered. Now, your body is that place, but so is the church as the body of Christ. And these two are intimately connected. That the the church, the body of Christ exists because of the eucharistic body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 10 verse 16 or 17, St. Paul
19:20 says, uh, we become one body because we partake of the one loaf. that he he makes that connection pretty explicitly. But yeah, so I think that's I think that's a very good nuance where you don't just want to say, "Oh, Protestants never sacrifice. They never worship God." That's that's too far. It's overly simplistic. There is sometimes a failure to understand sacrifice and worship and maybe a failure to distinguish it from prayer or from sermons, but that doesn't mean it's not present. It just needs to be kind of teased out, purified, and and in some cases maybe somewhat redirected. Right. right now. Would you say that there's a distinction between a Protestant and a Catholic doing maybe the exact same act of self-giving? Whereas the Catholic might unite that to
20:08 the suffering of Christ in the cross, unite that um act of service, act of worship, act of suffering and the Protestant might not. Would you say there's as much? That's a great question. I would say, you know, St. Augustine when he talks about sacrifice says basically any good thing that you do for the sake of God constitutes a sacrifice. Um and so the problem is what about people who are doing these good things without a sense of a sacrificial theology behind it. My inclination is to say God is still pleased with that and it it constitutes a sacrifice in some sense but the offeratory aspect is properly an important part of this. You know, imagine if someone in the Old Testament didn't explicitly offer the sacrifice, but was still trying to give it to God. My inclination is to say, "God
20:53 understands that they're still trying to give it to him." So, good intentions do go a long way, but I want to caveat that slightly with Leviticus 10. So, Leviticus 10, you've got Aaron, you got the high priest, and his sons, Naab and Abahoo, decide to worship God in their own way, and they offer unholy fire before the Lord. And explicitly, they're not worshiping a false god. They're worshiping the true God on their terms. And God sends down fire from heaven and destroys them. Because if worship, you think about the old English worthy ship, like it's giving the honor and praise and sacrifice and offering and all of this that is God's worth. Well, putting God on my terms is not giving him what he's worth because he's
21:38 worth approaching on his terms rather than ours. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, similarly in Numbers 15, when Kora argues all of us are priests and so therefore we don't need a priesthood, he creates the first schism and the schism in the ground opens up and he and his followers are swallowed up. Again, they're offering sacrifice to God. And so maybe in some sense like the question of do Protestants worship is a good one to explore more deeply. What do we mean by worship? But do we worship properly? you know, is this the kind of worship God wants? And I I alluded to the Muslim question earlier. I think many times, particularly Protestants hearing this of saying, "Yeah, we can acknowledge a sense in which Muslims worship the true God." It they're hearing, "Well, this is
22:24 therefore just as good as anything else." But our implicit premise is it is not enough to worship God. You have to worship God properly in the way he wants. And if you're doing it with bad theology and you're doing it with disordered rights and everything else, that's not it. And so we're not just saying therefore Islam's equal to Christianity or Islamic theology is equal to Christian theology or anything like that. But I can understand someone who has a totally different theology of worship or maybe an underexamined theology of worship would would hear those words very differently. I mean, Paul encounters pagans who have a purely natural religion in Acts 17 and he says that altar to an unknown god, the God that you worship, I'm going to declare him to you. Right? And so it's like they're still referring to the same
23:11 being, right? But it's not it's not the same, I guess, value or the same um kind of worship that God would expect of people living under the new covenant, right? And and he says that pretty explicitly I think going on in Acts 17 where like the the deeds done in ignorance were overlooked but now they don't have ignorance as an excuse anymore. I mean he he says that fairly directly. So it's certainly possible for someone to ignorantly with the best of intentions offer worship to God and he can be pleased with that and it can be a sort of preparation for the fullness of the gospel. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a good analogy. I love analogies. So, like let's say it's somebody's birthday and they tell they have a a whatever a list of things that they want for their birthday, a registry or whatever. Um, and then somebody brings something
23:56 that's like totally way off the list, like has nothing to do with it. You still brought a gift to the right person, but it's not what they had in mind. Yeah. Yeah. And so somebody who brings the gift that they actually ask for is their their gift is superior and and analogous to worship the the worship that is done in the way that God um prescribes is superior. Uh but the other people who are trying to worship God but are just doing so in way off ways. They're trying to worship the right God. They're just Yeah. They're not they're not bringing the right I like that. Yeah. I mean, I'm just imagining if for my wife's birthday, I got her like chief's tickets. She would suspect I'm offering a gift on my terms rather than hers. Like, I'm giving her what I want to get and and she might be a little bit uh
24:43 suspicious of the gift, say, right? I mean, hopefully she'd like it. I'm afraid to try. She gets to go with you to Yeah. And along those same lines, it seems to be that the going back to intention, if you intend to give God the the kind of worship that you think that he desires or has commanded, um that's loads different than knowing the list, saying, "Yeah, I'm going to get something else." You know, right? because because that would seem to be comparable to those first generation Israelites offering the kind of worship um when they weren't supposed to whether I mean we don't know exactly what the unholy fire maybe it's the wrong kind of incense the wrong blend they picked up the wrong blend at the store um and then the sons of Kora they
25:31 weren't allowed to and they knew it because Moses told them Moses was like okay here's the here are all the things that you're supposed to do and guess what the sons of Aaron over they're the ones that do it, not you guys. Right? And um but it it seems in an entirely different context to say, okay, someone who is trying the best that they can given the knowledge, given the revelation that they have, I mean, working just from the text in the of the New Testament alone, you can piece it together in a in a way that doesn't give explicitly eucharistic, you know, sacrificial tones, right? and present that to the congregation, say this is what we're doing. Yeah. U my mom when she was a little kid decided to honor her family by washing the car, but she used Comet, so she
26:18 scraped off the outer coat of paint. Oh. And this was still an act of genuine charity. Uh like this was a beautiful thing she did for her family. It'd be totally different if she knew what Comet was like and then chose to do that anyway. Like those would not be the same act. Um, so yes, I'm I'm not sure how grateful her family was with this gift, but yeah, you're right. Like well-intended, misguided attempts to everyone's gotten a gift where you're like, "Oh, I don't love this, but I love the thought that you put into it. You don't say that, but you you hopefully still feel honored that the person made an effort to to get you what they thought you would want." So hopefully God has a similar kind of approach to it. But it is a good reminder that if we haven't thought deeply about it, we should think deeply about what kind of
27:04 worship does God want? Since we talked about sacrifice, how would you handle uh the objection, well, don't you know it's all once for all? You know, you got this once for all sacrifice of Christ and here you are telling me that every time you go to mass, the sacrifice of Christ is presented to the father. Aren't you just completely contradicting scripture? Absolutely not. Because it's once for all and we're in the for all. Okay, that's the one time back then and we're in the for all. It's for all time and it's it's available for all of us anywhere we are, right? Um anywhere across the world, the Catholic Church has spread, right? And I I definitely think that when they when they forward that uh and I I remember using that same argument against against my Catholic friend. Um the the once-forall argument
27:50 is is it's coming from a place where they're assuming the sacrifice of the mass is some sort of recrucifiction, right? Like we're rekilling Jesus, which is assuming the sacrifice just means killing Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And um you'd have to explain that to the the unbloody versus the bloody offering and and things like that. But no, it I mean it comes from um a place of sincerity because they just don't a lot of them don't understand Catholic teaching when it comes to that sacrifice. Um but no, it's it's just funny to be able to point out that we're we're in the for all period, not the the once period. So true. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned earlier that when you're partaking of the lamb that was sacrificed, you're not rekilling the
28:36 lamb every time you partake of it. It's the same lamb. Uh but yeah, like you said, this this lamb is the lamb of God, the perfect lamb. So, we are able to partake of him for eternity until we're God, God willing, taken home. Beautiful. You know, one thing I'd give just as encouragement for anyone who hears this objection is go back and read it in Hebrews. And one of the things mentioned in the once-forall context is that Christ presents the blood once for all in heaven and then sits down at the right hand of the father. Now, significantly, that doesn't happen on Good Friday. that happens 43 days later at the ascension. So the author of Hebrews is not saying everything needed for the sacrifice is done on Good Friday because that's not true by the terms of Hebrews own theology of sacrifice. And so there are once for all aspects
29:22 you know Christ is never recrucified his presentation of his blood in heaven is this eternal offering and then we participate the for all aspect as you say we participate in that by like you know because how does it applied to us I like to ask the question of people like when when did you get saved and you know different people from different backgrounds it'll be baptism or when they converted or they prayed a sinner's prayer whatever it is no one I've encountered church has ever said Good Friday. Like everyone Catholic or Protestant or whatever has some implicit understanding at least that the merits of Christ on the cross have to be applied in my life somehow. Maybe they have an understanding for how that works. Maybe they don't. But there is some way that we have to access and
30:08 share in the sacrifice because if you know if you have the Passover sacrifice, they kill the lamb and then they do nothing else. They don't smear the blood on the doorpost. They don't eat the lamb. Has the lamb been sacrificed? In one sense, yes. But not in a way that's efficacious because it hasn't been applied. Yeah. Yeah. But it seems like um they would say, "Okay, well, in order for it to be applied in my life concretely, I don't have to offer it back to the father in in the propitiary n the way that it is in the mass because I mean it's like our sacrifice and yours, you know, offer to the father. That's what we say in mass every single time, right?" And so, um, I I can definitely see where they would try and push back and say, "Well, yeah, like it has to be applied to me. I just accept the the merits of the
30:53 atonement and I don't have to offer that up for some sort of reapplication." Yeah. I want to explore that because I think both of you would be in a better position than me of maybe understanding that from a an insider's view sort of. Yeah. Because if you have a theology of sacrificial worship of some kind, even if it's not maybe fully fleshed out, pun intended, uh you have this sense of like, I need to make sacrifices in my body. Allah, Romans 12, I mean, it's right there. It's pretty explicit. Yeah. To then say, but those sacrifices aren't going to be united to the sacrifice of Christ actually looks way more palagian. I mean, from an outsers's perspective of like what Christ did isn't enough. I have to do my own thing separately over here. Whereas the Catholic view is all
31:38 of our sacrifices are incorporated into the sacrifice of Christ and transformed into something that they aren't on their own. So like we take the bread and wine, the work of human hands, and it becomes the body and blood of Christ. So our meager sacrifices are then united to his perfect sacrifice and that's what gives them merit. But otherwise, it's hard to see what our sacrifices are doing at all. uh at least from my perspect maybe someone can push back and say here's here's kind of how merit's a bad word from where I come from. So fair we don't think any sort of we didn't think any sort of work or worship or anything was meritorious before God. Like it might so there's a distinction like okay God might choose to give you an extra mansion or two in heaven right but that doesn't that's not
32:24 like you're meriting it. It's like kind of a it's a free gift based off of the works that you did here on merit. So, um, no, but it it was like I I I can see where you're coming from with the whole, um, it seems pelagian to say you don't need to unite that. Yeah. Like I'm just wondering, I guess what what is the maybe there's no efficacy to our worship. Maybe our sacrifice in our worship doesn't do anything. But if it does do something and it's not united to the sacrifice of Christ, Yeah. I actually find that much harder to explain than it doing something when it is united to because if it's united to the sacrifice of Christ and it makes perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ in my own body. Like that. Okay, that makes sense. Like my sufferings are united to his and they're completing it in some way.
33:10 So you're you're kind of asking like what is the goal of Protestant worship? Kind of. Yeah. Like what is what is it doing if it's not united to Christ? Yeah. Cuz you wouldn't say that, well, I go to my Protestant church service so that I could receive the forgiveness of sins or so that I could receive Yeah. the body and blood of Christ or something. All right. Can each of you We'll start with you, Adrian. Sure. volunte. Exactly. Steelman, the we'll say broadly Protestant uh conception of what worship is for. Oh yeah. Okay. So, I'm going back to my non-denominational mindset here. Uh worship is not for the atonement of sins because that was accomplished for us on Good Friday and that's applied to us when we accept uh when we have faith in Christ. So,
33:56 worship is purely to give glory to God. It's not for us to receive anything. Uh obviously we're edified by it, but um it's purely to give glory to God. And I would I would say that's probably like the the strongest view of like non-denominational, what the goal of non-denominational worship would be. I know Joel Ostein's wife said something in a sermon once she gave where she said like we don't worship God for his sake. We worship God for our sake. And people were furious with her about that. And she might have meant that in a narcissistic prosperity gospel sort of way. I'm not denying that. But there is one sense in which we would say historically that is actually closer to the Christian understanding of like God is not actually improved in any way by our
34:42 worship. Yeah. He is as infinitely glorious and as infinitely happy as he's ever going to be. And we haven't added one iota to that by our worship. But by having a right relationship with him, we are transformed. So, it's fascinating to hear that that perspective of this is for his glory and it leads to our edification, but it's Yes, that's secondary. Yeah. No, Adrian, man, you just like hammered it in there. I don't know what the heck. Thank you for watching. Yeah. Go subscribe to Sips with Sarah. Uh, no. Yeah, worship is for God's glory. Worship is not for us to elicit some sort of, I don't know, gift from him, benefit from him. It's purely to glorify and and and um and raise his name high and say, "Look, God, you're
35:27 worthy of everything. I'm I'm offering my body as a sacrifice. I'm offering my my lips as a sacrifice, singing praises to you, psalms, hymns, and it's it's solely for that reason, not so that I can receive the forgiveness of sins." But that's where I'm coming from as a former Baptist. So, Lutheran would say something slightly different. And certainly like I think it's it's a fine answer in one sense to just say we do this because God tells us to do this. I wouldn't be satisfied with that answer. You know, I think that that's sort of because I said so doesn't we can do better than that I would suggest. But it's at least part of the answer surely of well Christ told us to do this even if we don't have any deeper theological reason we're going to do it. But it does seem like we should be asking why is he
36:14 telling us to do this? And what happens when we do it compared to not doing it? Because even if you're not going to disobey, do you do it more often or less often? Does it matter? Does it change your life? Does it, you know, have a theological kind of implication or or no? It it's and it's tough to because there's so many blends, brands of Protestantism, right? I don't I don't expect you to speak for everybody. Yeah. I mean, when we did when we did that video on the propitiatory sacrifice with Payton, um I mean, he's just that in case people don't know this. So, we did a video right after his debate with James White um with my Lutheran seminarian friend Payton. Um and it's on my channel, the Catacuman. And we just talked about uh the Lutheran perspective on whether the sacrif where the whether the mass is a sacrifice and
37:00 in what way. because it seemed like in the debate that you and James did, it was kind of like, okay, I'm coming from this low church reformed Baptist perspective that isn't representative of and and this was a this was a critique of many Protestant friends of mine that I know. It's like that's not really representative even of the reformed tradition, right? Um Yeah. They would say it's a sacrifice of praise, but it's not the representation of the sacrifice of Christ. Yes. So it's I actually find that really fascinating because that actually looks much more like you're resacrificing Christ to me of like so you have a sacrificial mass and Christ is bodily present but it's not the Good Friday sacrifice. It's some other sacrifice. It and they just say that um when when the body and blood of Christ have been
37:45 made present at the consecration, it's not offered back up to God for the forgiveness of sins in that offering. It's you receive it. and they would say that justifies you and the the corporate confession that justifies you when you hear the the soothing words of the gospel that justifies you, right? And so for for a Lutheran, it's like yeah, I go to mass because I want to receive the forgiveness of sins because the best of my works are at least a venial sin, right? So I need to receive the forgiveness of sins a ton, right? But then it's like reformed Baptist, non-denominational Baptist, that sort of realm. It's like, well, like first and foremost, God says the Sabbath was made for man, not ma man for the Sabbath. So really, God's trying to benefit us by us hearing the word, by us worshiping him.
38:32 And then it's like he's pleased by our worship. He's pleased by us listening to his words and and uh we're we're trying to be equipped by listening to the word to go out into the world and be obedient, things like that. But it it really is like, okay, we're obedient to God. This is for our spiritual benefit. It's not that we've received the forgiveness of sins. The vast majority of Baptists, at least that I knew, is like, "Okay, you're saved. You're eternally secure. If you start doing bad things and you're not repentant, then maybe you weren't really saved, but it's not like you need to receive the forgiveness of sins again because you're already forgiven. You or you don't. You should ask for forgiveness, but you're already forgiven because you're eternally justified. So, it's not like you can commit a sin and be in a state
39:17 of mortal sin as in not a friend of God. It's like you commit a sin, it's like, "Oh, that's bad." But like, you don't need to go and have the atonement reapplied to you, per se. I think this is a really good reminder because I think as Catholics, we're looking for uniformity in Protestantism that isn't there. like we're we're expecting on some level that Protestantism works the way other religions whether it's Catholicism or even non-Christian religions like if you said what do Muslims believe you can say these are the five major pillars and you can and every faithful Muslim believes those things and if they don't then you're like well okay there's some weird offshoot they're Drews or they're whatever you know but with Protestants the depending on
40:04 what part of the country you're the particular flavor you get may be wildly different from the particular flavor that you get somewhere else. You know, I'm in a much more Baptist part of the country, but if I go up to like Minnesota where it's much more Lutheran or, you know, you go somewhere else and it's just don't assume the other person is Yeah. coming from a particular background. And I can understand the frustration. You know, Lutheran theology of sacrifice is actually rich and nuanced. I think it's wrong in some ways, but it's very different than a sort of Baptist repudiation of a lot of the stuff Catholics and Lutheran would actually agree on. And I think our conversation with your friend Payton uh captured that in some ways. Like there's the first half of the cannon of the mass where we present the sacrifice of bread and wine and then Christ is made present.
40:49 Lutheran and Catholics can make sense of each other's views quite quite easily. Yeah. It's what happens next that that we tend to part company. So, what would be your recommendations for Catholics who are watching this who want to present some form of the worship problem argument to their Protestant friends? So, I guess the first tip would just be like don't assume they're a Baptist. Yes. Yes. Uh just read all the Protestant confessions. Memorize exactly what they say. No. Um one, don't say Muslims worship God and Protestants don't. That's overly simplistic. Please. And yeah, we're getting a lot of flack for that. We got to do some damage control. Uh um no, but yeah, don't I I think that goes for a lot of Protestant Catholic
41:35 controversy and debate like don't assume everyone's a Baptist. And and I I understand the critique coming from my Lutheran and Anglican friends like oh you guys just only address like you guys think only non-denominationalism is Protestantism that no other Protestants exist. But at the end of the day, if you're going to try and focus on Protestant apologetics, you're going to try and hit as general of an audience as possible. That's right. And the vast majority of people are going to be listening to you from the Protestant world. They're not going to be your super tread Lutheran. They're not going to be your, oh, I hold to the all the Anglican divines and I read all these people, right? those that's like a super super small demographic that shouldn't be ignored, but it's it's
42:21 difficult. We shouldn't present it in a way that says Protestantism says this. Yeah, I think that's very tricky and I find that very hard to do in terms of accurately presenting a clear and clickable title or thumbnail because it may be 90%. It may be 95% but you know, you're not gonna usually get 100% on anything. So, I I've been trying to figure out good ways to do that that are that are fair and charitable, but also clear. Yeah. Because you can't just be like, "Oh, yeah, there's technically a couple outliers, and so therefore, we're not going to address this thing." Like, if somebody said Republicans believe in ex policy on any policy, you could find people that don't, but it'd be ridiculous to say, well, Rutherford Behazes doesn't agree with Donald Trump. It's like, well,
43:07 Rutherford Behazes was in the 19th century. So likewise, when you're like, these historic Protestant confessions that are of no applicability to most Protestants today, why should those trump what actual Protestants believe? They don't have an infallible standing. They don't have, you know, like you could you could pull an Anglican divine, you could pull, you know, a magisterial reformer and they might or might not agree with somebody today. So yeah, I think but in any case, you're absolutely I think right to say tread that carefully so that you don't end up misunderstanding or misrepresenting somebody accidentally. So what we're saying Protestants is is you need to come up with some new categories. We can't like there's like magisterial protestism like come up with a few different ones that way we can get
43:52 it straight. So it's your fault, not our and make them short so we can fit it in the title of video. Yes. Catchy, short, but it should be things people actually recognize for themselves. You know, there's a lot of um I think Protestants trying not a lot, there's a a handful of Protestants trying to reclaim what they view as traditional Protestantism. And this has been a sort of project from some Presbyterians and others, you know, like Keith Mat, I think Redeem Zoomer is doing some of this. Yeah. and and they're trying to like reclaim these things from the much bigger and more popular and more outspoken evangelical very low church kind of conceptions that are often divorced not just from Catholic tradition but even from Protestant history. Uh and so I understand that desire but if they're creating boxes that the people they're describing don't accept for themselves.
44:38 You can't insist everybody else call it solo scriptor when nobody who believes in it calls it that. Like it's just a pjorative term you made up. Yes. Yes. Like it' just be like saying, "Well, you can only call Catholics papists or romanists." It's like, "No." Like that's No, they just got to accept it. I'm going to I'm accepting I'm Catholic Inc., so they got to accept solo scripture. Exactly. Yeah. And we can we also like you you used to be a Baptist. I used I was raised in non-denominationalism basically. So we speak to what we know the most and what we were raised in and also what people around us believe most likely. So, like when I make a video, often times I have my family in my mind like, "Okay, well, I had this conversation with my whatever relative uh and so this is what they have to say about this. Let me respond to that objection in this video." So, that's kind of informing our videos, which is why a lot of people might feel that
45:23 we're kind of targeting certain Protestants over others. Well, it's much it's much more likely for a Baptist to convert to Catholicism in my opinion because it's much it's a much more radical break when you see you see the black and white a lot clearer. Yes. Whereas like if you're coming from like a high church Anglican Lutheran, it's like the issues can get really nuanced. I mean really nuanced. Yeah. I talked to a Lutheran young woman who was in OCIA and you're just coming to actually inquiry. She wasn't even in OCIA and she was trying to understand the difference between Lutheran and Catholic theology and the Eucharist and trying to present in a way that didn't make her eyes completely glaze over, you know, of like in with and under verse transubstantiation. And so I just said like, "Well, do you worship the Eucharist?" And she said, "Well, no." I said, "Well, we do, but that seems
46:09 pretty black and white, but a lot of that stuff you can be kind of in the weeds." Okay. So, watch out for the nuance. Watch out for what the other person is is saying. So, it seems like anecdotally sometimes there's a conflation of prayer and worship. Yes. And I think this comes up in how we talk about like Mary and the saints. Yes. Because when we say, "Oh yeah, we pray to Mary. We pray to the saints." I think many people hear we are offering divine worship to Mary and the saints. How would you address that with like how do you clarify that misunderstanding because it's a big problem for how we understand worship in general? Yeah. I think I I have I've had this conversation with family and basically I just kept have having to ask what is
46:55 worship and just driving that home. What is worship? And so I've gone through this with family where they'll say it's uh it's you know praising and like okay well we we praise kids when they do something right we praise dogs when they do something right when you're trying to train a dog or something. Uh so is that worshiping the dog? No. Well it's it's uh you know whatever whatever you wanted to say but eventually went through the cycle and my relative was like okay smart guy then you tell me what worship is since you're asking me all the questions. I'm like okay well let's go to the Bible. when in Exodus uh Moses was saying, you know, let our people go so we can go worship God, they wanted to go sacrifice to God. That was what they meant by worship. So, um I think just clarifying that and just getting them to understand like what worship actually is
47:40 biblically biblically we understand that these other aspects like prayer and praise and singing songs are all elements uh that can be associated with worship but in and of themselves they're not worship because we can direct those things to other people or areas of life that are not uh worshipful. Yeah, I think it's a great way of uh capturing that that this is the thing we do only to get like if someone is offering an animal sacrifice to their friend or to their dog that you know rather than just giving him his bowl of food, you you make an oblation to him. You have you've definitely made an idol of your dog. Yeah. But just calling him good boy or singing a song to your dog if that's something you want I might judge you but that's not immoral. Uh yeah, that that makes sense. I like
48:27 that distinction. Yeah. Anything you add to that? Yeah. So, worship just seems to me to be the highest form of honor that a creature could give. And if it's the highest form, then that would indicate that uh you value this person, this being um above all other things. You value them above all other things. And I think that even from a Catholic perspective, worship can be can be expressed in different ways. Prayer can be worship. prayer can be an act of adoration. We can pray in in in um in adoration before the blessed sacrament, right? And um and so when when Protestants, especially low church Protestants who don't have especially like a lurggical setting where they're,
49:13 you know, doing these these rituals with uh the Eucharist and things like that, it's it's prayer is one of the highest forms of worship that they offer, right? as I do your do your daily prayers, honor him, glorify him, you don't have this theology of praying to anyone else. So prayer seems to be inherently an act of worship to them because they don't they don't understand how you could pray to someone else and it not be um honoring them as the creator of all as being able to um answer your prayer and um you honoring them through the prayer. How can you honor someone else other than God through the prayer? Um and that that's where those distinctions really matter. Um offering sacrifice, a veneration vers versus Lria versus
50:00 dullia, right? Um but then you start bringing up Latin terms and they're like, "Okay, Sophus, like what are you talking about?" You know? Yeah. So um yes, like it it's it's tough until you get them to recognize that um certain like singing they would say singing this worship song about God is worshiping God. People make songs about other people all the time. If you sing that, are you worshiping that person? Well, not not really. It's what you say. It's your intention. It's all these different things, right? And so, it's the same thing with prayer. And the prayer that we give to the saints and Mary is not the same kind of prayer that we give to God, right? Um and and ultimately our our prayers, you know, directed towards Mary and the saints. That's not the end goals to talk. That's not the end goal talking to them. It's
50:47 to have them ask God on our behalf something, right? Um and so ultimately it's it's directed to God as the final final end, right? Um it's it's never like what's up Mary? Like you having a good day, you know, like it's not it's not you're telling Mary isn't the end all beall of your prayer if you're praying to Mary. That's right. Right. Yeah. It's kind of a weird cultural divide that's kind of happened because if you only experience prayer in the context of directing it to God, then hearing about prayer to somebody else is gonna be like, well, that's obviously, you know, disordered. If if because the only time I've experienced prayer is directly to God. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if the only time you'd ever encountered animals was reading about like the golden calf, then hearing about people like saying good boy to their dog might strike your
51:33 ears as like obviously blasphemous. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, it makes sense. I was asked a question recently and I I don't think I gave a good answer and maybe you can help me out. So, somebody asked me recently, okay, if we offer if sacrifice is the highest form of worship and we offer um you know the once and for all sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist to the father, then in what way do we worship the holy spirit and the son if we're not offering them sacrifice in some way? Yeah, they're involved I would say in the sacrifice offered to the father in such a way that they aren't the direct recipient as the father is but the offering of the son is made through the spirit to the father. So there's this trinitarian act of worship of the spirit leading us to the son to the father. So there is a sense in which
52:20 uh the principal person of the trinity being worshiped is the father in terms of lurggical worship. I mean, I don't think you can get around that just historically and theologically. And I understand why that can lead people to say like, what do we make of the rest of this? Yeah. Um, but we still make sacrifices offered with reference to the other two. You know, like you can make up what is offer lacking in the sufferings of Christ and unite it with Christ where you you have Christ in view as you're offering a sacrifice throughout your day. So particularly outside the mass, I think you maybe see that more uh or there are just times where something is offered in a general way to God rather than to to one of the persons of the trinity. Well, it's it's not even just um the sacrifice of the mass. It's just the our father, right? The creed, the apostles
53:06 and ning creed seem to the father almighty, right? And um so yeah, this actually your timing is very good. So a little behind the scenes peak. We've recorded this before this episode has come out, but I have an episode that will have just dropped maybe two days before. I don't know the sequence we're going to do this in. Um, where it talks about a Mormon objection, which is that we should not pray to Jesus and we should not worship Jesus. And it it touches on a lot of those things. So, I will I will refer to that as as another place that people can explore that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, gentlemen. And so, do you want to give us a little bit of, you know, where to find you and maybe what you're working on right now? Yeah. Uh you can find me on all platforms at sips with Sarah. Uh right now I'm working on a lot of apologetics
53:52 or pmics directed towards Islam. Um kind of a new direction I'm going because it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I've been working on over there. It's been a lot of fun. Very interesting. I've also been memorizing scripture with with members. So check that out. Beautiful. Epic. I'm Braden. Uh you can find me at Sipserah anywhere you look online. No. Uh, Katakuman on YouTube. Katakuman on X or Twitter. Do you want to spell kakuman for people? Yeah. C H A D. Okay. The C A T E C H U M E N. The Kakuman. Yes. You just gave yourself the most confusing shout out. Hey, just cut Just cut that. Just cut that. Uh, no. Um, and Braden Cook on Instagram. That's where you can find me. I've been working on uh a lot of things
54:39 behind the scenes, including waking up at 4:00 a.m. every day to hang out with my son because he's sleep progressing really bad. Um and uh uh maybe maybe dropping a diss track soon towards your son. Yeah, towards my son. Go to sleep. Yes. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, thank you all so much and thank you all for watching for Sheamus Poprier. I'm Joe Heshmire. God bless you.
