The Pope Changed the Sabbath?! Catholic Apologist Responds!

Hey there as always thank you for being here and an especially warm welcome if this is your first time with us so one of the key things the Seventh Adventist movement is known for is their multitude of claims about the Roman Catholic church but what if these charges are not true how much of the sea framework rests upon the claims that they make about others well we’re going to examine that today and I have the perfect guest to help us out Joe hesme is a Roman Catholic apologist at Catholic answers and the host of the Shameless popery podcast he has a law degree from

Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC a Philosophy degree from Kendrick Glennon seminary in St Louis and a theology degree from the pontifical University of St Thomas aquinus in Rome he enjoys speaking and debating on a wide range of issues including the papacy the beliefs of the earliest Christians the Eucharist and sacramental Theology and pro-life issues while I’m not a Roman Catholic myself despite the multitude of Adventists claiming to the contrary I am a staunch believer in primary source documentation if you’ve been with us before you know this that charity

Needs to be extended in all directions not only with those that we agree with so did the Pope change the Sabbath did the Roman Catholic Church invent the idea of Eternal conscious torment during the Middle Ages what about the classical Christian view of the nature of the Soul all of this and more coming up next all right Joe thank you so much for sharing some of your time with us I will preface by saying that this discussion is going to get Fiery arrows shot my way from both Adventists and evangelicals alike maybe even some of the Catholics in our audience who knows um especially

Considering the name of your podcast being Shameless popery but this will not be the first time and most certainly will not be the last but how are you doing today I’m doing great it’s it’s good to be here I’m excited and I’m happy to try to engage with people who may want to shoot some fiery arrows totally so people are probably wondering why is a reformed Protestant bringing a Roman Catholic apologist on to discuss 7th day adventism which is a great question and the answer is simple I am a firm believer and people who engage in our uh Community will will know this um

I am a firm believer that people deserve to be represented accurately and disagreements can happen from there so on this platform for example we utilize primary SDA Source documentation when raising our objections not here say not individual opinions we go to the actual sources so I wanted to bring you on to test some of the SDA Church’s claims regarding Roman Catholicism and hear from a Roman Catholic apologist how accurate you think that they are to let uh people essentially hear both sides of the story sound good that sounds great great so I will preface by saying many

Adventists are going to say that you are lying no matter what you say in their eyes this is a Protestant as we will see linking arms with Roman cathol Roman Catholicism and it will only further ingrain them in the SDA mindset but for those who care about honestly representing others and trying to actually hear from what uh uh well what they actually believe I hope this will be of benefit to break the ice I want to start by listening to a four minute or so clip from an SDA pastor and professor at Oakwood University that is an Adventist University in Alabama his name

Is Dr Isaac olun G who had something to say about Catholic answers this is from one of his uh Sunday law updates which is what they hold at his church every Sunday where he brought up an article from Catholic answers website regarding sth day adventism afterward I will have a question for you great so they’re quoting from the great controversy look at this it is one they’re quoting from great controversy this is a Catholic publication written by some Catholic leaders so you asking me have they been reached yes they’ve been reached brothers and sisters it

They repeating what we believe right it is one of the leading doctrines of romanism that the pope is the visible head of The Universal Church of Christ it has been declared infallible he demands the homage of all men the same claim urged by Satan and the Wilderness of Temptation is still urged by him through the Church of Rome and vast numbers are ready to yield him homage and then look at this one right here they’re quoting from LG White marvelous in her shrewdness in cunning is the Catholic Church she can read what is to be they’re quoting from the spirit

Of Prophecy and you’re asking me has the church been reaching a meaningful way well if you quoted for Ellen White you have been reaching a meaningful way evidently somebody gave this young man a great controversy and he was reading it they know what so they know what we believe know what we believe if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck she she read what is to be she bides her time seeing that the Protestant churches are paying her homage and their acceptance of the false Sabbath and let it be remembered that it is the boast of Rome that she never

Changes the principles of Gregory I 7th and innocent the third are still the principles of the Roman Catholic Church man they quoting Ellen White word for word they just got the page wrong have mercy they must have got it from another version it says look then they quote God’s word has given warning of the impending danger let this be unheeded and the Protestant world will learn what the purposes of Rome really are only when it’s too late to escape the snare she is silently growing into what power her doctrines are exerting their influence in legislative halls and the

Churches and in the hearts of men she is piling up her lofy and massive structures in the secret recesses of which her former persecutions will be what this is the Catholics quoting from Ellen White selfly and unsuspectedly she is strengthening her forces to further her own ends when the time shall come for her to what all that she desires is Vantage ground etc etc bear in mind that these quotes are not taken from a obscure work of Ellen White that nobody ever reads they are from what is probably her single most popular volume the great controversy and you think that

The general that the that the uh Catholic church does not know what the general conference is getting ready to do for the next two years for J controversy 2.0 they know they know and they need to be but it’s not reach in the way that those other countries need to be reach sa now listen to this right here according to her to my elen white the papacy is the seven-headed beast from the sea in Revelation 13 accompanying that Beast is the lambik beast from the earth the latter causes the world to worship the former and has an image made of it why Ellen White proclaimed that the second

Beast is who United States and that it will force people to worship on the papacy by enforcing some observance which should be Act h of the papacy this observance she says is what worship Sunday worship rather than Saturday worship Ellen White this is the Catholic Church Ellen White claims this this right here that the papacy changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday making this change its Mark of authority in her view there will come a time when the US will establish a national what Sunday law and compel its citizens to worship on Sunday it will not compel

Them to become Catholics but to join a Protestant State Church that is an image of the papacy thus the image of the Beast brothers and sisters they know what we that that tell me right there but look at the next paragraph oh look at the next dney you better passing your seat bills it’s about to knock your feet out from under you look what it says 7-Day adventism cannot change its views on the Catholic Church being the Babylon without admitting it was wrong on Sunday worship it talking about 7day adventism cannot admit that Sunday worship is not the

Mark of the beast without changing its views on The Jewish Sabbath but look at this 7-Day adventism cannot cease to be anti-catholic without ceasing to be seventh day adventism wow that’s planed is that clear catholic.com on seventh day adventism all right so I promise all of the questions are not going to be this wild but besides Dr o errant confusing Catholic answers with the Vatican he claims that you all are reading elen G white because you have a tracked page on the website that quotes Ellen White to support the claims that are made in the

Article he later would go on to claim this evidences that you all know what the SDA Church believes and are conspiring behind the scenes which is supposed to prove these sorts of claims to be true so Joe as someone that works for Catholic answers how accurate is his assessment yeah I think the first issue is the conflation between Catholic answers and the Vatican that so I would just want to point out like two things going on first he’s looking at a tract from 2004 there is a 20-year-old tract on adventism that who I don’t actually know who wrote it but whoever it was did

Their homework and did a good job of summarizing what seventh day Adventists believe and I think you get that even from his commentary on it he says they know what we believe and wow is that clear and and those kind of comments throughout and so you know we started the episode with you saying if you want to refute somebody’s beliefs go to them go to the source like find out what they actually believe and he doesn’t go to the Vatican he doesn’t say here’s this thing where you know the pope has denounced you know worshiping on Saturday or something like this he’s

Going to a 20-year-old Catholic aners track and confusing that with the Vatican but in the meantime he’s showing that we’re actually doing the thing that they’re not doing like we’re actually going to the sources we’re going to LG white and saying what do we find in great controversy and so we’re not just saying you know I heard a rumor from other Catholics that Adventists are planning something sneaky and all we’re asking is the same respect in return if you have a knowledgeable critique of the Catholic church and you can point to a Catholic Source saying the thing you

Claim great but if it’s just you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that’s not how you do theology it’s not how you do apologetics and it’s not even how you do Christian Living that’s the sin of gosip and so there’s a lot of Gossip I think both Adventists and Catholics have probably been on the receiving end of people getting things wrong about what we believe and the easiest remedy to that is well go and find it from a authoritative sources where where do we find it from them so I would say no like Catholic answers is not a mouthpiece of

The Vatican in an official kind of capacity uh that particular tract was approved by the bishop of San Diego but it’s not like Pope John a second at the time was saying oh yes this you know here’s our secret plan we’re going to announce that we’ve read some LG white so what what we’re really seeing there is like someone at Catholic answers read up on adventism and did a good job of representing Adventist Doctrine the context of those quotes which I don’t think he really explained was that you can assume that anti-catholicism is part of the radical Fringe of adventism but

It actually permeates great controversy although the track goes on to notice even LG white kind of softens up in some of her later writings that are uh less wellknown that nevertheless this is much more at the heart of adventism than it is for say Evangelical protestantism one doesn’t need to be anti-catholic to be an Evangelical one sort of needs to be anti-catholic to be a Seventh Day Adventist so I think that part it sounds like he’s agreeing with uh but he just thinks that like obviously if one person that Catholic answers is red LG white that must mean the entire Vatican is red

LG white and that doesn’t logically follow at all um we just do our best to do our homework when we’re criticizing someone to to learn what it is that they believe before we kind of fire off for critique so that we don’t have lengthy Clips where we don’t know the difference between the Vatican and Catholic answers yeah so we responded to this entire video about a year ago but what got me too is excuse me the guy in the audience who brings the charge he says you all are reading SDA literature which was supposed to imply that the SDA church has reached the the Vatican with the

Message because the greater context was there was a debate around have Jesuits infiltrated the SDA church that’s the sort of of Pocket of adventism that we’re engaging with there like I said not all Adventists are that way but that kind of speaks into what you’re were saying too about how Dr o is kind of recognizing some of these things that you’re pointing out in the Articles because he’s not one of these I’m going to beat around the bush Adventists he’s he’ll shoot it to you straight he says no this is what we teach this is what we believe Etc but the guy that in the

Audience that brings up the claim about they’re clearly reading the great controversy Etc when they don’t understand they’re looking at the a web page on an apologetic site and that’s what apologists are supposed to do um you’re supposed to read the materials of the individuals that you disagree with and then present arguments um to the claims that are made from the source’s own mouth um one thing in passing I don’t know who wrote that article I think you said you didn’t know either I don’t it’s not it the old tracks don’t have names on them yeah it should be

Noted that the SDA Church may use the word Trinity um that clip in full he he talks about he says well at least they recognize that we’re Christians and we affirm the Trinity but they are actually not trinitarian um they reject the nying Creed in favor of Ellen White’s Heavenly Trio concept um they also don’t believe like Christians do regarding the Divinity of Christ so getting into the athonian Creed or the like calcedonian you know sort of formation they are uh they have a pre-earth origin story that Jesus was exalted to be made equal with God the father and when he incarnated

The Adventist Jesus set his divine nature aside so the kosis heresy he was only a man on Earth um and all sorts of other issues but those issues aside yeah speaking of Ellen White I want us to look at some statements made by her with regards to Roman Catholicism and get your thoughts great first I want to look at what they believe about the state of the dead now this is a huge topic within adventism huge um the nature of man the afterlife Etc in the context of Roman Catholicism um it is intrinsically tied to their belief as well about the Sabbath and

You’ll see what I mean by uh intrinsically tied to to all of this they’re going to claim that um the classical Christian view of the afterlife as well as the Sabbath are two vestages that Protestants affirm that are links back to romanism so let’s start here the doctrine of the natural immortality the soul has opened the way for The Artful working of Satan through Modern spiritualism and besides the romish errors Purgatory prayers for the dead invocation of saints Etc which have sprung from this Source it’s led many Protestants to deny the resurrection and

The judgment and has given rise to the revolting heresy of eternal torment and the dangerous delusion of universalism but she also had this to say in the great controversy through the two great errors the immortality of the soul and Sunday sacredness Satan will bring the people under his deceptions while the former lays the foundation of spiritualism the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome the Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the

Roman power and under the influence of this three-fold Union this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience so we will talk about the Sabbath more shortly but with regards to the soul this belief is not just an uh uh this belief is not just an invention from Rome that has no basis in Scripture it also supposedly is what is uniting according to them Protestants and Catholics which will ultimately bring about the persecution of Seventh Adventist that’s what all of this is is really getting at but Joe did the Roman Catholic Church

Invent the idea of an immaterial animate soul that precedes the body after death or is it biblical it’s biblical and in fact I would actually even add a third option which is not only do we find this in the New Testament not only do we find this in the Old Testament but even other religions and cultures had a belief in this long before the Catholic Church existed like the notion of an immortal or IM material uh technically Everlasting Soul like a soul that survives death like it has a beginning but not an end is one that’s fairly cross-cultural now there are some

Cultures that deny that it’s true or believe in other things that are inconsistent with it like reincarnation but the idea is it is a point of Union for sure between Catholics and Protestants but this is not something the Catholic church just made up or pulled out of a hat uh you see it all over the Bible now you see it much more clearly I would say in the New Testament than you do in the Old Testament there are certain doctrines like hell like the nature of the Soul uh like the Messiah that are clearer As you move forward in time and so one of the later books of the Old

Testament uh Daniel 12 has one of the clearest presentations of the nature of the Soul as something that endures and and it talks about this so Daniel 12 Begins by saying that at that time shall arise Michael the great prince who has charge of your people and there shall be a time of trouble such as there’s never been since there was a nation till that time but at that time your people shall be delivered everyone whose name shall be found written in the book now if you’re familiar with like the Book of Revelation you’ll hear a lot of thematically similar notes but then

In the next verse and many of those who slept sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt now there’s still ambiguity there this nature of Awakening is this a reference to what sometimes called Soul sleep you know is this the death or the you know ceasing to exist of the Soul prior to the resurrection or is the sleep there about the body what’s clear so far is that after the resurrection both the souls going to heaven and those going to shame and everlasting contempt endure which is one

Of the things that she denies but in the New Testament we get more clarity about the nature of the Soul its relation to the body and what what happens to it so what makes this tricky here is that there isn’t a good word in Greek that just means soul in the Christian sense and so there’s a couple different terms that get get used psyche uh gets used Numa gets used but these sometimes have other meanings this is not unique to the idea of Soul even something like the word for worship worship is a very central idea in the New Testament but if you say well what word means worship

There’s not just one there ‘s about four and each of those four can also sometimes mean other things so I’ve read Adventists who deny the biblical evidence from the New Testament by by making the point which is true that sometimes when you see Numa or when you see psyche it doesn’t mean soul in the Christian sense we’ll grant that we’ll concede that there’s a lot of words that are like that even I mean the word spirit in English is like that you can have a spirited conversation you could say you know the spirit of the movie is such and such and you’re not saying the

Movie has an mortal Soul other times you do mean an immortal Soul when you’re talking about a spirit or you’re talking about the holy spirit so all that’s to say there is linguistic ambiguity both in Greek and in English that’s not really a point for the Adventist side but it is a good kind of yellow flag that both sides should be cautious in doing ex to Jesus and so in the New Testament we see over and over again this apparent distinction between soul and body and the nature that both of them uh survive in some way but also with the soul in particular but the the clearest

One is Matthew 10 verse 28 where Jesus says Don’t Fear Those Who Kill the body Som but cannot kill the soul psyche rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in gehenna which is you know usually translated as hell there’s a lot of exegetical questions about how we interpret both the psyche but it’s clearly something different than bodily death uh then you also have the nature of like what is gehenna is is this a reference to hell is this a reference to like Eternal damnation or not and seemingly I mean most are going to translate it as hell that the soul is

Destroyed in hell that then raises a third ex etical question what does it mean to say the soul is killed or destroyed is this speaking about Annihilation and the New Testament answer to that is actually fairly clear that it’s not and by that I mean you find several passages that talk about what we as Catholics call mortal sin or deadly sin so in 1 Corinthians 11 St Paul tells the Corinthians because of their disrespectful attitude towards the Eucharist this is why many of you are sick and some have died or some have fallen asleep he’s not saying that

They’ve literally like dropped dead on the spot bodily he’s referring to a spiritual death uh likewise John in first John distinguishes between sin which is Mortal or deadly and sin which is not mortal deadly and so over and over again in Scripture you have this sense that there is a kind of death of the Soul even while you’re alive by turning away from everlasting life or rejecting everlasting life and embracing damnation and destruction so we can talk about even someone walking around among us as being spiritually dead we don’t mean that their soul is annihilated we

Mean that it’s not in Union with God The Giver of Life and that it doesn’t have the life that God intended for it so when we talk about the destruction of the soul I just want to make it clear that in life of the other New Testament evidence we don’t interpret that to mean the soul is actually annihilated but for our purposes it’s enough to show that it’s immaterial it is distinct from the Soma from the body you have other places that I think make this clear as well Jesus for instance In The Garden of Gethsemane says my soul here he uses psyche is very sorrowful even to death

And he’s not saying he’s in mortal sin he’s talking about this like incredible weight on his Soul he’s not there talking about an incredible weight on his body the next day when he’s crucified he famously says father into your hands I commit my spirit and the word there again is Numa so we’ he’s used both psyche in the garden and Numa on the cross to refer to something other than bodily death this assignment of his soul to God to the you know in trusting to the father his Spirit similarly when St Ste St is martyred uh in Acts uh 7 he says something very similar he says Lord

Jesus receive my Numa receive my spirit and so when you’re looking at maybe the easiest thing to do is to just say what happens to those who die in the New Testament and so Jesus is a really clear case when Jesus dies we can speak on the one hand uh about his body being in the grave so if you said on Holy Saturday you know the day after Good Friday where is Jesus one answer to that question would be in the Tomb because his body is in the Tomb and a human person is a union of body and soul and so you could say they laid him in the tomb which is what scripture says you can also say he

Committ commended his Spirit to the father and uh he goes to perform what is called the heroine of Hell the clearest evidence of this is in 1 Peter chapter 3 uh when St Peter gives this example of how uh it’s kind of an example about baptism and about Noah’s Arc but I’ll just read what he says in 1 Peter 3 beginning in verse 18 for Christ also died for sins once for all the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit in which that is in the spirit in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison who

Formerly did not obey when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah during the building of the Ark in which a few that is eight persons were saved through water so he’s giving this description where Jesus is bodily dead on Good Friday but spiritually alive and active conscious preaching doing something now we don’t have to get into kind of the nature of the heroine of Hell to just see that clearly Body and Soul are distinguished in a in a very obvious way and the soul is surviving bodily death and the soul is aware and active in operative and none of this is

A Roman Catholic invention um there’s a lot more that could be said about that but I just say here it’s very clearly biblically based and you might read the Bible in a different way but it isn’t as if this is some crazy interpretation to say yeah the passage seems to make a really clear distinction between body and soul and here’s the spirit surviving death or the soul surviving death another clear example of this in terms of looking at death in the New Testament would be Lazarus and the rich man in Luke chapter 16 both Lazarus who goes into What’s called the bosom of Abraham

And the rich man who goes into torment their souls survive bodily death both of them are conscious neither one is annihilated and we can see there something about the nature of soul and body uh last point I’d make is in addition to all of that biblical evidence you also have the attestation of a number of extremely early Christian sources dating back to like the 100s where they they talk very clearly about this one of the oldest ones we actually don’t know who wrote it it’s an ancient homy for Holy Saturday but it depicts Jesus confronting Adam and coming on

This mission of redemption as as he does this heroine of Hell described in First Peter 3 now you might think that’s right or that’s wrong but if Ellen White is going to say this is a Catholic invention she has to acknowledge then that the Catholic Church is at least as old as the 100s which is not what she not kind of the timeline she presents about Catholicism in great controversy so long before Ellen White believes the Catholic church or the papacy exists we find attestation to this likewise um trulan in uh to the Nations ad naon he talks about this again

Tertullian’s like late 100s early 200s so he’s slightly after but still before Constantine before of this stuff by about 100 years and tertian is not perfect he gets stuff wrong but he’s very clear about the immortality of the soul and he’s uh responding to those who believe in something like reincarnation and he tells them that their tradition that the human soul takes up residence in the body of a dog or a mule or a peacock is empty-headed and he says how much more attractive is our belief which affirms that the soul returns to the same body so he’s not even debating the

Immortality of the Soul he’s debating what happens to the soul after bodily death will it eventually return to be reunited with the body or will it become United with the body of an animal in reincarnation and then he says a bit later in the same vein we declare that after death a judgment is ordained for each man according to his merits then he says this judgment will condemn the wicked to pass eternity in Everlasting fire while the pious and the innocent will proceed to a joyous place so notice the souls of the unjust are not annihilated they last forever in eternal

Torment likewise origin in book three of d uh Prince on the first principles says nay the very fact that he is longsuffering that is that God is longsuffering conduces to the advantage of those very persons since the soul over which he God exercises this providential care is Immortal in other words God is patient with you in this life because he realizes that eternal life is at stake and why because your soul is by its nature Immortal again more technically Everlasting usually we use uh like Eternal uh to mean without beginning or Without End so Immortal you

Know undying or Everlasting and he then describes it as both Immortal and everlasting he uses both of those descriptions and then the last thing he says for God deals with Souls not merely to the short space of our present life and included within 60 years or more but with reference to a perpetual and NeverEnding period exercising his providential care over Souls that are Immortal even as he himself is eternal and Immortal so notice he makes that distinction God is both Immortal and eternal we’re just Immortal for he God made the rational nature which he formed in his own image

And likeness Incorruptible and therefore the soul which is Immortal is not excluded by the shortness of the present life from the divine remedies and cures that is the reason you’re able to receive things spiritually and you know from divine power is because you were made for more than just this life so God’s willing to you know take years and years and years you’ve got someone like the thief on the cross who maybe converts to Christianity moments Before Dying God is totally patient it isn’t as if that is a waste because he now has eternity whereas if

That hadn’t happened there would be eternity separating him from God so all of that is to say you don’t have to wait for Constantine or when Ellen White claims the papacy was invented to see clear both biblical and early Christian evidence in a belief in a a distinction between soul and body and B A belief that the soul survives death in see a belief that includes the souls of the Damned yeah that’s good you mentioned a a lot of uh just really key points there you mentioned Daniel for example it’s fascinating because that’s one of the SD Church’s favorite books of the Bible

Yeah um that’s one that they consider themselves experts in yet they’ll miss these sort of things we had my friend Sam frost on here he has translated The Book of Daniel and he came on to discuss his his uh work in that and one point that he brought up in Daniel as well is in Daniel chapter 2 when it talks about the king being tormented he said the language there in the Hebrew actually speaks of the soul of a person being like a sword in a sheath that the body is the sheath and the the soul is like the sword that goes into the sheath showing that there’s a dichotomy that

Takes place there so I just say that to say that’s perfectly in line with Daniel’s own Theology of what you pointed out in Daniel chapter 12 but also first Peter um I know the response to that and I don’t want to get bogged down in in in all of that um but it misses the fact that you mentioned they don’t agree obviously that Christ went to preach to the The Souls of um you know those in in in uh constraints yeah to to be freed out yeah Hades um the the point is though is that it simply shows that Peter didn’t have the understanding that Jesus just ceased to exist for 3

Days because that’s essentially what the SDA Church teaches even though they claim to affirm the hypothetic union it kind of gets into the importance around that Doctrine as well and rightly being able to understand because you know Ellen White said there’s no way that his soul could have gone to do such a thing because well Jesus said that he hadn’t ascended yet after the resurrection and so oh because he hadn’t ascended yet that means that when he died he had to have just you know been in his body just in the tumor in the grave not understanding that that’s speaking about

Christ’s physical Ascension um the the again it just speaks to needing to understand the hypothetic union but also I know of zero Protestant confessions that deny any of the doctrines that she mentioned yet they all affirm the classical Christian view of the Soul uh and I use that term specifically classical Christian view because the SDA vocabulary like natural immortality is a loaded term with a misrepresent of what Christians actually believe which transitions us perfectly into my next question you alluded to this a little bit with some of the uh other Church

Fathers or I guess Teran not but origin Etc I want to look at a quick statement from irus in against heresies and then I’m going to have a question for you so he writes the Lord has taught us with great fullness that Souls not only continue to exist not by passing from body to body but that they preserve the the same form in their separate State as the body had to which they were adapted and that they remember the Deeds which they did in this state of existence and from which they have now ceased in that narrative which is recorded respecting the rich man and that Lazarus who found

Repose in the bosom of Abraham referring to Luke 16 but if any persons at this point maintains that those Souls which only began a little while ago to exist cannot endure for for any length of time but that they must on the one hand either be unborn in order that they may be immortal or if they have had a beginning in the way of generation that they should die with the body itself let them learn that God Alone who is Lord of all is without beginning and Without End being truly and forever the same and always remaining the same unchangeable being but all things which proceed from

Him whatsoever have been made and are made do indeed receive their own beginning of generation and on this account are inferior to him who formed them in as much as they are not unbegotten nevertheless they endure and extend their existence into a long series of Ages in accordance with the will of God their creator so that he grants them that they should thus be formed at the beginning and that they should exist afterwards so irus in the second century long before even the infancy of the Middle Ages appeals to Luke 16 which the SDA Church claims is only a parable that

Argument aside because Parables have to have you know it’s like okay what does the the torment represent what’s the fire represent what’s the conscious experience represent all of these things have to have a representation of something if it’s a parable but that argument aside irenaeus appealed the scripture to argue against the idea that man is naturally Immortal you hit on this a little bit earlier having no beginning and no end only God possesses that but it’s God that creates and sustains the soul but in conjunction with this we also see him argue that the

Afterlife has an eternal duration for both the righteous and the wicked which the SDA Church claims was also a novel invention by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages so Joe what does this quote from irenaeus say about the belief regarding the classical Christian view of hell and was it novely invented by the Roman Catholic Church not just the nature of the soul but the Eternal punishment of the wicked no I mean we already saw a couple of the passages including Daniel 12 that seem to speak of souls undergoing Everlasting torment now that’s not an invention from the

Middle Ages it’s not an invention from the Catholic church that text is older than Christianity and so that’d be the first I say second if you’re going to attack irus you’re in kind of a weird spot so for those who may not be familiar with who he is SAS he’s Bishop of Leon he’d actually grown up in Smyrna and studied in Rome and then became Bishop in Leon uh but he studied under polycarp and polycarp who was born in the year 69 uh we actually have pretty good records for polycarp because he was martyred in 155 I believe and so polycarp was a student

Of the Apostle John’s so you have have this very clear lineage that’s well attested that the Apostle John has two well-known students uh St Ignatius of Antioch who was Bishop of Antioch and St polycarp of Smyrna and polycarp as Bishop of where uh irus grew up was a really influential role for him and irus describes himself as you know learning at the feet of polycarp and so it isn’t he that he’s just you know read some Greek philosophy somewhere and applied it his own theology that’s the first thing I’d say is if you’re telling me that somebody who got their Christianity

Not just from picking up a Bible but from actually talking to a student of the disciples what uh the Theologian Marcus Brock mule calls living memory you have these two generations you’ve got the apostles who teach people like Ignatius like polycarp who then teach people likeus and so they’re able to very reliably point to written interpretive traditions because it’s not just heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend is no no I got it from someone who directly got it from the apostles it’s a much closer connection once you

Get out of the 100s people start to get too far away it becomes much more of a game of telephone but a game of telephone with three people where one person says it to another says it to another is still pretty reliable and in terms of just history leaving aside the particular questions of theology leaving it decide well did the Holy Spirit protect Revelation or not we can already just say like historically speaking that is usually a pretty accurate chain of transmission not automatically not without fail but in terms of historical evidence irus is well poised that’s the

First thing I’d say the second is irus is also the very first Christian to tell us that the four gospels are Matthew Mark Luke and John and so if you cut off that branch and say we can’t trust irenaeus then raises all these questions about well how do you even know if you have the right Bible how do you know if you have the right New Testament because we point to the exact same people not just the same time period the same individuals to say this person knew what they were talking about and we trust him on these issues and if you can’t that doesn’t just undermine you know belief

In the nature of the soul that undermines the whole belief in Christianity as such because you say well who knows what Jesus taught because we don’t know which are reliable text and which ones aren’t because we don’t trust the early Christians got it right and once you say that you you haven’t saved adventism you’ve left yourself in a state of sort of theological agnosticism where you can’t say what is and is not true now I anticipate some people are going to come back and say well look the Holy Spirit quite sensibly is going to protect divine revelation Revelation by

Definition is the unveiling of God the reiling like you’re removing a veil and God reveals himself in his fullness in the person of Jesus who is the image of the invisible God and it doesn’t make any sense for God to go to the trouble to reveal himself in this way and then within a generation to have it just totally destroyed and annihilated and of course this we find in the New Testament repeated promises this won’t happen Jesus says he’s going to build the church the Gates of Hell won’t overcome the last words in the gospel of Matthew he promises to be with us always at the

Last Supper he promises to spend send the spirit of Truth to guide us into the fullness of Truth none of this is consistent with the idea the earliest Christians had no idea of the basic Christian doctrine so you have two things here first Ellen White’s knowledge of history is clearly wrong she has no idea what she’s talking about which calls into question her prophetic status whether irus is right or wrong he’s too early for her theories about the nature of the Soul you know if if I said the telephone was invented in the year 2000 and you show me some pictures

Of people using telephones from the 1950s whether the telephone is good or bad I’m clearly wrong well likewise whether the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is right or wrong Ellen is clearly wrong in claiming that it didn’t exist at a time when it clearly did so we can say much more than than just this is an ancient Christian belief but notice also irus is not citing to you know in this again in this Greek manuscript of some Pagan philosopher you know they talk about you know Aristotle or Plato they believe in the immortality of the Soul so therefore I accept that

No it’s not that at all he’s making arguments about the interpretation of the New Testament text and what these Parables kind of mean now last Point there’s much more obviously that could be said about this as you say Lazarus and the rich man is a parable but it doesn’t follow from that that Jesus is going to tell a heretical parable or a parable built on outright falsehoods like I would challenge the person who makes that argument to think critically and say where else does Jesus do that you know where does he show immoral Behavior as like a good thing in a

Parable and why would he be doing that here and like not just immoral Behavior but theological falsehood like if he gave a parable in which somebody was reincarnated that would raise all kinds of red flags when you say is that really a parable of Jesus that doesn’t make sense well likewise if he’s making a parable about a false vision of Heaven why would the only person qualified to speak on the nature of heaven give us such a false and misleading interpretation or or vision of heavenly realities what kind of a revelation is that if you’re presenting falsehoods as

If they’re true even if it’s for a some kind of narrative purpose so I hope that’s clear but all that’s to say we’d better be able to trust irenaeus because it makes sense in light of the Holy Spirit protecting his church and protecting Revelation makes sense in light of the interpretation of biblical text and it it also shows that Ellen White is not a trustworthy historian or Theologian yeah so the thing that’s interesting about Luke 16 is exactly what you brought up I bring that up all the time as well it makes no sense to say that the the Lord Jesus uh used a

Parable that um is actually heretical it goes against it goes against his own teachings but what they claim is that well it’s it’s a parable teaching us about the dangers of wealth so Jesus used um fake realities about the afterlife to teach something about wealth that’s that’s apparently what’s going on there so it’s such a convoluted idea like if the only way to tell people wealth is dangerous is to make up a false vision of heaven and if that really is a good deterrent for you know sin and everything else wouldn’t the god of the universe just make that the

Reality instead of know you know like wouldn’t the logic is like you know it’d be really nice if this was true so people wouldn’t accumulate ungodly wealth well you’re God you can do that like you you could have just made that that afterlife and like you said this is the same Jesus who in Matthew 10 makes a very clear dichotomy between the body and the soul and according to their view of the Soul which is they they’ll use the analogy of a pile of nails and a pile of boards when you have the two separate you have a pile of nails and a pile of boards but when you put them

Together you get a box the soul is the box it’s the body plus breath when you remove those two things the soul no longer exists well then that would go against what Jesus was teaching and you you there could be somebody who could kill the soul they just have to kill you because then your soul ceases to exist your soul has actually been killed so yeah I know Adventists are going to hear you know references to to church history um actual church history that is not in in line with the great controversy I don’t know how much you’re aware of that book but it’s essentially

A reimagining of actual history yes um and so because irus is not in that narrative um it’s kind of broad he’s kind of broad brushed as well I mean I’ve heard all sorts of stuff man I’ve heard he was a pagan he was a heretic you know just crazy stuff um but they’ll automatically retort to this that’s not the Bible but the simple fact is we have sources well before the Middle Ages that rep that that are representing what Christians believe regarding the afterlife and his appeal was to scripture even if you want to disagree with his interpretation that okay that’s

A different discussion the point is he was appealing to scripture not platonic you know philosophy which is oftentimes the charger Greek Pagan philosophy Etc that’s not what was going on there um but like we saw earlier she tied this to the Sabbath so I want to look at a number of the favorite SDA claims regarding Rome Chang ing the Sabbath great first notice what she claims in her book early writings claiming to be shown this Invision from God she claims I saw that God had not changed the Sabbath for he never changes but the pope had changed it from the seventh to the first day of

The week for he was to change times and laws then later on in the book she writes this quote the pope has changed the day of rest from the seventh to the first day he has thought to change the very Commandment that was given to cause man to remember his creator he has thought to change the greatest commandment in the decalogue and thus make himself equal with God or even exalt himself above God so The Story Goes that Constantine laid the way for the papacy to eventually change the Sabbath and exalt Sunday as the Christian Sabbath we will get into

Another one of their claims regarding this uh you know charge in a moment but I want to focus in on the papacy here does the Roman Catholic Church teach that the pope changed the Sabbath no and so it’s interesting the first thing I’d say for any Adventist listening to this which pope is she talking about I mean there’s a well-documented list of popes so which pope did it and when did this happen uh Pope Sylvester Pope Sylvester one perfect and so when did this happen right like let’s get really specific about dates so if you claim you know the fourth Century because after Constantine

You’re in a real pickle because we have a lot of evidence that in the 100s people were celebrating on Sunday now they don’t believe Sunday is the Jewish sabbath so you’ll find plenty of distin distinctions between describing the Sabbath and describing the Lord’s day but it’s abundantly clear that the day Christians rested and worshiped together was on the Lord’s day and so again the timeline just doesn’t work to point to later popes so I’ll give you a few examples first I want to point to a scholarly resource and then I’m going to look at some primary texts so there’s a

Book called the earliest history of the Christian Gathering the subtitle is origin development and content of the Christian gathering in the first to third centuries uh by valer alakin and all he’s doing is looking at the historical evidence of the first century second century third Century so stopping at the year 200 all of this well before Ellen White’s timeline and uh he says Christians began to hold periodic Gatherings not later than the middle of the First Century 20 years after Jesus’s death in so far as the sources allow any inference the periodical Gathering of

Christians took place on Sundays they could be held at various locations although most took place in private houses so the nature of Christian worship was such that was clearly happening in the days of the House Church well before Constantine in this spirit is looking out of the first 200 years of Christianity and is happening on Sundays now we can see this uh in several different sources for instance St Justin Martyr in first apology now this is even early than irenaeus irus is writing about 180 Justin Martyr is about 20 years earlier than this now Justin Martyr is someone

You would be hard to accuse of importing Pagan ideas because the whole notion of first apology is that he’s arguing in defense apologia apology uh he’s arguing in defense of Christianity against paganism he’s telling the pagans that they’re wrong which is why he’s not you know Justin who peacefully retired in the wilderness he’s Justin Martyr he confronts the Roman Emperor directly by letter to accuse him of teaching false things and in the process of this he describes the nature of Christian worship and he says and on the day called Sunday all who live in cities or

In the country gather together to one place then he describes the nature of this you know the Memoirs of the Apostles or the writings of the prophets are read and then you have the celebration of the Eucharist and so it’s very clear what’s happening here and it’s very clear that it’s happening on Sunday and he explains Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly because it is the first day on which God having brought a change in the darkness and matter made the world and Jesus Christ Our Savior on the same day rose from the dead now other early Christian

Sources will actually give a full trinitarian account of Sunday and say it’s on Sunday that the father creates the world it’s on Sunday that Jesus rises from the dead and it’s on Sunday that the Holy Spirit comes in Pentecost and so father son and spirit are recognized acknowledged worshiped and adored properly on Sunday now as an aside I want to just make this point because this is one of the deepest areas of misunderstanding as Catholics we believe you should worship God every day and you can actually fulfill your mass obligation by going to mass on a

Saturday evening so if you’re someone who wants to both have Christian worship and you know honor the historic Jewish sabbath some way as long as you don’t think that’s binding on other people you can rest on Saturday no one’s telling you you can’t and you can go to church on Saturday we have masses at almost every Church in the country on Saturday if that’s what you want so the idea that we’re just like against people worshiping God on Saturday is demonstrably and obviously false but returning to Justin Martyr so he’s explaining why it’s happening on Sunday

And then he says for he was crucified Jesus of course on the day before that of Saturn so he’s crucified the day before Saturday Friday and on the day after that of Saturn which is the day of the son having appeared to his Apostles and disciples he taught them these things which we have submitted to you also for your consideration that’s one60 way too early for Ellen White’s timeline and he also makes clear that he doesn’t think Christians are bound by The Jewish Sabbath anymore and he makes this clear in his was called dialogue with trifo or sometimes called dialogue with Trio a

Jew which is Jewish Christian debate and this is from about 150 and he says that what one of the charges that Jews raise against Christians is this that we live not after the law and are not circumcised In the Flesh as your fathers were and do not observe sabbaths as you do and so he acknowled and he doesn’t disagree with this charge he thinks this is true and he then says do you not see the elements this is much later I want to make sure clear I’m jumping here from paragraph 10 to paragraph 23 he says do you see that the elements are not idle and keep no

Sabbaths remain as you were born in other words in nature things don’t just naturally come to rest on the Sabbath for if there was no need of circumcision before Abraham or of the observance of sabbaths of Feasts and sacrifices before Moses no more need is there of them now now look a sabbatarian might disagree with all of that my point is simply this is what Christians believed in the 100s and that doesn’t fit with the idea that this is some medieval invention and this is not just Justin giving his personal interpretation or irus giving his personal interpretation or tulan or

Origin or any of these people they are speaking on behalf of what Christians are doing and how they’re living and no one is saying hey this is crazy heretical you’re violating the Ten Commandments imagine this imagine for a moment that the early Christian Church really was Seventh Day Adventist and its beliefs I mean obviously in it structure not but in you know just imagine had Adventist beliefs and imagine someone is writing on your behalf to the Roman Emperor very publicly announcing that you worship on Sunday and you in fact don’t you worship only on Saturday we

Would expect to see a lot of push back in Christians saying hey that’s not what we believe at all we don’t see anything like that rather these men were revered and honored as if they are speaking accurately on behalf of the Christian church now I want to add one more source and the dating of this one is a little tricky the diday so some are going to put it in the 100s but there are plenty of Scholars who argue that this is the oldest text outside of the Bible in Christianity then they’ll did it even back to like the the mid 50s ad somewhere in there so in the first

Century older than parts of the New Testament it’s not part of the Bible it doesn’t claim to be be written by an apostle it’s an early Christian attempt at summarizing the teaching of the 12 apostles which is what the name d means the teaching of the 12 and in it it says but every Lord’s Day gather yourselves together and break bread and give Thanksgiving the Eucharist in Greek after having confessed your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure and so you have that uh clearly pointing to worship being on the Lord’s day and of course we also see the

Apostle John in Revelation 1 talking about the Lord’s day and I know the standard Adventist response is the Lord’s Day must have meant Saturday because the day of the Lord in Isaiah is Saturday but every use of the phrase the Lord’s Day in Greek in early Christian text points to Sunday and this is remarkably clear you remember earlier when I said uh the Apostle John had two well-known students one of them St polycarp of Smyrna the other one is St Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius in his letter to the magnesians he is on his way to be martyred he’s the

First bishop of Antioch and he is uh in 107 about seven years after the death of his teacher John he is being himself brought to Rome to be martyred and along the way he writes seven letters and in one of them to the church in magnesia uh he says this if therefore those were brought up in the Ancient Order of things that is within you know Judaism have come to the possession of a new hope no longer observing the Sabbath but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day on which also our life has sprung up again by him and by his death so it’s abundantly clear in

107 there’s not a lot I mean there’s a couple years wiggle room in terms of where we date ignatius’ letters but pretty broad consensus is between the the latter part of the first decade of the 100s so maybe 105 to 110 107’s a a a best estimate he’s abundantly clear that Christians don’t worship on the Sabbath but on the Lord’s Day on Sunday and then you when you have that it makes sense of Revelation 1:0 where John says that he was in the spirit on the Lord’s day and so all the Book of Revelation is presented from that Sunday Kind of perspective now all

That’s to say like there’s a again you could say every Christian that we know of in the first century the second century the third Century got it wrong but that’s a separate argument from the fact that Ellen White claiming all this is post constantinian is demonstrably untrue I mean it is obviously she is off by several centuries and there’s just no evidence of the position that she’s claiming it just is so abundantly clear uh that this is false so from a theological perspective we can debate it I trust the early Christians more than I trust Ellen White from a historical

Perspective it’s absolutely undeniable that she has no idea what she’s talking about as a historian as a church histori someone making these allegedly prophetic claims about church history those claims are provably false and that should call into question a great deal of her Authority and I hope for those listen it does yeah man there is like so much because I know they’re responses to all of these things but I don’t want to get bogged down and all that you mentioned for example the father created on the first day um speaking to the new creation that would be a very

Interesting topic to have you back on because I hear it all the time I’m constantly talking about the new creation on this platform because of how detrimental that is to the Seventh Day Adventist position um and that they’re not equipped to deal with it because I know adventism well enough to know they have no present category for the new creation because of their nature of man what they believe about their esqu there’s just so many areas and the new creation absolutely demolishes their I mean that’s what Ignatius was using yeah so their defense has to be well Ignatius

So here’s what here’s what I’ve heard now I’ve heard a variety of arguments when it comes to Ignatius I’ve heard some say well he was a seventh day sabbatarian when he uses Lord’s day he’s talking about the seventh day which if you understand the history uh no we’re not worshiping on the Sabbath but on the Lord’s day really you know like this is the day of our observance isn’t the Sabbath it’s the Lord’s day that means well then you just make him contradict himself talking to a Jewish interlocutor exactly saying we are being accused for not you know

Keeping the Sabbath and that’s because we believe the Christian day of observance isn’t the Sabbath but the Lord’s day to say that that means it isn’t the Sabbath it’s the Sabbath makes that argument incoherent it’s just it doesn’t make any sense that yeah well so the one of the arguments I hear is all they hold to the all seven letters of of Ignatius were forgeries which is just crazy we’ve gone through a number of his his letters on the platform specifically that quote so some people in the audience are going to be familiar with that they’re going to know

Some of the history behind that because we’ve talked about that um but they also like to claim that the new creation is a Roman Catholic invention it’s not biblical it has no no roots in the Bible it’s just a a Roman Catholic invention so maybe you could come back sometime we could have a discussion around and the implications that it has for the S position because I’ll give a two second answer now if you want Christ is the new Adam in 1 Corinthians 15 he’s first of those whove fallen asleep and so that notion of in calling him the new Adam he’s Adam 2.0 and you see this in the

Structure of the Gospel of John just as baret is you know in the beginning in Hebrew that’s the opening passage to Genesis 1 John one begins in the beginning and then if you look really closely he then has six days of creation so know beginning with the ministry of John the Baptist then says and the next day and the next day and the next day and then and the next and then on the third day gets you to day six which would be the wedding Feast of Kaa so just as you have on day six the creation of man and woman you have on day six of the New Creation The Wedding Feast of

Kaaa this is all very intentional like john2 1:2 matches up with Genesis 1:2 in this very obvious kind of way and it’s pointing to a Theology of new creation and Joe day six is also preparation day yes before entering into Holy Communion with God and so there’s a lot of of parallel there that it would be fun to have you back for to yeah a real quick yes or no followup just because she also mentioned this in her quote as well and I want you to be able to speak into this do you all teach that the papacy is equal with God yes no not at all I’m actually that sometimes there’s claims

So obviously false I kind of forget to even you know like no the the pope you know even I was thinking about this even in your depiction of and white wearing a tiara what Catholics Claim about the pope is a great deal less than what Adventists Claim about Ellen gold white and specifically this we don’t believe the pope is an oracle of God uh his authority is purely interpretive and Vatican 2 in Dave arabam paragraphs 9 and 10 talks about this that God reveals himself so Jude 1 verse3 we’re contending for the Faith Delivered once for all to the apostles there is no f

Future Revelation this is why we don’t believe in Islam it’s why we don’t believe in Mormonism and it’s why the pope can’t just pull some new idea out of his hat and just like invent some new thing and say oh yeah God revealed to me in a dream this thing is true now the the reason I’m distinguishing this like we don’t believe the pope is a prophet we believe that he’s protected in particular contexts from error and so he’s a prophet in the sense that all Christians are called to share in the prophetic Ministry of Christ but he doesn’t get some new revelation he’s not

A prophet in that sense uh and so in contrast even though you’ll find plenty of kind of solos scriptor sounding things within adventism it’s hard to square that with the view of Ellen White as apparently a prophet giving some new Revelations about things you know as as we saw in her writings just a moment ago she’s allegedly having these dreams about church history and revealing things that turn out to be false that aren’t found in the Bible Well the pope doesn’t have that kind of authority so she’s actually claimed for herself a higher authority than the pope

Claims for himself and if she accuses the Pope’s authority of being like an affront to God how much more would she be kind of hoisted on her own patard well the SDA church is on record folks will know we have looked at this at nauseum at this point they openly State she’s the infallible interpreter of scripture and when it comes to what you were just mentioning about the papacy I’ll just mention for folks Ellen White has more supposed infallible words than the PO hope has given infallible declarations so a lot of times that gets misrepresented and um again I’m not

Roman Catholic but I I think people should be represented fairly and a lot of times people think well the the Roman Catholic Church teaches anytime the pope speaks it’s supposed to be infallible um and there’s very little there’s very few times where it’s actually um been an ex Cathedral if you will a statement that is infallible well Ellen White the Adventist Church claims her writings two million words two million words yeah so um it is fitting that she’s wearing that hat which is again it’s a little bit ingest but that’s why I put that on there because that’s what we’re supposed

To be getting like you mentioned she’s a terrible historian that’s supposed to be coming from God yeah so if even one of her historic claims turns out to be false and I think you’re finding a growing body of even Adventist Scholars who are kind of quietly distancing themselves from s Samuel or Samu Bak thank you his stuff on early sabbatarianism yeah he does not line up with Len white and it’s hard to square those twoo uh and like I don’t agree with everything he says but nevertheless like he realizes you can’t take this stuff at face value and expected to be

True history because he actually is a historian unlike her well I I don’t know if you know this but Samuel Baki was a Jesuit plant because he went to the because he went to the pontifical pontifical Gregorian School in Rome and so because that’s the case the the running narrative amongst the people like we saw at the very beginning that crowd um well Baki was a Jesuit plant that was sent to infiltrate the Seventh Adventist Church I don’t know a lot about spycraft I’ll preface that but if you want a plant maybe don’t openly send him to the Gregorian yeah

Like I I don’t know I mean it just feels like I think if you had a spy and you’re like here he is at spy school and then he like here’s his diploma from Spy school I that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me again like I’m no expert on the Cold War I don’t feel like the Soviets ever got that sloppy that feels a little sloppy yeah that’s that’s actually a really good point I hadn’t thought of that but with that in mind that’s a perfect segue because now I want to look at one of the avenus favorite sources to point to a Catholic miror article from September 23rd 1983

From Cardinal given who had this to say the Catholic church for over 1,000 years before the existence of a Protestant by virtue of her Divine Mission changed the day from Saturday to Sunday the Protestant world at its birth found the Christian Sabbath too strongly entrenched to run counter to its existence it was therefore placed under the necessity of acquiescing in the arrangement thus implying the Catholic Church’s right to change the day for over 300 years the Christian Sabbath is therefore to this day the acknowledged offspring of the Catholic Church as

Spouse of the Holy Ghost without a word of remonstrance from the Protestant world so if I had a nickel for every time that I had an Adventist cite this I would be a very rich man in conjunction with Ellen White’s claim Adventists will cite this to say see they even admit it the pope changed the Sabbath they read into any statement from Rome regarding the change of the Sabbath that the Roman Church is admitting the papacy changed the Sabbath in the 6th Century to which I always respond that these statements are all post reformation and are usually

Said within the context of apostolic succession meaning you guys obviously believe the apostles were the first Roman Catholics and it was the apostles that made this change not the pope and since Rome believes that Protestants broke away from them we Protestants then have no connection back to the apostles so therefore we have no BAS for corporate first day worship because it’s Apostolic in origin so the argument was over or is over Apostolic succession so my question for you how accurate is my assessment and was Cardinal Gibbons admitting that the

Papacy changed the Sabbath like Ellen White and the SDA Church claims it’s a very good question the first thing I’d say is actually the given so take everything I’m gonna say from here on but remember Gibbons isn’t infallible he doesn’t think he is Catholics don’t think he is and he’s an English Cardinal he things he says in a newspaper article don’t automatically become de facto you know the teaching of the Catholic church or accurate history so it is possible for instance for him to get the the history wrong Gibbons was in his own lifetime something of a controversial

Figure other well-known English Catholics like St John Henry Newman uh but it heads with him sometimes and so yeah I’d say that at the outset because you can find a Catholic Source claiming something doesn’t automatically make that thing true if it’s contradicted by the actual history so if you find a Catholic Source in the 19th century saying the Sabbath changed like if he is trying to say in the 500s then he’s wrong I don’t think he is trying to say that for the reasons you said but if he were trying to say that we would know that be untrue because of all the

Sources we already saw and so him like admitting to something we know isn’t true doesn’t make it true I hope that’s clear that’s first thing second as you say like the context of this matters that the Catholic argument is think about like the I don’t want to get too far into the nitty-gritty of like the back and forth between Catholic Protestant uh views on like the nature of worship but think about something like the regulative principle of worship which Broad speaking says you can only do those things that are put forward in the New Testament that if you’ve got an

Instruction to do this thing in worship you can do it and whatever isn’t permitted is forbidden apologies that’s a little bit of a sloppy uh characterization of it but basically that and so in response to that a Catholic would say you don’t find a direct instruction in the New Testament telling you to worship on Sunday and I think Catholics Protestants and Adventists would certainly agree on that point you find a reference you find references to what appears to be Christians worshiping on Sunday you know St Paul talks about having a collection on the first day of the week when you

Come together well it sounds like that’s the day Christians are coming together you’ve got John talking about being in the spirit on the Lord’s day that implies there is a Lord’s day that’s being kept by Christians but you don’t find that given as a direct instruction so in the pical context between Catholics and Protestants a point Catholics make is yeah like regulative principle of worship doesn’t work there is clearly you know the church in the apostolic age didn’t feel Bound by what does the Old Testament say about how to worship and there is clearly some new

Form of Christian worship and that’s not all given in terms of direct instruction some of that seems to be left to the apostles to implement now we get even more into the Weeds on that and look at the controversy in the90s uh between the churches in Asia Minor modern day Turkey which celebrate on the 14th day of Nissan uh for Easter what are called quto deons and those who celebrate Easter on Sunday and the quter desmans claimed that the Apostle John had given them one practice for celebrating Easter while the other Apostles always made sure Easter fell on

A Sunday now all of that points to the fact that from the Catholic View and from I think the early historical evidence there were times where the apostles just seemed to make a decision about the structure and nature of how worship looks which points to them having this kind of authority so I hope that’s clear we’re not claiming that the apostles or the pope are equal to God we are claiming as Jesus points out in John 4 in response to the Samaritan woman she talks him about worship and he talks about Worship in spirit and truth that the day is coming when there’s going to be a change

To what worship looks like that at the time in John 4 worship had to be in Jerusalem in the temple but some new form of worship is coming I think again we’re agreed on that part but we’re not given clear lurgical rubrics anywhere in the New Testament in the way you have pretty clear lurgical rubrics in the trah we don’t have that in the New Testament and so that’s a Catholic point that we often make in response to Sol scriptura in response especially to like Sol scriptura coupled with the regulative principle of worship it’s not a claim about the pope or the apostles

Having co-equal Authority with God or or changing this in the middle ages or anything like that see and and that’s the problem is that Adventists often times do not get equipped because I don’t think their scholarship at least not that I’ve seen is actually engaging at as granular of a level as Protestants and Catholics are yeah in adventism it’s this very vague generalized sort of like very everything’s just this simple black and white and we kind of have this perfectly crafted narrative that’s been put together and our talking points and our quotes and all of it just kind of

Fits seamlessly in the shoe box of the universe but the issue is a lot more granular than just finding a statement from somebody that you even think is a an authority figure or may be an authority figure in an organization you need to understand what that organization says about them so again going back to Ellen White I can show you statement after statement after statement uh I mean they have the official statement in the confidence of Len G white’s writings from the general conference Ellen White said the general conference they’re essentially the the

Magisterial body for the SDA Church she said that when the general conference makes a decision on something you were to yield your private opinion to them because the holy spirit is leading the GC while they are in session and so that is essentially another infallible body of interpretive leadership Etc but speaking again about Protestants and Catholics uniting Ellen White had this to say by the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God our nation talking about America will disconnect herself fully from righteousness when

Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism when under the influence of this three-fold Union our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and Republican government and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions then we may know that the Time Has Come For The Marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near so Joe as someone who engages with a lot of Roman Catholics

Orthodox friends Etc I still see us arguing issues we’ve been arguing for 500 plus years but according to the Adventist eschatological Paradigm Protestants Roman Catholics and spiritualism are uniting in a threefold union to essentially take control of the United States government to eventually pass a national Sunday worship mandate when this happens observing such will be the mark of the beast the sign of submitting to the traditions of man at the behest of the papacy furthermore she also had this to say the whole world is to be stirred with enmity against 7th Day

Adventists because they will not yield homage to the papacy by honoring Sunday the institution of this anti-christian power in fact Protestants are apparently worse than Roman Catholics in this regard because she also went on to say this the persecution of Protestants by romanism by which the religion of Jesus Christ was almost annihilated will be more than rivaled when protestantism and popery are combined so this will spread from America to the entire world who will then be stirred with enmity towards sth Day Adventist leading to their International

Persecution because it will also bring with it a death decree for anyone that does not obey so my question for you do you see this Union between Catholics Protestants and spiritualism forming and is the Roman Catholic Church seeking to mandate worldwide worship on Sunday threatening death to anyone who does not so all of that is ludicrous and all of these predictions I mean think about them in their historical context the 19th century in America a lot of things were happening you have uh a strong Adventist eschatological movement you have very famously the great disappointment of

1844 you get the millerites you know breaking up and then you get a bunch of these radical kind of offshoots this is not mainstream protestantism this is largely uneducated people on what werein the Frontiers and so what they have is a working knowledge of the Bible and in many Cas is a deep hatred of the Roman Catholic church or what they imagine the Roman Catholic Church to be because that’s a really important part of our country’s history so if you think back to like the Quebec Act in 1774 one of the causes of the American Revolution was that the colonists were

Afraid that giving religious liberty to Catholics was going to lead to the pope Taking Over America that was like a paranoid fear in 1774 that then leads eventually and very soon after uh this is one of the great Intolerable Acts right and so they want to push back against this that oh we’re being too nice to these French Catholics in Quebec and so there was a deep suspicion and deep misunderstanding of Catholicism in general in the US because there wasn’t a lot of Catholic presence until later on in the 1800s when you get a lot of mass migration of you know Italians

And Irish Catholics and so people start to understand Catholicism better then so at this time you get a lot of this kind of paranoid style and so even envisioning her thing about you know preserving the us as a Protestant and Republican country look around in 2024 and you don’t have to have any conspiracy theory about the papacy to say I think few people would describe modern American uh polity as a Protestant and Republican government it’s it’s not and it hasn’t been not because of some crazy inner working of you know Catholic Protestant Union or

Any of these things as you say Catholics and Protestants are still quite divided on a number of issues we don’t see them working to bring about Mand Sunday worship as I mentioned one of the things Ellen gold somehow failed to predict uh was the introduction of vigil masses in 1955 and so you have a change to Holy Week and then you have a lot of lurgical reforms that brings in more Saturday evening worship and there’s a lot going on in the Catholic style of worship we want to honor both Sunday as the day of the Lord we also want to honor that on the Jewish

Calendar uh the day begins at nightfall and so going to Mass on Saturday evening fulfills your Sunday obligation and so none of that looks like the kind of move you would make if you’re trying to outlaw people worshiping on Saturday and force him to do it on Sunday alone that even Catholics are free you know I I just went to Easter vigil mass and was there Saturday night and it went I mean it went a few minutes in well went about 12:30 it’s a three and a half hour long Mass but you know the idea there is it doesn’t have to be within the midnight

To midnight period of Sunday even for Catholics so that part already is a red flag second her failure to predict the religious changes in the US should be a red flag there’s no mention of the religiously unaffiliated of agnostics of atheists of Muslims of any of these other groups that are now major parts of us politics and us polity it’s Catholics Protestants and spiritualists spiritualism as a movement is very much a creature of the 19th century all has to say is over and over and over again her prediction looks nothing like the 21st century and a lot like kind of 19th

Century paranoia about this is what’s going to happen in the future and none of that stuff has come true and so it’s just constantly Charlie Brown in the football where it’s well it’s gonna happen soon we don’t know when it’s gonna happen soon and it never like we don’t see any of those things happening we don’t see a trajectory of those things happening Catholics and Protestants are certainly less acrimonious now than they were in the 19th century but I think that’s largely because we understand one another better not because of some secret plot to

Overthrow the Adventists who most Catholics and Protestants know nothing about like the world is not uh at enmity with adventism the world is largely unaware adventism even exists yeah and their whole Paradigm comes from a strictly Western there’s no mention of Orthodoxy the Church of the East the marinite churches the the the Byzantine right none of that is mentioned at all so they’re just kind of left out as well we have a lot of Orthodox that watch this Channel and they always like to ingest comment about how they feel left out of the persecution here of being

Lumped in with the rest of us you know like where are we at why aren’t we being included um well it’s because it’s a strictly Western mindset and strictly 19th century right like she she has all of the limitations you’d expect somebody without Divine forn knowledge to have about the religious landscape like she’s projecting the religious landscape of her day into the future and we know from a combination of spiritual trends and immigration pattern and everything else 21st century America doesn’t look or believe very similar to what 19th century America believed and you see

That across the board and so her failure to account for that again I keep talking about what a bad church historian she is she’s also a bad foreteller of the future yeah and that and that’s a really good point because you know if God is giving her you then get into the questions of of open theism and I don’t want to Sidetrack into that but you may not know this um a the one of the gentlemen that popularized the term open theism is a Seventh Adventist Richard rice I didn’t know so it makes sense in their system um and so maybe that’s the problem um I know that they don’t

Officially hold to they don’t have a statement saying that they affirm open theism but there are Seventh Adventist Scholars that have even been involved at that level who advocate for such it’s not only consistent with their system but um they think it would give them a number of Escape hatches in another a number of other I want to listen to a clip from an SDA Pastor by the name of Mark Finley he is one of these celebrity SDA pastors he has a YouTube channel called hope lives 365 notice what he says regarding the Ten Commandments and Roman Catholicism

And then I’m going to have a question for you great in biblical Christianity Jesus said in John 14:15 If You Love Me Do What keep my Commandments but yet in Daniel 7: 25 5 it speaks about a power that would rise out of Rome that would change the law of God how did the papacy change God’s law well in the Ten Commandments it dropped the second commandment that says Thou shalt not worship idols drop that that means that it would only have nine so it has to take the Ten Commandment Thou shalt not covet make it to Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s

Wife and thou shalt not cover with any of his Goods so the law of God was changed next it says in Daniel 7:25 that it would change the times and the laws what’s the only law that has to do with time that’s the Sabbath commandment so the church would change the Sabbath commandment from Saturday the 7th Day to Sunday the 1st that’s why there’s this Divergence this this contrast all right so Joe this is a very common SDA claim that the Roman Catholic Church not only changed the fourth Commandment which we’ve already discussed but removed the second and

Then to be nefarious because oh no we still have to have 10 to make it look like uh there’s we haven’t done anything they broke up the command to not covet into two to make it make it appear as though there are 10 question for you can you explain the augustinian order of the Ten Commandments and why Roman Roman Catholics and lutherans utilize it yeah so the first thing to say is you get two slightly different presentations of the Ten Commandments in the two places they’re given in the Torah Exodus 20 and then Deuteronomy 5 and so we’re told it’s the decalog it’s the 10 words we’re

Not told the numbers and so everybody Jewish Catholic Orthodox Protestant Adventist you name it everybody trying to interpret this has to do the interpretive work of adding numbers to this and the two problems are there appear to be more than 10 commandments like there are more than 10 things that you’re told to do or not do uh and second the order varies between the Exodus list and the Deuteronomy list and so broadly speaking in the East it’s gone more with the numbering uh that has that is current in protestantism and broadly speaking in the west is gone more with what

You’re calling the augustinian numbering and the reason for it is not to remove the prohibition against idolatry that prohibition is part of the first commandment in the Catholic order it’s still prohibited if anything got moved up the list so the reason is because having no other gods before me and having no Idols mean the same thing so the Hebrew there is the like a a Graven image you worship it has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean like a total iconoclasm a Prohibition against all images we know that’s not true because in the Torah you also see things like

The creation of the bronze serpent or a little later you see things like the creation of the temple which has all sorts of images you’ve got the cheram over the Ark of the Covenant you’ve got all of these things that are religious images and so we know that the prohibition here whether you call it the first or the second commandment is against the making of Idols not images and you know even when Jesus has like the coin and it has the image on it he doesn’t condemn them for having you know a coin with an image on it oh why do you have an idol in your pocket it’s not

That so it’s not a total prohibition against images it’s a Prohibition against Idols first point uh second like why interpret it this way well either way is fine as long as you keep these things where you mentally put the numbers is helpful for a reference standpoint and so you can refer to the first commandment the second commandment Third Commandment is is helpful from a reference perspective just like the chapter and verse numbers the chapter and verse numbers are not in the Bible we added those to make it easier to cite the Bible Well likewise we added the

Numbers to the Ten Commandments to make it easier to cite them why has the western church historically gone with the numbering that Augustine gives well I I mentioned the first half that idolatry is a violation of the first commandment in other words if you view the prohibition against idolatry as a sep separate commandment than the prohibition against having any other gods then you couldn’t violate the second commandment without also violating the first commandment and that’s kind of a weird thing that one commandment just seems like a special

Application of another I hope that makes sense that if you can’t have other gods and you can’t have idols and to have an idol is having another God which sounds like this is just a particular example of what not to do so we’ve historically in the west treated it as one commandment on the flip side in coveting there is a clear spiritual difference between coveting your neighbor Goods what St John calls lust of the eyes and coveting your neighbor’s wife which John calls lust of the flesh you may remember St John distinguishes between three categories of sin lust of the eyes lust

Of the Flesh and pride of life lust of the Flesh and lust of the eyes are the two categories of the ninth and 10th commandment and so because idolatry and not having other gods go together and because lust of the Flesh and lust of the eyes are separate forms of coveting that’s why the numbering looks way it is not to allow idolatry We Believe idolatry is evil yeah and like you said the the distinguishing between the the command of coveting always gets me every time because it’s like do you really believe that a person’s spouse is the same as the person’s donkey right

Like that’s all that’s going on there is a distinguishing and also too often times when they’re they’re trying to point at this they’ll try and like take a picture of something and it’s often times a picture of the catechism and it’s like do you understand what a catechism is it’s like a teaching tool it’s trying all the the stuff is still there yeah but it’s not this number well the numbers were uh an added addition because like you said there’s actually 13 imperatives not just 10 so that’s always an interesting one when when they say this and it’s like well this can

Easily be fact checked now in line with this I want to look at a statement from the Catholic in psychop cedia volume 4 we have looked at this in full on here because again this is something that’s often cited by the SDA church but they leave out this paragraph they typically cite from the same page but it is the preceding paragraph Without this final paragraph so they’ll try and cite this to support their narrative but then leave this off on page 392 under Commandments of God that’s the heading the church on the other hand after changing the day of rest from The Jewish

Sabbath or seventh day of the week to the first made the third commandment refer to Sunday as the day to be kept holy as the Lord’s Day the Council of Trent condemns those who deny that the Ten Commandments are binding on Christians so we already talked about the change of the Sabbath and what is meant by that but that last sentence they will leave that off entirely which states that Trent condemns those who deny that what all 10 of The Commandments are not binding on Christians if a person says that that uh session six Canon uh my Roman numerals yeah 19 I can

Actually quote the the Canon if you’d like if anyone sayith that nothing besides faith is commanded in the gospel that other things are indifferent neither commanded nor prohibited but free or that the Ten Commandments no wise appertain to Christians let him be antha and you can probably guess the context this is post-reformation correct and so there this kind of Martin Luther says some things like sin boldly and there’s a lot of concern on the Catholic side of what do we mean by that like if you’re saying if you’re a Christian who believes you can commit whatever sins

You want yeah we condemn that we reject that we believe it’s possible for Christians to have mortal sin and so if you’re saying don’t worry about the Ten Commandments anymore go do whatever you want because you have faith alone yeah the Council of TR rejects that yeah that does not impose saboten ism uh it’s just saying you can’t take the position The Ten Commandments is irrelevant correct it’s it’s essentially denouncing antinomianism exactly um but most or a lot of Adventists would be shocked to hear that last statement that the Roman Catholic Church teaches all 10

All 10 not well right because they removed the Sabbath and then split up coveting and it’s those 10 no no it the same 13 imperatives are there but they they specifically state that the Ten Commandments are binding on Christians what does the Roman Catholic Church teach regarding the Ten Commandments Joe and salvation yeah so the Ten Commandments are the moral road map in in this sense Jesus says to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor and great easy wonderful everybody says that sounds good but then you get the hard work of like what does it actually look

Like to do that and so the Ten Commandments give us that broad framework and so since the days of Augustine actually we see the Ten Commandments being used as the launching point for catechetical formation for moral formation about the what to do and not do there’s different ways you can divide up S you know I I mentioned earlier John gives a three-fold distinction between pride of life lust of the lust of the flesh Augustine’s going to take a tenfold distinction based on the Ten Commandments you got the seven deadly sins all of these are atts to present in a more cohesive uh

Almost bullet point way the dos and don’ts of Christian Living because those aren’t given in kind of a simple straightforward bullet pointed way anywhere in the Bible you have to take all of those things and put them together the Ten Commandments are the closest you get to 10 simple kind of bullet points but anyone familiar with Judaism knows there is much more to the moral law to leave aside everything like the ceremonial law there is more to the moral law than is just directly found in the Ten Commandments but nevertheless we can categorize the other aspects of the

Moral law given this so I mentioned earlier that as Catholics we believe in two types of sin based on St John who says there is some sin which is Mortal or deadly and some which isn’t uh for a sin to be mortal it has to be a violation in some way of the Ten Commandments and so it has to be something where you have failed in some Duty that was obliged or at least so even like a guide to confession uh these aren’t like official Church documents but these are helpful spiritual guides so if you’re you know in line for confession you might be going through a

Sort of spiritual checklist of well what did I do and not do when I should have done the opposite and it’ll often be based on the Ten Commandments again you could do it a different way but all that shows that these are still understood to have this tremendous important and tremendous influence in how we live as Christians um more broadly if I could add one more point to that going back Beyond St Thomas aquinus but Thomas aquinus does a good job of explaining this there’s an understanding that there are three categories of law given to Israel you

Have these ceremonial laws which were about making the Jews a unique people the Israelites a unique people to prepare them for the Messiah and so once the Messiah comes those are no longer um applicable things like circumcision then you have things that were laws of the Kingdom of Israel or laws of the people of the nation and so those things go away when the nation goes away so you know you don’t see modern Jews Like stoning people for different sins that’s not because they don’t believe in the Torah or in the Tanakh it’s because they recognize that some of those laws are

Tied to a particular time and place but then the third category are moral laws about the dos and don’ts in light of who God is and who we are and the Ten Commandments are a reflection of that and those are of everlasting applicability like Christ coming into the world doesn’t get rid of my need not to murder my neighbor and so the Ten Commandments is speaking of an eternal moral law what St Paul calls the the law written on the human heart and so in Romans 3 many talk about Gentiles behaving even though they don’t have the law revealed to them they kind of do at

The level of their heart in other words if through some great catastrophe we lost all knowledge of the Ten Commandments tomorrow I don’t know how it doesn’t matter you would still be able to come up with a very similar list just based on the dictates of conscience and so that’s the last like the The Ten Commandments are in a real way not giving anything new they’re highlighting things that you already should know and making them clear and really placing them upon you to make sure that you do them or don’t do them Joe a lot of Adventist heads are going to explode

Hearing you say that because Adventists agree and here’s why they agree there and well the general SDA probably isn’t going to understand at this level but the reform tradition which I’m a part of agrees with Thomas’s three-fold Division and understanding of the law um and the the moral ceremonial and like you mentioned the the yeah some said civil or judicial Etc um but the SDA Pioneers that systematize Seventh Adventist theology are they’re kind of a cornucopia of different Traditions that they pulled from to kind of get their system together and then they filter all

Of it through what they call the great controversy theme um it’s their unique extra biblical Paradigm uh it’s really what the great controversy is coming from um and unbeknownst to them though their uh affinity for the the law and the perpetuity of the law to some degree in some sense with a three-fold division Etc um they’ve really pulled from the reformed tradition not understanding that well um the reformed tradition is in line with Thomas’s and then we get into things like natural law which you were kind of getting into there that the conscience serving as um the the the

Same sort of element there so I just think sounds like you guys are sending spies as well no correct which is well it’s so funny because like I said Adventists are going to agree with all this they’re going to hear you say Eternal law and they’re gonna say yeah but all of that stuff is informed by their great controversy worldview which is what I always point out that’s always the problem Protestants and Catholics have differences but we don’t have a different world viiew I remember when I got red pilled on this um Co coming out of adventism when I realized adventism

Isn’t Christian in any sense um it’s just it’s it’s a different thing entirely it’s like a sect of its own thing um I realized that Christians all have a certain world view and Adventists have a distinct one that is all informed by this prear origin story where all this stuff was going on in heaven but all of that to say what you just said there is going to uh blow the minds of a lot of Adventists who have kind of been told sort of things like well you know Rome has um some have like an antinomian view of Rome that like well Rome doesn’t even think the Ten Commandments are you

Know they’ve abandoned God’s law Etc um but fin yeah I just say like the entire section the catechism is in four parts and so one of those parts is looking at the moral law and using the Ten Commandments as the jumping off point for that the The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes are where we’re going to figure out what should we do and what should we not do and so that’s a weird thing to do if you don’t believe the Ten Commandments are relevant to Christian Life right um well and not just that but again they try to appeal to classical Protestants too and all classical

Protestant confessions um they’re not antinomian right they’re not Mar they’re not marianites like none of us are marianites I I constantly feel like sometimes with them it’s like we’re constantly back in like the fourth fifth century it’s like this is the problem when you try to reinvent the wheel um all the time like I know that they’re you know without getting into to Protestant Catholic back and forth stuff um well depends who we talk to some people are going to say well Luther nov came up with some of these things Etc but what you have going on with them is

Like a far reaching back into the past and a resurrection of a bunch of ancient heresies thinking these were things that the uh the papacy extinguished and we’re Reviving when actually no you’re just actually resurrecting a bunch of ancient heresy yeah that there’s a lot that could be said there if I could just throw an idea out there I would suggest everything I said before about Jesus saying the Gates of Hell won’t overcome the church saying he’ll be with the church always promising that the spirit of Truth The Counselor will come and lead the church into all truth is

Inconsistent with the idea that the papacy is more powerful than Jesus right like if you think Jesus founded a church but Constantine and the pope overthrew that church and replaced it and so like the true church only lasted like a maybe a hundred years maybe not even that depending on when you date the diday like maybe a few decades you know that’s how long the true church lasted but the papacy’s lasted since whatever you date it then it looks like the Catholic church is actually more successful at the gates not overcoming than the church founded by Jesus and so it’s a really

Weird position to try to stake out this place of saying yeah there was this truth but then that got lost I’ll give you an example in Acts chapter 5 the apostles are on trial before this Sanhedrin and their lives are spared by the uh kind of interjection of the Pharisee gel who we we know later in act 22 is the teacher of the Apostle Paul and gel points out you can tell if a movement is of god like these Messianic movements based on whether they endure or B on whether they scatter and so according to the SDA position it would seem by their own theology they’re

Believing that yeah there was this Messianic movement it believe seven Adventist things and then it died out and everybody scattered and then they disappeared until Ellen White kind of resurrected it and that sounds much more like Mormonism and I would just throw out that then by the standard of Acts 5 you’ve proven seventh day adventism to be false because it it ceased to exist like the truth should be there for 2,000 years in an unbroken lineage you know you talk about like why we’re big on Apostolic succession and it’s because of this kind of principle in places like

Acts five that if it’s of God it won’t be overcome now you mentioned Daniel 2 earlier and this is I think a place that is really important because Daniel 2 Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and he has the the gold silver bronze and then the uh iron and then the iron gets kind of brittle in the feet and then during the days of the fourth Kingdom because that’s what the four TI of the statue represent a stone not formed by human hands which we recognize to be Jesus will come and establish a mountain that’ll last forever and so however you understand kind of the ecclesiology of

The church I know it’s an area where Catholics and Protestants tend to part company in some sense we should find the kingdom of God coming into the world with Jesus and that that mountain not going away it’s the mustard seed that becomes the largest of all Garden plants it’s not going to be destroyed it’s going to grow and grow and grow and grow and instead the Adventist view seems to be from the outside that it did die out and it died out because there was an even stronger Mountain an even stronger Garden plant of Constantine thee Pope and that is so

Biblically unsound that I think it’s just worth calling that out and saying that like your views of church history should be biblical and that is unbiblical yeah so their claim is going to be and this is really if you read the great controversy this is what Ellen White puts forth so that’s why it’s the driving force the claim is that Revelation foretold of the church having to go into the Wilderness there was a great apostasy right after the apostles it’s the same as the restorationist narrative that’s they’re kind of the fruit of the restorationist movement and

The idea being that well the church didn’t truly die it was just persecuted and became dispersed and we just kind of don’t really know where or what it really was because there’s no there’s no real understanding around so for example in the reformed tradition we believe the church was when people say well do you you don’t think the church existed until presbyterianism was around and we say well no and they’ll say well where was it before and we’ll say well it was Universal it was Catholic now we’re going to argue obviously what the term what that’s

Referring to or who that’s referring to specifically um but that’s actually the classical Protestant argument around why we think we’re actually more Catholic because it sends no I don’t think I believe you have to be United to Jesus Christ Union with Christ and you’re going to find people United to Jesus Christ in the Roman Catholic Fellowship um John Calvin said that for example not to not to dog into all that but they didn’t have this idea my point with that is they didn’t have this idea that SDA kind of do and they try and hoist this on to Protestants and and the the the

Reformers well the reformers weren’t saying what you guys are saying they aren’t saying the church completely died and then needed to be Resurrected or that they themselves were resurrecting this sort of thing but that’s how Ellen White positions it in the great controversy is the waldenian are kind of the starting point yeah with well that’s where we started to see now the church is coming out of the Wilderness of persecution from the papacy and all of Bible prophecy uh you know foretells of this so it’s biblical yeah I think there’s a couple things one you know as I think we’ve

Both kind of acknowledged we’re going to part company on some of the specifics but there is a belief that there should be this kind of continuity like we I think we’re both broadly speaking anti-restoration because if you believe in a total apostasy then you put yourself in a place that seems just completely untenable in light of like a why is there no biblical prediction that there will be a total apostasy we’re told many people will fall away which is what the word apostasy means but people leaving the church or leaving Christianity in that sense that’s not the actual debate

The debate is this thing that calling an apostasy but is actually the extinguishing of Christianity or the extinguishing of the church it’s much more like a total Annihilation that total Annihilation which allegedly happens in Christianity is not found and so that’s going to apply both to a lot of Adventist history but also to a lot of Mormon history so again Ellen White’s kind of vision of the world is very much a product of 19th century America you have you know the famous like burned over District in Western New York where there were so many revivals coming through and so what

You had was all of these people who would go to like a Tent Revival and they’d become on fire for Jesus Christ but they weren’t connected with any kind of institutional church and they didn’t know much about history or theology so they’d start doing their own thing they had a lot of passion a lot of drive not a lot of roots or Foundation the kind of thing Jesus warns about in the sewer and the seed of the this you know the shallow soil and so they’d spring up all these different churches and bodies and so you have the Shakers and you have all of these kind of of weird fringy kind of

Movements and in the midst of this you have these people one after another Who start claiming that God has inspired them with this revelation of either a when the end times are going to be and or B that they are going to be the the ones who bring about the true church and so if you read for instance the writings of Joseph Smith and Mormonism you see all of that going on so that’s the restorationist side the kind of invisible Church side and I don’t mean here like there Christians in the church and I mean much more like uh if you’re familiar with fundamentalist Baptists uh

What’s called the trail of blood that there is on the fringes of Baptist theology Baptist successionism this is not a mainstream view even among Baptists but it’s this idea that all these different groups like The waldensians were really just Baptists Ellen White is doing a similar kind of historical song and dance as that the problem is when you go back and read the writings which again I think is a recurring theme you find out that these groups often believed things radically unlike Protestants of any stripe or Adventists of any stripe and because

They were of a different time and era and had a different theological system and no credible historian is saying oh yeah there’s a there’s a through line that gets you through all of these people so doesn’t have to be a Catholic scholar or a Protestant scholar it could be a secular one where do we find anybody making these connections that isn’t just super in the tank for adventism we don’t and there’s there’s a good reason why because unlike in the 19th century we now have a large body of the writings of these different heretical movements of these different

Like sects that grew up we can point to what they actually taught and a lot of them are these wild things that don’t look remotely Christian and you know like you you’ll find uh strong Gnostic elements that there’s two Gods a good God and an evil God you’ll find prohibitions against marriage yeah yeah so all of this makes it it totally incredible in the sense of not believable to say that you’ve got this historic successionism yeah they love citing for example Philip schaf um which you know Protestants tend to to refer to scha um but it’s just like he’s a good

Guy yeah exactly so it’s like he’s kind of like a well he’s an actual historian and that’s you can’t you you can’t you know well without rabbit trailing off into all that it’s just like they only like to selectively site sha though because it’s well schaf like if you literally go to Sha’s history of the Christian religion book one the very beginning when he starts with the apostles it’s on like almost like the it’s within the first 10 pages of his discussion he says now the the practice of of worship on Sunday originated with the apostles yes well then you have

Statements from SDA Pioneers when it comes to them citing sha who then follow up by saying now no one would question Sha’s credentials who could even come you know Etc well what about this quote over here that just completely decimates your guys’s historical revisionism but speaking of historical revisionism I want to end here on one of the final claims that we often hear unfortunately and that is this title of vicarius Fel day many conspiracy-minded sdas love to circulate images like this one they claim that the papal Tiara contains the title of Vicor of the Son of God which

Adds up supposedly to 666 when you use the sort of hebraic gatria math so therefore the Bible clearly shows the papacy is the beast power Joe is this true uh no in two ways number one vicarius uh da Philly is not a Papal Philly day is not a Papal title there are a bunch of papal titles you can find them amongst other places on the Vatican own website and this is not one of them now you will find this occasionally in old documents uh the earliest and most notorious is a so-called Donation of Constantine this was a medieval forgery allegedly from Constantine giving care

Of what became the Papal States to the pope and this was a forgery this was not a forgery by the popes but popes believed this and for a long time relied on this text as one of the arguments they made for why they had the care of Rome without getting as you said too far down the rabbit Trail Constantine moves the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople and so in the period after Constantine not because of some scheme with the Catholic church but because he wants to start a city called Constantinople not coincidentally uh you have these Western the vandals The Goth

Of viago uh barbarians coming in and they eventually like sacked the city of Rome and so the ancient imperial capital was basically abandoned by the Empire and so you have people who are hungry and in the streets and you there’s a need for Law and Order and the bishop of Rome takes a greater and greater kind of authority because no one is is a sort of state of Anarchy and so this is someone taking care of the poor this is somebody like organizing things and administrating things and all of this and I mean the best example I could give is if you imagine like a missionary or

Maybe a community of missionaries who go to some place and while they’re there the place kind of falls into Anarchy they might bring a semblance of order and so they might effectively start running things that’s the actual history of the Papal States it was not some official declaration by Constantine but years down the road like centuries later there start to be these legends about how the pope kind of came into Authority the history is just pretty natural pretty organic process in terms of temporal Authority and the Donation of Constantine is one of these forged

Documents uh that we don’t know exactly who forged it but it’s probably in the 8th Century so 700s well after the fact somebody forges a document and and convinces the Catholic authorities that this is a real deal and they will go on to site it for a few hundred years before they become embarrassed when they realize that it’s not real uh so that’s just like a fact in history so you find the title there but you don’t find it in actual like things written by the popes about themselves it’s not one of the official titles of the Pope so that’s the first thing it’s not a real papal

Title the second thing is the geometria like the numeric numbering from the letters that’s not how you do it like the first thing is in Hebrew there are certain numeric values to every character and so you can do uh geometri you you can do like a this word has this numeric value because every letter has a number and so to give one really clear example Nero’s name totals up to 666 and so at the time when Nero represents the awful persecutor of the church then saying 666 you’re told let the reader understand right like remember John saying that uh he assumes that the

People reading in the first century this is going to be a reference that they’re going to get if this is a medieval title that doesn’t exactly make sense so Revelation 1318 this calls for wisdom let him who has understanding reckon the number of the Beast for it is a human number its number is 666 in other words in the first century a person with understanding and a clue of what’s going on could think of a person whose number in Hebrew is 666 Scholars I think virtually universally realize this is a reference to new and more broadly Nero is a symb of the

Authority of the state being used in this evil way it’s not a reference to this Pap title that doesn’t exist for another 700 years uh and was never officially like used by the Pope in that way uh second the all of that as I said is in Hebrew what they’re trying to do what Len white is trying to do is taking the v in vicarius and saying oh well V five in uh Roman numerals and then the eyes are one and if you take the other U as a v then that’s five and totaling up this way the problem is Roman numerals are only like a handful of letters in Latin or in

English for that matter and so we don’t have this same kind of numeric where every word has a number uh the way that Hebrew does and so it doesn’t really work to do that because then you have a bunch of leftover letters for you say oh these letters don’t really mean anything and then the final thing is just kind of a funny one Ellen gold White’s own name adds up to 666 if you accept that method if you abuse English or Latin and just take the the characters that are Roman numerals and you include a u as a v because those used through the same letter and say well that’s five well

Then you end up in this situation where Ellen White by her own methodology points to herself as having the mark of the beast which is a bizarre place to end up it’s a bad method all the way around and it leads to this kind of hilarious result yeah and the thing that’s funny about that is uh it well like you were alluding to it says the title of a or or the the it speaks to the name of the individual not title yeah yeah not the title of the individual and they’re pointing to the title of it the the name of the pope is not vicarius fely day that’s not his name

Yeah you know you’re pointing to a title but ironically enough in the November 1948 issue of ministry magazine which is an official publication of the SDA Church they write this the question is asked is there any genuine picture of the papal Tiara bearing upon it the inscription vicarius fely day which some of our evangelists show on the screen in discussing the mark of the beast to which they then write each Pope like any other Sovereign has his own Tiara which is the Papal crown there is therefore no one Tiara that is worn by the full succession of papal pontiffs moreover

Personal examination of these uh various Tiaras by different men back through the years and a scrutiny of the pictures of many more have failed to disclose one engraved with the inscription vicarius fely day there is none such definitely known to exist as Heralds of Truth we are to proclaim the truth truthfully no fabrication should ever belcloud our presentation of the truth so sdas that keep recycling this are out of step with their Church’s own Publications and need to cut this out as even the SDA Church admits This Is A Lie Joe thank you so

Much for being here thank thank you for some of your time I really appreciate it maybe we will do another one of these like I said we can look at new creation um I think it’s important like I mentioned as well in the beginning that even if people disagree that folks here things from both sides of discussions like scripture calls people to do and not be fearful of listening we always encourage people on this platform to go to these sources themselves that we provide don’t just listen to me see the sources for yourself and analyze and I think people should do the same with

Roman Catholicism as well so thank you for sharing with us my pleasure thanks for having me on ho apostate did he say that come on man a