The John-Henry Westen Show - November 24, 2022


Scott Hahn： How to Get Over the 'Hippie Hangover' and Fix 'Wreck-ovation of the 70s and 80s'


Summary

In today s day and age, particularly with the problems in the Church, there is a problem of holiness. What is holiness? Is God s Church not holy? We call the Pope His Holiness, and yet there is so much confusion. So how do we get to a proper understanding? Well, we have the best person here who could give us that proper understanding. You all know him very well, his name is Dr. Scott Hahn, and he s got a new book all about holiness, called Praise for His Holy Name.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 And in particular, the ascension, the exaltation of Jesus' sacred and divinized humanity
00:00:05.920 has brought about a revolution in the history of world religion and the fulfillment of Judaism
00:00:10.960 in a way that would explode their brains.
00:00:13.620 I mean, this exceeds their highest hopes.
00:00:15.880 And yet it elicits yawns or kind of bewilderment from ordinary Christians and even Catholics
00:00:22.480 who really need to rediscover the holiness in order for the sacraments to have their intended effect.
00:00:32.160 In today's day and age, particularly with the problems in the Church,
00:00:38.560 there is a problem of holiness.
00:00:42.600 What is holiness?
00:00:44.220 Is God's Church not holy?
00:00:46.560 We call the Pope his holiness, and yet there's so much confusion.
00:00:52.720 So how do we get to a proper understanding?
00:00:57.160 Well, we have the best person here who could give us that proper understanding.
00:01:02.200 You all know him very well.
00:01:04.020 His name is Dr. Scott Hahn.
00:01:07.180 He's got a new book out all about holiness.
00:01:10.540 It's called Praise for His Holy Name.
00:01:13.440 This is the John Hunter Weston Show.
00:01:15.480 Stay tuned.
00:01:22.480 Dr. Scott Hahn, welcome to the program.
00:01:45.300 Great to be with you, John Henry.
00:01:46.840 Praise God.
00:01:47.420 Let's begin, as we always do, at the sign of the cross.
00:01:49.380 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
00:01:54.000 Amen.
00:01:54.860 Congratulations on another book.
00:01:57.720 Tell us about Praise for His Holy Name.
00:02:00.120 What's it about?
00:02:01.000 Well, in one sense, it's the climax of a series of books that goes back to the Lamb's Supper,
00:02:06.520 and then Hail Holy Queen, and now Holy is His Name.
00:02:11.800 But in another way, it really does represent the culmination of a sort of personal arc,
00:02:18.260 a narrative arc, and it goes back 50 years to my own conversion as a young teenager.
00:02:23.860 When I was about 14, I found my way out of the Allegheny County juvenile court system
00:02:29.060 and a delinquent lifestyle that left my parents bereft.
00:02:33.680 I found Christ.
00:02:35.040 He found me.
00:02:35.940 I was still a long way off from the Catholic faith.
00:02:38.740 But this experience for me was life-changing.
00:02:42.760 But when I started attending church, I discovered this sort of love.
00:02:48.260 Late 60s, early 70s, it was like a spiritual hippie hangover.
00:02:52.580 And I couldn't help but wonder if this approach to Shummy Jesus was not only superficial, but really off.
00:03:02.680 And I had a series of experiences that led me to discover the teaching of a Protestant theologian by the name of R.C. Sproul.
00:03:10.920 And he only lived about an hour away, and the Ligonier Valley Study Center was newly established.
00:03:16.320 And he was giving a series of lectures for a course entitled The Holiness of God.
00:03:23.440 And so when I heard about the holiness of God, I latched on to that which I knew I was looking for,
00:03:30.440 what I was needing, what I was missing.
00:03:33.020 And so I began to really devote myself to the teachings of Scripture, but also through the eyes of Dr. Sproul.
00:03:40.120 And as a result, I must admit, it was life-changing in a much deeper way.
00:03:47.320 I remember back then, Protestantism in general was suffering from this malaise of secularization.
00:03:54.480 And I was still far off from the Catholic faith, but I remember H. Richard Niebuhr describing the Christian faith in America as
00:04:02.140 a God without wrath who brings man without sin into a kingdom without judgment.
00:04:07.680 In other words, it's a kind of religious democracy.
00:04:10.960 It's all egalitarian.
00:04:12.720 I mean, you know the rest of the story.
00:04:14.200 And so to discover the holiness of God led me more deeply into Scripture.
00:04:20.200 But what ended up happening over the course of the next 10 or 15 years was life-changing in new ways and traumatizing,
00:04:28.780 especially when I discovered in the Old Testament a much deeper conception of holiness
00:04:34.460 and then discovered in the Catholic Church, a perfect match for what I was discovering.
00:04:39.940 When you read the New in light of the Old and the Old Testament in light of the New,
00:04:44.380 that match is a perfect match for what you find in the early Church Fathers.
00:04:50.020 And so on the one hand, Sproul was focusing on the holiness of God and our experience of a holy God.
00:04:56.900 He was drawing from a famous book that had been written back in 1917 by a German Protestant,
00:05:03.720 Professor Rudolf Otto, entitled The Idea of the Holy.
00:05:08.100 Das Heilige was published in translation by Oxford University.
00:05:12.520 And what Otto became famous for was noting that holiness is a trauma for us.
00:05:18.920 It is a mystery.
00:05:20.200 The mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
00:05:22.480 It's mysterious.
00:05:24.240 It causes us to tremble.
00:05:26.060 And yet it also draws us.
00:05:27.520 It fascinates us.
00:05:29.260 And so I stuck with that for a couple of years, thinking that this approach to God is what we need,
00:05:35.220 that there's a loss of the sense of the sacred.
00:05:37.920 People aren't taking the holiness of God seriously.
00:05:40.960 And then I began to realize, now, wait a second.
00:05:43.560 Holiness is not reducible to our own experience and our subjective response to it.
00:05:48.920 Holiness in our subjective experience is important, but what is holiness objectively in God?
00:05:56.960 What do we mean when we say, you alone are holy?
00:06:00.340 You know, the idea that holy is his name.
00:06:02.880 And I began to realize that you distinguish, as a theologian, not to oppose, but to unite.
00:06:09.580 And you usually do it by subordinating such a thing as our subjective response to holiness,
00:06:15.280 like Moses at the burning bush, who is frightened.
00:06:19.440 And yet at the same time, he is enthralled.
00:06:22.160 He can't take his eyes off it.
00:06:23.920 And yet he hears the voice of the Lord saying, take off your shoes for the ground that you stand on is holy.
00:06:28.960 Or Isaiah, when he has the vision of the seraphim singing the sanctus in the heavenly temple.
00:06:34.640 Woe is me.
00:06:36.420 I'm a man of unclean lips.
00:06:37.900 I'm doomed to die.
00:06:39.040 I dwell on a land full of people who are unclean.
00:06:42.200 You distinguish the response that we need to have in the presence of an all-holy God.
00:06:46.780 But what is holiness, you know?
00:06:49.280 And actually, the catechism distills what you find in the early church fathers and in St. Thomas Aquinas in paragraph 2809.
00:06:59.020 This distinction is made and put into a definition where the holiness of God is the inaccessible center of his eternal mystery.
00:07:08.580 What is revealed of it in creation and history, that's what scripture calls glory, the radiance of his majesty.
00:07:16.680 And so you recognize that holiness is something that is proper to God alone.
00:07:21.180 It is the inaccessible center of his being.
00:07:23.620 And what that really evokes is the holy of holies in the temple that was strictly off limits for all humans.
00:07:30.940 Well, except for Aaron, the high priest.
00:07:32.720 But even Aaron was only allowed to go in once a year, briefly, to atone for the sins of the priests and the people.
00:07:39.740 And then he quickly left.
00:07:41.640 And so this inaccessible center is a reminder that holiness is the realm of the temple, the presence of God, the ministry of the priests.
00:07:50.360 And therefore, in ancient Israel, and even still today, holiness is not the same thing as righteousness.
00:07:57.080 In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the idea of sanctity is distinct from justice.
00:08:03.500 Now, they're not opposed.
00:08:04.740 They're clearly inseparably united.
00:08:07.100 But justice is the ministry of the king in the palace.
00:08:10.760 It pertains to the second table of the Decalogue.
00:08:13.680 The last seven commandments that are all basically our interpersonal relations with fellow humans, beginning with our parents and everyone else.
00:08:21.900 Whereas holiness, the realm of the temple, the ministry of the priests, that pertains to the first table of the Decalogue.
00:08:29.980 The first three commandments have no other gods.
00:08:33.280 Don't take his name in vain.
00:08:34.640 And remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
00:08:37.860 The only time holiness occurs is at the end of the first table, the third commandment.
00:08:42.540 And what that does, what it did for me, at least, was to throw me back to the beginning, where God creates all things in six days, but he does something with the seventh day that is unique.
00:08:54.900 He sanctifies.
00:08:56.000 He consecrates.
00:08:56.880 Kadosh.
00:08:57.660 He makes it holy.
00:08:59.240 That's the Sabbath.
00:09:00.460 That's the sign of the covenant.
00:09:02.480 And so what you discover there is, whoa, okay, that's the first time that kadosh occurs in all of Genesis.
00:09:08.940 But then you keep reading and you discover it's the only time holiness occurs in all of Genesis because of what happens in the next chapter with our first parents.
00:09:18.420 They have sanctifying grace that God had breathed into our first father, the breath of life, so that it wasn't just air that our first father was breathing.
00:09:27.460 It was the spirit of God.
00:09:28.920 It was the Holy Spirit, sanctifying grace, divine life, if you will.
00:09:32.520 When God said, the day you eat of it, you'll surely die, he wasn't talking about natural death, but spiritual death, or what Trent calls the death of the soul, original sin that he committed by giving consent to a mortal sin.
00:09:46.280 First John 5, 16, a sin is mortal because it snuffs out the life of God in the soul.
00:09:51.260 And so the catastrophic effects of that basically explain why holiness doesn't occur anywhere else in all 50 chapters of Genesis.
00:10:01.520 But the restoration begins in Exodus where there's an explosion of kadosh and all of the derivatives.
00:10:08.420 Ninety-eight times in just 40 chapters, holiness occurs.
00:10:11.980 And not only is the ground that Moses stands on holy, but the vestments of the priest, the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle itself, the holy place, the holy of holies.
00:10:22.300 I have over a dozen different things called holy.
00:10:25.540 Israel is called to be a holy nation.
00:10:28.540 But the fact is, nowhere in Exodus is Moses called a saint.
00:10:34.560 He's described as righteous.
00:10:36.300 Nowhere is Aaron called a saint, although he's consecrated.
00:10:40.400 And so the move from the holiness of God to the interiority of humans, in a certain ironic and unforeseen way, is nowhere found.
00:10:51.540 It took my interaction with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi to kind of open my eyes to what should have been obvious, because it was hiding in plain view.
00:11:01.620 And that was that nobody in the Hebrew Bible was ever referred to as a saint.
00:11:05.580 When I first heard Rabbi Berman say that, I'm like, I beg to differ.
00:11:09.700 I didn't say it, but I was thinking it.
00:11:11.580 So I scoured the Old Testament, and I discovered that really the main exception to this is that, well, okay, Noah's called righteous, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, and others too.
00:11:24.960 But nobody's called holy.
00:11:26.480 Nobody's called a saint except in Daniel 7.
00:11:29.520 In Daniel 7, when the Son of Man comes on the clouds of glory, returning to the Ancient of Days to receive this everlasting and universal kingdom, he turns around, and in the second half of Daniel 7, he gives that kingdom to, quote, the saints of the Most High.
00:11:45.800 Oh, there.
00:11:46.860 Somebody's called, well, actually not by name, and that's not in the present.
00:11:50.720 And then it occurred to me, well, that's the incarnation of the Son of God who becomes the Son of Man, and when he rises and ascends into heaven, that's what Daniel's describing as a future oracle.
00:12:02.420 But it also shows us the hinge on which all of history turns is the incarnation, and that the effect of the incarnation has been practically forgotten by people today.
00:12:12.920 That in the New Testament, not only do you have people being called saints, but even just ordinary Corinthian believers living in the most secularized and desecrated town of all.
00:12:24.840 And again, it's something that we should have noticed, but we didn't.
00:12:28.600 But there in Matthew 27, verses 50 through 52, right after Jesus is raised from the dead, the tombs surrounding Jerusalem are opened, and all of these saints, the souls of the faithful departed from the Old Testament, are reunited temporarily with their bodies, and they're witnessed as signs by all of these inhabitants, the citizens of Jerusalem, but they're only there for a while because when Jesus ascends into heaven, it is on a solo flight.
00:12:55.880 He takes captivity captive, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, citing Psalm 68, which was pointing to what would happen in the future as all of these promises are fulfilled.
00:13:07.860 But you basically end up discovering that heaven has been repopulated.
00:13:12.560 In Isaiah 6, when Isaiah hears the Sanctus, only the seraphim are singing it because only angels dwell in heaven.
00:13:20.120 But in Revelation 4, verse 8, when John the seer, in his Apocalypse, describes the liturgy of heaven, who's singing the Sanctus, well, the angels, but also the elders, the martyrs, all of these humans, the incarnation in general, the Paschal, Mr. N in particular, the ascension, the exaltation of Jesus' sacred and divinized humanity,
00:13:43.800 has brought about a revolution in the history of world religion and the fulfillment of Judaism in a way that would explode their brains.
00:13:51.380 I mean, this exceeds their highest hopes, and yet it elicits yawns or kind of bewilderment from ordinary Christians and even Catholics who really need to rediscover the holiness in order for the sacraments to have their intended effect.
00:14:08.120 Because if God alone is holy, then the only way we can become saints is not just by making ourselves bigger and better, but as the saints tell us, by making ourselves smaller and drawing closer to our Lord, like Our Lady, so that He can do for us what we can't do for ourselves.
00:14:26.220 We can't do it for Him, but we can dispose ourselves.
00:14:29.860 We can cooperate with grace.
00:14:32.160 But the sacraments make it possible for us to be saints.
00:14:35.460 But the sacraments don't make it easy, much less automatic.
00:14:39.600 We're not robots.
00:14:40.780 And so the challenge for me in writing this book is not only living out the message, but also sharing what has taken me about 50 years, but doing it in a way that is easy breezy, that is accessible to basically a high school level of readers.
00:14:56.980 And what I've discovered is that just as I have been sort of electrified by this discovery in new ways over many years, so friends and family members and also just colleagues and ordinary Catholics are reporting back to me, yeah, it's having a similar effect.
00:15:16.020 The best example I can think of is what Aquinas uses, that our human nature is sort of like hard, cold iron, like an iron bar, whereas God's holiness is like the consuming fire that practically combusts the seraphim, the highest of the nine choirs.
00:15:33.960 In fact, in Hebrew, seraphim literally means the fiery or the burning ones.
00:15:39.840 And so if you plunge the hard, cold iron of our humanity into that fire, or in this case, if the Son of God assumes our humanity, He does so for the purpose of making us partakers of the divine nature.
00:15:54.160 Not just forgiving us, not just forgiving us, not just healing us, but sanctification actually has the principal purpose of divinizing us, of making us sons and daughters of the Most High, which would be metaphysically absurd and impossible apart from the incarnation.
00:16:12.500 And so that hard, cold iron of human nature, not only Christ, but now ours, becomes glowing.
00:16:19.780 It's red hot.
00:16:20.940 And so if you are touched with that, you're going to be basically caught ablaze.
00:16:26.440 You're going to be catching fire.
00:16:27.940 And that's what the saints are for, to communicate the faith in a way that makes other people combustible.
00:16:34.420 That is, we are drawn into the consuming fire of a divine love that is eternal in the Trinity.
00:16:42.640 He loves us just the way we are as sinners, and through the medicine of His mercy,
00:16:47.160 He shows us that I love you too much to leave you the way you are.
00:16:50.880 So we don't want to reduce unconditional love down to this idea that, oh, just stay close and conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings every time you think of my love or my holiness.
00:17:02.500 That's counterfeit.
00:17:03.700 That's bogus.
00:17:05.060 We've got to really restore that sense of holiness so that when we approach Him, we have reverence.
00:17:11.340 We have awe, we wish to prostrate ourselves before Him, and at the same time that we're humbling ourselves, He will fulfill that pledge.
00:17:19.600 If you humble yourself, I will exalt you, because we can't exalt ourselves up to the only thing for which we were made, which is sanctity.
00:17:27.340 And if we recognize that the only purpose for which God has created us is to become saints, then, okay, we're going to have to reassess practically everything in our lives, everything in the world, and I think it needs to start in the Church, especially with our local parishes.
00:17:44.800 Today's day and age, we have, exactly as you described, a total lack of reverence.
00:17:50.280 Let's talk for a second only about Catholics in the Church today, by and large.
00:17:56.100 People are walking up to receive Holy Communion without a thought.
00:18:00.380 People are regarding Mass and the sacraments, the Blessed Sacrament itself, with very little regard.
00:18:08.780 The difference between Moses' care for the burning bush, for the Israelites' care of the Ark of the Covenant, it's unreal how different that is from where we are today, by and large.
00:18:25.440 Today, we are treating the Holy Eucharist like a cookie or cracker, if that.
00:18:32.420 And the reverence for the Blessed Sacrament itself, with almost disdain.
00:18:39.200 I mean, sometimes they're shoving it over to a corner of the Church or outside the main body of the Church.
00:18:45.180 We're sometimes holding concerts in a Church and having other things go on.
00:18:51.220 Sometimes they forget to repose the Blessed Sacrament somewhere else.
00:18:55.440 Where are we at?
00:18:56.320 Yeah, I mean, we are basically at the same place the Church has been for 2,000 years all over the world.
00:19:04.580 Just a quick note before we return.
00:19:08.980 If you would like to stay up to date on LifeSite's coverage of the latest life, family, and culture news,
00:19:13.700 subscribe to one of our many newsletters by going to lifesitenews.com slash subscribe.
00:19:19.000 And if you'd like to help us bring our truth-telling coverage to millions around the world,
00:19:23.640 please consider making a one-time or monthly donation at give.lifesitenews.com.
00:19:29.100 And now, back to the video.
00:19:30.520 And so, a little Church history goes a long way in calming my nerves because, you know,
00:19:37.700 I wouldn't say relax, but I would say do not give in to fear.
00:19:42.440 But at the same time, I think my tendency can be to become scolding, you know,
00:19:49.960 and that is to castigate and that sort of thing.
00:19:53.000 Whereas, I find that the best way to help people is to restore the sense of holiness,
00:20:00.560 that it's the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
00:20:03.160 Whether it's the Novus Ordo or the TLM, if it's a valid Mass,
00:20:06.780 it's got more than enough grace to make us saints.
00:20:10.020 And at the same time, it's the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
00:20:14.180 And so, it's a sacrifice first and foremost.
00:20:16.480 And so, the one up front is not primarily a celebrant or one who presides, but a priest.
00:20:23.880 And so, the Lord's table is what Malachi refers to as the altar.
00:20:28.080 But we want to subordinate the idea of the sacrificial communion that we receive
00:20:34.880 from the sacrificial act which the human priest is offering.
00:20:40.580 And the heavenly high priest is offering everlastingly.
00:20:44.540 And so, Christ is the high priest.
00:20:47.320 He is the lamb.
00:20:48.260 He is the altar.
00:20:49.660 He is the temple.
00:20:50.500 Destroy this temple.
00:20:51.320 And on the third day, raise it up.
00:20:53.200 And so, the fact that God alone is holy and that Jesus is called the holy one,
00:20:59.120 if we get a little bit of supernaturality and a little bit of supernatural reality therapy,
00:21:05.260 I think it'll go a long way to then sort of resolving a lot of disputes that might be treated
00:21:11.600 as primarily political.
00:21:13.120 But if we understand that it is holy, not just just, that it is the temple, not just,
00:21:21.300 you know, the state capital, and that it's a sacrifice first and foremost, and then secondarily
00:21:27.640 a meal, a sacrificial communion upon the lamb, then we're going to be able to say,
00:21:32.800 well, if that's the case, I mean, if heaven is coming to earth, if we're surrounded by angels
00:21:37.800 and saints, then what difference does that make in terms of what I wear, in what kind
00:21:43.340 of music we ought to be including in the sacramental liturgy?
00:21:48.580 In terms of furniture, you know, how fitting are banners when we have the statues and the
00:21:54.440 images and the icons that represent that which is holy?
00:21:58.200 You know, I'm thinking of Leviticus 10, verse 10, where after Aaron has suffered the loss
00:22:04.240 of his two sons, Nadab and Abihu, who are apparently going into the holy place intoxicated,
00:22:10.900 God reminds Aaron that it's primarily up to the priests to teach the difference between
00:22:16.080 that which is holy and that which is common.
00:22:18.700 Because what is sacred is not opposed to the secular.
00:22:23.240 What we do for six days is secular, but our labor is ordered to liturgy, our work is ordered
00:22:29.120 to worship, and so the fruit of our labor is to be offered in sacrifice, and so the holy
00:22:35.800 is not opposed to the common, the sacred is not opposed to the secular, but only to the
00:22:40.660 sinful, like those two drunk priests, those sons of yours.
00:22:44.400 So teach the people of Israel the difference between the holy and the common, the
00:22:48.540 unclean and the clean.
00:22:51.080 And what you discover is that in the sacramental order of the old law of Moses, there's an
00:22:56.540 entire social hierarchy implied, and hierarchy comes from hierarchia, which is sacred order.
00:23:05.660 All things are ordered to God.
00:23:08.320 That's the first and the greatest of the commandments, to love the Lord your God with all of your heart,
00:23:12.380 mind, soul, and strength, and then secondly, to love our neighbor as ourselves for the love
00:23:18.260 of God and for His sake.
00:23:20.120 And so, you know, if we get that which is first right, returning to first principles, to
00:23:26.400 me, is the single greatest problem, and it's the single simplest solution to the problem,
00:23:32.880 because when we return to first principles, not just intellectually, not just personally,
00:23:37.660 but publicly, socially, not just spiritually, but also physically, not just internally, but
00:23:44.300 externally, I think the more we get things right that are first and fundamental, the more
00:23:51.220 people are just going to look around and say, you know, these songs are more appropriate,
00:23:56.340 chant, polyphony, this kind of furniture, you know, and then we'll look at the recovation
00:24:01.200 of the 70s and the 80s and say, okay, we're getting finally out of the 60s and 70s.
00:24:07.220 We're over this hippie hangover.
00:24:09.180 Let's get back to the business of being Catholics and entering into the Mass as the holy sacrifice.
00:24:16.940 One of the things that is perhaps most neglected today is a thought about the holiness of God,
00:24:24.340 particularly around his holy name. The use of Jesus Christ as a swear word, as an expletive,
00:24:32.560 is universal. Not only that, the name of Jesus, but, oh my God, said as a reaction statement or
00:24:42.540 whatever. How serious is that? Is that something that, eh, that's whatever, or is it something really
00:24:50.980 grave? You know, when you look at the Ten Commandments, the first one is have no other
00:24:54.900 gods before me. But it's not enough just to have the right God. You have to worship him in the right
00:24:59.820 way, on his terms, not your own. That's what the Second Commandment is all about. Do not take the
00:25:04.920 name of the Lord your God in vain, for he will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
00:25:09.700 Does not imply not ever taking God's name. No, it means invoking the holy name of God,
00:25:14.940 the holy name of Christ, because that is consecration. That is how you sacralize.
00:25:22.500 And when you look at the term sacramentum in the Latin, that translates the, you know,
00:25:28.420 that is the translation for covenant oath. And I deal with this a fair bit in my book, Holy is His
00:25:35.280 Name, that the way you worship the one true God in the right way is by calling upon his name. Our help
00:25:42.820 is in the name of the Lord. We don't just say our help is in God. Our help is in his name, because he's
00:25:48.420 revealed his name. That's his true and essential character. And so, I'm professor, I'm doctor, you
00:25:54.440 know, I'm mister. But in a certain sense, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. The name
00:26:01.560 of God is the first person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Father, the Holy Son, the Holy Spirit. My kids
00:26:08.500 can call upon me because they have my name. We can call upon God as Father, because we bear his name
00:26:15.700 in our baptismal status. But we dare not take his name in vain. You know, in a courtroom, if you invoke
00:26:24.680 the name of God and lie, lying is ordinarily a sin, but it becomes a crime, a felony called perjury,
00:26:31.100 because if you lie under oath, well, again, the Latin term for oath is sacramentum. I quoted my book,
00:26:37.840 I swear to God, this legal scholar from the University of Chicago Law School, Vining, who
00:26:42.500 points out that where else do you find grown adults in robes, using Latin, sitting up on
00:26:49.540 a dais, approached with titular references like, your honor, I petition the court, I pray
00:26:55.500 that your honor. Well, you know, that's because the courtroom is a kind of secular or natural
00:27:01.180 sanctuary, which implies that our sanctuaries are supernatural courtrooms, where God is the
00:27:08.420 holy judge. And we invoke his name, we throw ourselves upon the mercy of the court in the
00:27:13.920 confidior, but we continue to call upon the holy name of the Holy Trinity, because the Father has
00:27:20.180 sent the Son to pour out the Holy Spirit upon us. And this leads us to the third of the Ten Commandments,
00:27:25.740 that we remember the Sabbath day. It's not at the end of the week anymore, since the resurrection
00:27:30.380 occurred on the first day, our rest has already been achieved. And so we set apart the first day,
00:27:36.320 but we also recognize that when we remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, this is what brings
00:27:42.920 order to the rest of our weeks, the rest of our lives, that what we do in the holy sacrifice of the
00:27:48.400 mass, what we do with all of the other sacraments, is what ends up sanctifying all of the ordinary,
00:27:54.380 the common, the secular tasks. And, you know, this is what I would call sanctified Catholic common
00:28:00.880 sense. When you go back to the Middle Ages, I think you would have peasants scratching their heads,
00:28:06.340 wondering why it would need to be said if we're living with our fellow Catholics and attending the
00:28:12.380 holy sacrifice of the mass. But here we are. And so I would say a little bit of study leads to a change
00:28:20.260 of will, a change of practice, and a change of outlook. And I think restoring a supernatural outlook,
00:28:27.640 preparing for mass, looking at it from a heavenly, an eternal perspective. Again, I honestly believe
00:28:34.040 that our omnipotent, all-holy God wants to sanctify us more than we want him to. He's capable of doing it
00:28:40.740 in a way that we can't do. And so we have to rest in his presence and cry out to him in our need
00:28:46.940 and say, you alone are holy. Our help is in the name of the Lord. You made heaven and earth. You
00:28:52.520 turned sinners into saints. Get on with it. But please start with me because I'm still a long way
00:28:57.980 off. Keep holy the Sabbath day, which of course pertains to Sundays now. What does that mean? What
00:29:06.320 should that look like for a Catholic family? What is keeping Sunday holy? And can we still do some of
00:29:14.320 the work we have to do? What if my son has a job that he goes to mass, but then he has to work as
00:29:19.900 he works at a restaurant on Sundays? What do you answer to that? Well, on the one hand, we need to
00:29:25.160 avoid legalism because the church does. On the other hand, what we ought to do, if the law of the
00:29:31.820 new covenant is written upon our hearts, then we do it out of desire and love, which is not less
00:29:36.980 passion than fear. You know, we've got to get to the point where sons outserve the mere servants. You
00:29:44.500 look at Islam, and that is a religion of divine slavery by their own self-description, whereas
00:29:50.480 ours is a religion of divine sonship. Well, you know, I think that if sons serve the father out of
00:29:56.640 love, they ought to outserve the mere servants or slaves out of fear. And this is how Aquinas
00:30:02.660 distinguishes between the old covenant, which is the servile fear of slaves, and the new covenant,
00:30:08.320 which is the filial fear of beloved daughters and sons. You know, I think just that little internal
00:30:14.440 adjustment is going to go a long way. It's like the first domino to fall. And then if we allow those
00:30:20.760 other things to happen, then we can approach the Lord's day in a manner that is more thoughtful and
00:30:27.220 intentional, deliberate. Over the course of 44 years of marriage, we started off as newlyweds,
00:30:33.940 and I would ask her not to cook on Sabbath, you know, on the Lord's day. I didn't call it the
00:30:38.080 Sabbath, but I said, you know, you need a break. You need a rest. You're going down to Cambridge Mass
00:30:43.500 working like eight, nine, 10-hour days. And so she deeply appreciated that. And then I invited my
00:30:50.040 classmates in seminary over to our apartment, and they would bring the bread, the meat, the cheese,
00:30:55.240 the lettuce, and the drinks, and that kind of thing. And so we had 10 or 15 guys over for three
00:31:00.220 or four hours of amazing conversation that was anything but legalistic. And even now, I avoid
00:31:07.080 employing people because when you look at the commandment in Exodus 20, it's neither you nor
00:31:12.240 your sons or daughters, manservants, maidservants, oxen, asses, or even the sojourners in your gates.
00:31:18.260 And so you don't employ people if you can avoid that, and that includes your spouse. At the same time,
00:31:24.700 now, we prepare the banquet for our extended family every Sunday because we have five out of
00:31:30.280 our 21 grandkids living close. And so we really have, you know, two or three hours of a really
00:31:37.000 blessed communion after our Mass. And so I think if we enter into this with a spirit of gratitude
00:31:47.340 gratitude and a spirit of loving obedience, again, we're going to outdo the kind of servile
00:31:54.040 obedience that is simply out of fear. And so this is why the puritanical approach to the Sabbath,
00:32:00.120 the blue laws, they were wrong, but for the right reasons. Whereas I think the freedom that we have
00:32:05.240 as Catholics is often right, but for the wrong reasons, you know. I just think it's a little bit,
00:32:11.300 as my mom used to say, bass-ackwards. And we have to get things right, the first things first,
00:32:17.400 and then the second and third things will follow.
00:32:20.140 We have a concept in your book, and you mentioned it earlier, it's quite controversial because it
00:32:25.560 sounds a lot like what New Agers might say. You talk about divinization. A lot of people in the New
00:32:34.300 Age and actually a lot of people in the world today think, yep, when I die, I'm going to become
00:32:40.380 a spark with God in the divine and join the divine consciousness somehow. What do you mean by
00:32:46.880 divinization?
00:32:48.000 Divinization is ever-ancient, ever-new in this sense, that for quite a while, it was practically
00:32:55.100 forgotten even by Catholic theologians, though it is lots of places in Aquinas, and especially in
00:33:01.820 Augustine, we tend to think, well, you know, it's either New Age or Mormon, when in fact the Mormon
00:33:07.920 don't even have an eternal or infinite deity to divinize, to deify. And when we think of New Age,
00:33:13.760 it really is a kind of implicit pantheism where we're already part of God anyway, if there is a
00:33:19.680 transcendent deity at all, apart from the natural order. So pantheism, naturalism are all counterfeit,
00:33:25.580 they're all bogus forms. And yet, at the same time, Christians in general, Catholics in particular,
00:33:31.780 tend to think of salvation as primarily what we're saved from. And there's a lot of good news in what
00:33:37.360 we're saved from. We're saved from hellfire, eternal judgment. We're saved from sin. We're
00:33:42.900 saved from guilt. You know, we're saved from all kinds of suffering and all of that. And yet,
00:33:48.020 what we're saved for is much higher than what we're saved from. It's one thing to be a guilty
00:33:53.960 criminal who is pardoned and acquitted so he can go off and be free. It's another thing to be adopted
00:33:59.620 as a son or daughter of the Most High God. That's what divinization means. He assumed our nature by
00:34:06.740 taking on humanity for the purpose of making us partakers of the divine nature. So as a little
00:34:12.380 kid, you know, I got along sometimes better with our pet dog, Sparky, than my older brother, Fritz.
00:34:17.280 But I couldn't have adopted my dog because he had canine nature, not human nature. Well, you know,
00:34:23.720 God can't adopt us and we can't adopt God. But in the incarnation, God does the unthinkable.
00:34:30.060 What would be metaphysically absurd or impossible for Plato and Aristotle is precisely what the
00:34:36.020 father pulls off by sending the son and pouring out the spirit of sonship. So that, you know,
00:34:42.180 in Romans, for example, I've written a commentary on that. Paul is talking about justification
00:34:46.580 in chapters 5 through 7. And then suddenly he shifts to sanctification in chapter 8. I think he
00:34:53.800 mentions it once in chapter 6. But justification practically drops off the table because the Holy
00:35:00.680 Spirit is mentioned 18 times in Romans 8. And what you have is this treatment of sanctification.
00:35:07.040 We are heirs with God, fellow heirs, you know, members of Christ, provided we suffer with him in
00:35:12.640 order that we may be glorified with him. And so Christ doesn't suffer and die to exempt us
00:35:18.660 from suffering and death. He suffers and dies to endow our suffering and our dying with a redemptive
00:35:25.520 power in a divinizing effect that is the Mysterium Fidei. This is what the incarnation is for. It's what
00:35:33.880 the Paschal Mystery does. And when we hear Mysterium Fidei in the traditional Latin Mass, it's there in the
00:35:40.700 words of consecration, the dual consecration of the chalice, because by taking our blood, pouring it out,
00:35:48.040 he doesn't suffer the loss of life. He is making us the gift of life and giving us a partaking of his own
00:35:55.420 divinized humanity so that ours can become like his. And it's like suddenly the good news is almost too good
00:36:03.000 to be true, except that it's basically what we get up and profess every Sunday in the Creed. Going back to the
00:36:10.640 Apostles' Creed, the threefold structure of the Creed is Trinitarian, but the third part is I believe in the
00:36:16.580 Holy Spirit. Therefore, I can believe in a holy Catholic apostolic church that exceeds what ancient
00:36:22.400 Israel was promised. And at the same time, the communion of what? Of citizens? No, saints. The
00:36:28.800 forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body. But this life everlasting is not just immortality.
00:36:34.600 It is really entering into that eternal life that is proper only to God. And so, you know, I can't help
00:36:41.580 but wonder if sometimes I get up and profess the Creed on a Sunday. And to my guardian angel,
00:36:46.960 I probably sound more like a parent saying, Paul, you want a cracker? I mean, it's not like we say it
00:36:51.960 too often we ought to stop, but we ought to contemplate what we say and realize, man, it's amazing what we
00:36:59.300 profess to be true and yet how much we take it for granted. Holy is his name. Where can we get it,
00:37:04.800 Scott? Well, I've published the last dozen or more of my books with Emmaus Road, a publishing house
00:37:10.440 that I founded with Tim Gray and Curtis Martin, Ted Street back in the 90s. But it's now the
00:37:16.340 publishing arm of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. And the St. Paul Center is really where
00:37:22.420 I'm pouring myself out. Been around for 21 years. So go to stpaulcenter.com, but that's
00:37:27.960 stpaulcenter.com. And you can get Holy is his name and a lot of my other books as well. And a lot of
00:37:34.880 other people's books besides mine that are as good or much better. It's sort of like when
00:37:40.300 somebody asks you if you have a favorite child, and of course you shouldn't, you know, but I have
00:37:45.340 to admit that, yeah, okay, I do have a favorite child. It's the one I happen to be with. I have
00:37:50.700 a favorite grandchild. It's the one I'm holding right now. You know, and so my favorite book out
00:37:55.360 of the 50 plus books that I've done is definitely Holy is his name. Because I mean, this is sort of
00:38:00.800 the child that I just, you know, I'm sharing with so many people. And the effect of writing it
00:38:07.140 is so similar to the effect of ordinary Catholics who are reading it. And I do believe
00:38:12.780 that, you know, transcending the liturgical political battles is an important part of
00:38:18.780 really becoming saints. But not because it's irrelevant, but because, you know, ultimately
00:38:24.100 the battle is the Lord's. And so the weapons are not primarily political or debate, but they
00:38:29.600 have to do with the sacraments. And so the more we get the holy right, the more we get the
00:38:34.980 sacraments, right? I think we can almost let the chips fall where they may because divine
00:38:39.040 providence will set an emotion, a sanctification that might even exceed our highest hopes. Lord,
00:38:45.400 hear our prayer.
00:38:46.600 I want to thank you on behalf of our many viewers and readers and probably many, many out there
00:38:51.840 who appreciate one thing that you do that I think is rather unique. You offer the wealth
00:38:59.520 of your study and learning in ways that are comprehensible to the common man. And I think
00:39:06.320 it's such a gift of charity.
00:39:07.860 That was my passion going back to high school, because that's what R.C. Sproul did. He obviously
00:39:13.520 did research, but he always turned it around and made it accessible to ordinary Christians.
00:39:18.460 That's been my passion ever since. So I'm happy to hear that. It's also great to be with you,
00:39:22.900 John Henry. And thank God for all the good you do and keep up the great work.
00:39:27.440 Thank you so very much. God bless you, Scott.
00:39:29.960 God bless you too, dear brother.
00:39:31.620 And God bless all of you. And we'll see you next time.
00:39:57.440 and culture news. Thanks for watching and may God bless you.