Become Who You Are
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Become Who You Are
#610 How To Compare Religions; Unmasking the Uniqueness of Christianity
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What makes Christianity fundamentally different from every other religion in human history? Matthew McKenna, Ph.D candidate in theology at Ave Maria University, joins Jack for a fascinating journey through G.K. Chesterton's masterpiece "The Everlasting Man" to answer this crucial question.
Read Matthews Article "How to Compare Religions"
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I'm excited to be with Matthew McKenna. Matthew wrote an article how to Compare Religions with the Catholic Exchange. Those of you who follow the show I know that I like to write for the Catholic Exchange myself, so I like to stay up with those authors, especially these young guys that are reaching young hearts. Before I bring Matthew on, I want to just touch on a sponsor of ours for today's show. I want to introduce AIM Utility Advisors, owned and operated by the Lally family, who are local Catholic friends, supporters of our work at the John Paul II Renewal Center. I've known him for many, many years, so I ask you this if you have a business that is prepared for the increased energy prices starting in June 2025,?
Speaker 1:Aim Utility Advisors is family owned. They're an energy brokerage and consultancy company that's been helping small and medium businesses reduce energy costs for over 30 years. Aim will put together a straightforward savings plan tailored to your business needs. When I was in business for myself, I always used an energy brokerage company. Aim operates without a quota, so you can request a no-pressure cost analysis through their website. It's free. Go to aimenergygroupcom. That's aimenergygroupcom. See the show notes for my friend TJ Lawley's direct phone number. I'll have a link in there for their website and be sure to tell them that Jack said hello. Just spoke to him not too long ago, matthew. It's so good to be with you, brother. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2:It's good to be not too long ago, matthew. It's so good to be with you, brother, thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:It's good to be here too. Yeah, so we were just talking before we came on. Why don't you tell everybody where you're at right now and what you're studying?
Speaker 2:So I'm a PhD student in theology at Ave Maria University in Florida. I'm about to defend my dissertation in the next couple of months, and that is explaining why only men can be priests, based on, well, what masculinity is. So, basically, I'm writing about the priesthood and masculinity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just I got you know. Everybody knows that we launched Claymore for young people. I was just telling Matthew about it before we came on, so I have to have him back to talk about what he calls the masculine genius and the priesthood. A very, very exciting time. And you know, matthew, the same thing with today's topic, though. When we're speaking to young people, old people, everybody. It's a confusing time. And you wrote this article how to Compare Religions. It's really showing that Christianity is different. And you did so by visiting one of my favorite friends of all time, who is GK Chesterton. For people that aren't familiar with GK Chesterton, he's kind of a one-of-a-kind guy too. I mean an incredible way that he expresses himself, the thoughts that he has. He only had a high school education at GK Chesterton, but a mind was just all over the place Amazing. So, matthew, how did you end up writing the article? And, of course, tell us a little bit more about your background, because they'll know why you're also enamored with GK Chesterton.
Speaker 2:My love for Chesterton began quite unexpectedly. I was told by my boss, the head of my theology department that I work for and teach in. You're going to teach a class on Chesterton in the spring, and I was like well, I read Orthodoxy once in my life I read.
Speaker 2:Everlasting man once in my life. Do I remember what they're about? Not really. Let me go back and read. And so I just prepared to teach a class. I dived in and started reading. I think I read Orthodoxy about a dozen times in the three months leading up to the spring semester so I could teach it well and a ton of other books about him and I just absolutely fell in love. That fundamentally changed my outlook on life and fundamentally changed my theology, my philosophy. Just totally fell in love with Chesterton, his way of thinking.
Speaker 2:I think it's extremely practical, extremely useful, extremely timely. He was writing 100 years ago, an absolute prophet. He foresaw the Nazis coming to power and almost everything they were going to do, hitler's hatred for the Jews. He foresaw it all. And then, of course, he died before World War II ever started, in like 36 or 37. He died something like that, but he foresaw everything.
Speaker 2:He was a great prophet, a total master of the Catholic tradition. Like you said, he only had a high school diploma but he read everything. He was just a vicious reader read everything. It seems to have kind of had a deep understanding of everything he read too, if you read some of his books in the time he was writing. The mode wasn't to constantly mention your sources and mention oh, by the way, I'm responding to this person. Oh, by the way, I learned from this person. Mode wasn't to give citations, but you can see he's involved, like referencing everybody ever Aristotle, plato, thomas Descartes, kant, nietzsche. He mentions Nietzsche by name sometimes, but he's thinking and engaging with everybody. So when you read something like orthodoxy, you're engaging with the entire intellectual tradition of the West in 200 pages.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a great way to sum that up. I never really thought of it that way, but you're exactly right. That is huh how did he get all that Matthew into that brain right Just by reading. High school education. But yeah, he must have been a ferocious reader, huh, yeah, so I love Chesterton got into ferocious reader, huh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I love Chesterton, got into Chesterton tremendously and ever since then I've taught the class multiple times now and Chesterton comes up in everything I do. My students are always hearing me talk about Chesterton and everything I write Chesterton shows up somewhere, probably. And so what? He has the kind of point of the bigger book, his main, his magnum opus, his great work, everlasting man, which is also like the only book he really thoroughly edited Orthodoxy. He didn't really edit, he just wrote it and sent it off and published it. But the one book he really worked on for a longer period of time and thought through a really, really deep layer and edited is Everlasting man.
Speaker 2:That's like his main work, so to speak, and the point of Everlasting man is to show, well, christianity is one true faith, the Catholicism was one true faith, and so in the process of that, he gives a method for how we can compare religions, compare belief systems, and I think that's just incredibly useful for us today, when there are so many ideologies and things being put out to us as live options, options, and there's so much discussion of what's the truth, faith, where, where's the truth be found, isn't an orthodoxy, isn't catholicism, proselytism, islam. I had a friend who was grew up a prostitute, went to iraq as a soldier, converted to muslim, to islam, then came back to america as an islam muslim, then eventually became orthodox like a greek orthodox christian and then eventually went back to pros as a Muslim, then eventually became Orthodox like a Greek Orthodox Christian and then eventually went back to Protestantism. So just all over the place people are just so many options out there.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised you could go back to and look it, we have evangelicals and Protestants listening to this show, yeah. So I'm always careful. They're good friends of mine. I gave a presentation last night with a good, a great, actually evangelical friend, but I'm surprised, after all that richness and tradition, that he would go back to being a Protestant. But I don't want to get you off tangent too far you know, because usually it goes the other way once you're immersed in that.
Speaker 1:But hey, to each his own. But you make some really interesting points here and you said his main argument comes in two steps. First, he compares mankind to all other animals and finds that mankind is radically different. So that's number one we want to explore just at least briefly here. And the second, chesterton compares Christ to all other men and he finds that Christ is radically unique among all religious founders. So you know, this is a confusing time.
Speaker 1:in the church we get some crazy ideas all the way at the Vatican, you know, all the way through. So this is a great time to be talking about it. So why don't?
Speaker 2:you go— I have no idea what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want to put you on the line, I don't even want you to comment, I don't think, until you're done with your dissertation and nobody's going to pick on you there. But how about the first one? Should we hit that at least briefly? How's mankind? If you want to sum it up for people, a couple of things we have that the animals don't have, and sometimes the reason I say this, matthew, and I want to take a couple of minutes is because a lot of the times the young people don't really think about this right.
Speaker 1:They've been told hey, we're all just a bunch of biology and you know blah, blah, blah, and it doesn't take you much to sit in a forest preserve and find out that, hey, we're a little different than the rest of the creatures, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so the Chesterton divides the work of the Everlasting man into two parts, part one and part two. And part one is about the uniqueness of man among the animals and part two about the uniqueness of Christ among men. Part one is bigger.
Speaker 1:Part one is bigger, it is oh you know what I forgot? About that.
Speaker 2:I forgot about that, and there's eight chapters in part one and six in part two. Uh, because a big air of our time is first of all like, yeah, materialism are all. Are we just animals? Are we just fancy monkeys? A lot of people, that seems to be like the implicit, assumed position of most people we're just a bunch of animals, matters all there is. There's no such thing as a spiritual soul. God, you know, we all just made that up.
Speaker 2:So chesterton begins like tackling that on. It's like no. And so the mode in which he engages this question is he says let's assume man is just an animal. Well, for sake of assumption, for argument, let's just assume man is just an animal like all the others. Well, then you start looking around and comparing us actually to other animals. You realize there's not much to compare. Instead you can almost only contrast.
Speaker 2:Like we have this thing called like speech and animals really don't do it like there's all. Every year you see some article in some science journal oh, the language of dolphins, it's just they make a couple sounds and like not, it's just not very impressive at all. Like animals just don't have speech and language like we do. One proof of that chesterton doesn't say say if we can like, add to it is that we have to learn language. Humans learn language if. If you don't learn language, if you don't learn to speak by the age of like eight or nine or 10, you actually never learned to speak, so like if you're like Tarzan, born in a jungle, raised by animals, you don't learn how to speak.
Speaker 2:It's actually impossible for you to then learn how to speak If you don't learn yeah, if you don't learn, by the time you're like eight like eight, nine or ten, you never learn.
Speaker 1:And like the examples, we're in trouble with these government schools.
Speaker 2:Matthew, yeah thankfully, like reading and writing aren't the same, but, uh, speech is that way and the the examples we have are horrible situations where a child has been like abused and locked up in the basement their whole life. Uh, so if those kids aren't rescued from their parents and brought to ordinary society by the time they're eight, nine or ten, they just never learn to speak. But animal, and also like our languages, are different. We have hundreds of different languages in the world. Right and like, as history has progressed, our language has progressed. Like shakespeare's english is different from our english, which is different from early english. So even the same language like changes actually into different languages.
Speaker 2:Really, animals aren't like that. Even among like one species of animals, the basic sounds they make are all the same. So you can take a monkey, raise it in isolation with other monkeys, and it's the language, so to speak, that he speaks is exactly the same as the monkeys. The sound, the sounds, the sounds for fear, for pleasure, for pain, are exactly the same as the air monkeys. So what this proves is animals sounds is pure instance, but for us it's not instinct, we have to learn it and there's different languages, so it's more than instant. So that's like one thing you look at, but also just like obviously you reason capacity to reason. Animals don't have this every like. You might see a monkey use a stick as a tool. I'm not impressed Like you might occasionally see, like one in the middle of one in a thousand monkeys.
Speaker 1:You're not easily impressed, are you, Matthew?
Speaker 2:That's just not reason.
Speaker 1:You know, when you think about reason. I think this is what we see these young guys, these young Gen Z guys, because reason is always seeking the truth. What is the truth of things? Yeah, and this is. Don't you think, matthew, that this is dawning on these young guys? Something's wrong and somebody's lying to me. You know something's wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we want the truth. This is uniquely human. Yeah, because we want the truth not just for usefulness sake, not just so I can use it to make better tools, but just to know the truth. Yes, the truth. We desire truth for its own sake, not just for application. So that's a huge difference between the monkey. That's a great point.
Speaker 1:I remember distinctly as a young man and that was some years ago, but I remember distinctly I went out on my own, I left home and I was seeking the truth. I remember perfectly well and it is exactly what you said, matthew, not so I can pontificate on it, but so that I would know how best to live. Right? What is the truth of things? Yeah, so powerful. And then let's hit on one last thing here at least, which is this thing called free will.
Speaker 2:Huh, yeah, we just are free. Free will, huh, yeah, we just are free, no matter how many arguments some materialist scientist puts up against free will to say no, no. The atoms in your brain, the chemicals, we all find them extremely unsatisfying. Because our own experience of freedom I experience the capacity to choose, to choose good and to choose bad. I experience, late that, regrets of my choices and judgments and condemnation of myself for past failures I have. I experienced free will. Animals don't seem to have such a thing like that and part of my free will then uh, that chester points to is the choice to worship religion, the, the judgment that I should worship something.
Speaker 2:The idea of religion is radically unpractical, actually, like it doesn't really help us in this life. Chiefly, the point of religion is not to live a good life. Now, the point of religion is to honor the deity, to honor the supernatural. You kill your cow to honor God. That doesn't necessarily help you. Some forms of bad religion, like the classic air of natural religion, is always going to be I kill cow and this convinces God to bring the rain, and even, like Plato and Aristotle are likeato and aerosol. Like this is stupid. We shouldn't be trying to control god with our cows, with our sacrifices and our prayers. God is god. We are not. We serve him. We don't control him, that's, that's a common error in all religion yeah, and I don't know if a religious instinct of man is radically unique among the animals we're the only ones ones.
Speaker 2:All men, chesterton points out, feel this religious instinct. We want to worship, we want to bow down and kneel before God. Animals don't have anything resembling that at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think we should just dwell on that for a second before we go too fast with that that there is something that's touching us, to move us right, to transcend, of course, what we would call sin and death. Right, we want to transcend that somehow. We know something's not quite right, something's reaching our heart. This is a big problem, I think, obviously with the technology today. Right, because it spends all the time with this noise and distracting us. The natural man, let's call it, you know, without all the distractions has a natural inclination, when he's sitting in silence, to say there's got to be something more. You feel this movement, right? I mean the ancients you mentioned. They would call this often eros, which is, we think of, just erotic or sensual, and it has some components to that. But it's really what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, some great thing beyond me, like the idea of wonder at the universe that, like the beach or a great mountain view, gives to a man. It seems like birds should have awesome views all the time whenever they fly, but they never just stop and look at the sunset. But they, the bird, definitely has a better view of the sunset than we do, because it's like flying up there in the sky watching the sunset, but it doesn't seem to stop and then also paint pictures of the sunset. But all humans ever the. What chesterton does here is points.
Speaker 2:What's the early? What are the earliest records of the oldest humans we have as it? It's paintings, it's art on a wall in the cave, art somewhere. These are the oldest records of human civilization we have. The oldest cave art, I think is something like 50,000 years old. And so he points out art is the signature of man that nobody else, no other animal, does. Birds build nests, beavers build dams, but they all make them exactly the same style, with no variation. Different species of bird make different types of nests, but within the species they're all the same, and this again proves it's instinct, not choice, and so not art.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, it's amazing. I remember Chesterton saying and you know, don't quote me exactly, but he said every time that you discover a prehistoric man, he's already civilized. Yeah, he's already doing art and drawing pictures of things, clay, pottery, you know all those things that we're finding already, right.
Speaker 1:So we know, we know mankind is different than the animals and you know that we're unique and it's it's unique right that somehow we're created different and it's not changing. You know, we, I, when I was a kid, matthew, it was that missing link. Right, it was evolution. It was a missing link and the more we find out about it, the more that link is getting bigger and bigger and and and bigger, right yeah it's been refuted really at this point, so let's in every way.
Speaker 2:We're just so different. We're the only ones that are naked. We're so weak. We're actually, as animals. We're quite bad animals, right the only ones that are naked. We're so weak. We're actually as animals. We're quite bad animals, right. The only thing, the reason we can survive, is because of our reason, which is, again, unique and different from all the others.
Speaker 1:Really, without your reason, without being able to make weapons, we're pretty yeah, pretty defenseless against almost all the big predators.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, even taking down a deer would be killing a simple deer, white-tailed deer it. Yeah, yeah, even taking down a deer would be killing a simple deer, white-tailed deer.
Speaker 1:It would be hard without a weapon. Yeah, yeah, it would. Well, we put that out there and I think it's important for young people all of us again just to sit out, go out and sit in the forest, just your neighborhood forest, because you don't have to go on vacation someplace and just sit in silence and you'll experience, I think, everything that we're talking about here. It's so very real. And then, once we do that, he starts to compare. Now, okay, we have this movement right of the heart, we're looking for something more. And then, matthew, he gets into your second part of this thing and Chesterton's second part, when he compares Christ to all other men. Let's get into that, because it's really fascinating. And the way that you caught up on breaking that down too, with him into those four categories, it was really beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the second part of the everlasting man is, of course, well, christianity. It's going to be Christianity, and so therefore we have to look at Christ. So, chesham, before he directly looks at Christ, he gives us a fourfold distinction or classification of different types of religions. So, instead of naming every religion and all their doctrines or whatever things he said, there's four types, there's four species of religion or genuses of religion, so to speak. First we have monotheism. This classification, this division, he says, is a psychological division, which means it's a division how this type of religion affects the person, what it reveals about their outlook on life, what it reveals what type of person, what their temperament is. It's not exactly the four temperaments, but that type of thing. So first we have monotheism, where God, the idea is God is holy, as in other, god is transcendent, he's really far out there, he's really really different from us, god's not like us, he's really far away, he's really really powerful and really, really awesome.
Speaker 2:Now, in the state of original sin, in a fallen world, it's hard to know much about the one true God, because we're fallen, because we have darkness of intellect and weakness of will, and so it's hard for us to know anything about God, except that he exists. And so what do we do? Well, the pious thing to do, instead of saying wrong things about the one holy, true God who is so far beyond us, is we don't really say anything at all. And so Justin points out that monotheism was probably the earliest belief, because, well, the earliest humans actually, like adam and eve, were like new god and their kids were told about god. Uh, so monotheism was like the first belief, he points out. In a fallen world, the pious thing to do is kind of to forget god, because if you try and say anything about him you're going to say something wrong. And so monotheism kind of deteriorates. In a fallen world, like where original sin abounds, monotheism kind of deteriorates into polytheism. He calls this just basically paganism.
Speaker 2:Paganism, he says, is the second type of religion, and in paganism we know we don't know about God, we're aware of our ignorance about God, but we know there must be a creator of all this thing. Everything we see around us, there's creators. We observe providence. We know there's a natural law Right is right and wrong is wrong. Certain things are right, certain things are wrong.
Speaker 2:If you read the agents carefully, you always find some kind of reference to the moral order from the heavens, the moral order from gods like cicero is especially big on. This is very, very clear about this. We're also seeing some of the greek plays, and plato sometimes too. And so but we know, we don't know anything, we, we're aware of our ignorance. So what do we do? Well, in order to satisfy our religious instincts, we kind of make stuff up, we tell stories. We have myths. We tell stories about what God might be like. So Chesterton says paganism is mythic and it's not a description of what is, but a description of what could be or what might be. We almost fantasize about what could be, how great God could be, and we tell stories about that. And over time the stories kind of deteriorate themselves and get less noble and less true.
Speaker 1:But you know, it's really interesting, though, again, just, you know, there has to be a moral code, right? I mean, somehow we realize that it can't just be chaos. But you know, you look around the universe and you say, wow, there's an order to the world, right, yeah, there's an order to this. And now I have to live with an order too in my own heart and in a culture. You have to live with it. And this, matthew, I just want to stop here for a second because, again, when we're speaking to young people, we live in this age of moral relativism, right, I mean, 90% of the young people surveyed today, whether they really understand what they're saying or not, but 90% would say they're moral relativists. But you can't live like that.
Speaker 2:They don't really analyze this? They don't really, they're not really.
Speaker 2:They say they're moral relativists, but that seems to be a defense against moral norms which they find oppressive, so like when somebody says, hey, you shouldn't sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend, which they're told are oppressive I don't know if they actually understand it or not yeah, actually that's bad, that's wrong, you shouldn't do that they say well, I'm a moral relativist, that's your opinion, that's not mine. But of course that young man knows that if somebody else touched his girlfriend he'd be angry and he would say what they did was wrong. Somebody else forced themself upon his girl. They'd say that was wrong, you should pay because that was wrong, no matter what you think about it. So we actually all, everybody believes in some moral, like absolute moral norm. So like, yeah, moral relativism isn't really possible. And this is CS Lewis's point in Abolition of man. You can't actually live as a moral relativist.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's true. So in the pagan mythologies, you know they're look, they're all over the board, right? But a lot of them taught these, you know, know these values of life and virtues and heroism and courage and and all these things, these manly things that you were talking about. You know what does it mean to be a man? You know these things. You know you, we might have made them up, but a lot of them were good stories, weren't they?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, they were not like terrible stories. We're like we're imagining good stories at first, at least at first like good stories, iliad theodosicy, like stories of heroism. Well, there's some good thing here.
Speaker 1:This goodness must come from god in some way yeah, but of course there's some problems, and I think you you mentioned it here right, the mystic religions are not complete, neither do they attempt to satisfy the whole person.
Speaker 1:This is really important when I was when I was studying, even things like you know, even outside of, say, pagan, you know like, like buddhism, hinduism, you know, that's what I found at the end. Nothing against that I. I thought there were some great qualities there, but at the end they just left me like man, it's just like not enough. Not, there's got to be, another step, you know. So, so, so that that degree of not this completeness right, there's just I, man, there's gotta be something more right. So we go on, don't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do.
Speaker 1:And then you mentioned witchcraft and and I love the way it starts out in your article just a sentence witchcraft is essentially a bid for power. It's true, isn't it, when you?
Speaker 2:really think about that, yeah, so yeah, this is chesterton's third like type of religion. You have a witchcraft religion which recognizes there are divine realities out there, there are supernatural powers, forces, beings out there. They're powerful, like by definition supernatural. They have more power than us if and the point is, if you make a deal with the devil, the devil keeps his promises, kind of like, you can sell your soul and you will get rich from it. If you sack, if you make a deal, the devil will sacrifice babies to you if you give us victory in battle, devil's very happy to make you victory victorious in battle.
Speaker 2:if you do all sorts of horrible things to it like, the end result of this course is he takes your soul. You do horrible things. He takes your soul, but he's very happy to make you rich and powerful and famous in this life and of course he can like. Christianity, especially new Testament, is very clear the earth belongs to Satan. When Satan offers everything, christ says like I will give you these things, christ says, and they're not yours to give, he's well. No, you should only worship God. So I'm only going to worship God. But he doesn't deny that Satan does have the power over the earth. He does.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting. It reminds me, of course, of that famous, you know, ephesians 6 from St Paul. Right, you know you're not dealing with just flesh and blood, you're dealing with the powers and the principalities. You know, matthew, I'm going to just dwell on this again because you're saying so many good things and I don't want people to go over this quick. These powers are real in this world too, you know, so we can talk about. You know there are real witches out there and they're actually growing. There actually are a lot, you know, just like Genesis 3,. You know you can be like God and you can decide what's good, what's evil. We want that power, don't we? You see that with the world elites, you know the world elites, look, I'm not going to put you on the spot here, matthew, but I watch them speak sometimes and I'm thinking, man, they have been possessed. You know whether I'm not talking about a total possession or not, but something's up with that. I mean you talk about, you know, selling your soul to the devil. You know this stuff can really happen.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's real. Chester makes a great point about witchcraft. He said it's a religion for practical people where you kind of abandon the worship of the supernatural and use the supernatural for benefits here and now. So it's a practical religion, oriented toward practical results. But of course you do that by trying to control the supernatural powers, by making a deal with them. He says this requires sophistication or civilization, intelligence. He kind of said so, justin kind of flips.
Speaker 2:We have this idea from I don't know where, but some kind of false idea from modern universities, but that witchcraft is a thing of savages. The savages were, or the uneducated, the dumb idiots of the past. The unsophisticated, uneducated savages, uncivilized people did witchcraft and human sacrifice and cannibalism. And Cheston flips that and says no, no, no, in order to make a deal with the devil you have to kind of be smart, you have to have a level of intelligence. So witchcraft type religion, trying to make deals with the devil, you need education. In some sense you need to be like a rather advanced civilization.
Speaker 2:This isn't the earliest civilizations, like the man in the state of nature, as we're so might put it. But actually this is only possible for some kind of high level civilization, he points out historically well like the mayans, tons of human sacrifice. That's witchcraft. The babylonians similar things. Carthage he has a whole chapter on carthage and the the war, the punic wars of carthage and rome as the witchcraft religions versus the pagan religions. That didn't practice witchcraft. Rome did not practice human sacrifice and such things. They told their stories and offered sacrifices, but not human sacrifices. But Carthage did a ton of human sacrifice actually and we always forget that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, unbelievable, right. And so now, and I could stay there for another half an hour, easy, but let's. Unfortunately, time's going to tick and I want you to talk about philosophies and other kind of religion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Cheston's fourth type of religion is the philosophical religion, which he says isn't really a religion at all. It's just you seek wisdom for a good life. So he names things like Confucianism, buddhism. That's like not really religion. It's not really concerned with worshiping or even interacting with the supernatural. You're just trying to have a good life here and now. You recognize some basic moral values, you try to do what's right, have a good life, have happiness here and now, but that's all it is. It's philosophy, not religion. And he says usually in the ancient world these four different types of religions got separated. They would not be united to each other, they were separate. They were never unified, they were always separate. Things Like Aristotle, who probably had the best idea of God, naturally knowable by reason, so you might say one of the best philosophers, still practiced the pagan mythic cults and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So they were they were they were separated, even in his mind, even in his life yeah, you know, you're trying to say what's a practical way to live right and you know, philosophy is usually. It's really an awe and wonder.
Speaker 1:Also right I'm, and I'm seeking the truth, but then it's not enough. And you know, you had that divine within you. And just to make this point, because you study right now, you're studying St Thomas Aquinas too For people that don't know, I don't realize, or I don't know how many people actually realize, the beauty of our Catholic faith. And this is kind of segue into what we're going to be talking about next with Christianity is, you know, is also eminently practical. You're right here, but but?
Speaker 1:but the Thomists right, they built on Aristotle, you know so they took those ancient Greeks, Plato first, and then, and then St Thomas comes and says you know, let's, let's, let's try to fit Aristotle in here, Right, For for some obvious reasons we won't have time to get into. But then the divine is built, Christianity is built there, and this is a stable foundation, right? Yeah, it makes this awe and wonder that we search for this practical idea of philosophy and the divine all together, and it all comes together in this person, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So Chetan's point then, about how Christianity is and Christ is only in Christianity. In Christ do we see the unity of all four of these elements. Christianity unites what's never before even been attempted, even been tried to unite it. So, of course, Christianity is.
Speaker 2:Christianity is, of course, monotheism, one God, but it's also kind of mythic, like we care about the stories. But Christianity, the story becomes real. God actually comes to earth. The Greeks told stories about God coming and walking among them as like a cow to seduce a girl or whatever, like weird things. But Christ actually came and walked among us, like the myth became real, so to speak. But also, it's not witchcraft, but it is eminently practical.
Speaker 2:If you think about the biggest issues, what are the biggest issues we actually faced? Well, sin, our own evil, evil in the world, moral evil in the world, and death. And that's what Christianity came to solve. Christ comes to conquer death and give us grace to enable us to live a good, moral life. So Christianity isn't super practical. If you want to get rich, powerful and famous in this life, it is the most practical thing. If you want salvation and eternal life, if you want perfect, utter bliss and happiness and fulfillment with God, it's the only thing that'll get you that, and anybody that actually tries to conquer sin in their own life realizes that you can't do it on your own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and talk about a practical thing, matthew, and this is important too. Pope Benedict XVI said our faith is never going to be an ethical decision or some lofty philosophical idea.
Speaker 1:It's always going to be an encounter with an event, an encounter with a person, and that encounter will give you a new horizon and a decisive direction for your life, and so this is important. You think about all these ancients. They sensed something, even in those stories that they told. Right, it's almost like it was in us. Matthew, we're fallen again, so we don't grasp it, but even those ancients right in telling these myths about this God coming into Earth. It's almost like man. We need this to happen, and then it happens, and it changes everything, doesn't it? But my point being, you can encounter this person, and so that's the power of the story here, that's the power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you can encounter him and then your life can be changed. Like these things can be united for you. Your desire, he says, like all these things are united in the person monotheism, like the desire for the, the knowledge of the one true god, the one, one source of everything is there. But also like all your, your imaginations, uh, the, what you wish could be true in the myths. When we talk about the myths, what, everything, all your imaginations, what you wish could be true in the myths, what we talk about in the myths, all your dreams can be met and also you can encounter God. You can be part of the myth. It's no longer just a story that other people do. It's not just talking about a kid.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a beautiful way to put it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we get wrapped into the myth. It's not. God doesn't become just. He's not just the God of Abraham. Like part of this is the Old Testament idea that God is the God of Abraham, isaac and Jacob. He is the God of us. Our names are now important. How we name God is he's God of Abraham, isaac and Jacob. But then in baptism God becomes the God of Jack and the God of Matthew. He becomes like our God and we get united into that story. And the story, like Chesterton, ends the everlasting man by talking about the church. But now the church is us. We are members of the church.
Speaker 1:We're caught up in the mythic story, in the real myth. You know I just got goosebumps when you said that, and usually to me that's like a little Holy Spirit moment when I feel this that means I got to stop there just for a second again, you know. I mean Again, say that again. Just you know how we get caught up and we become part of this. We know we want to be part of this bigger story.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It took something else called revelation right to actually unpack this, but it took revelation of the person who actually came in, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because Christ, like revelation, started the story, like Christ came into the story. Christ came into history Originally like God, not just Christ. With Abraham, right, he chose a people. He chose a person and a nation and made a people out of them. And then their history becomes our history, the salvation history, the history of Israel. We're incorporated into it, we're grafted on branches, grafted onto the vine that is Israel. We are participators in the story of David. That's our story now. And then, of course, christ comes.
Speaker 2:God enters the story himself. The author of the book has come into the book as a character. The creator of the video game is now a character you can play with and go on missions with, so to speak. But now God's here and we get baptized into his life, shares in his life, baptized into his death. Christ's death on the cross isn't just a story, it's something we re-present. We make presence at the mass and then we unite ourselves to that. Our, our lives are united to Christ's life. And also just the whole church, like Acts of the Apostles, part of the Bible is just the story of what the members of the church did. But then, of course, acts of the Apostles ends, but the church doesn't end there. The church keeps going. We are the church. We are continuing what the apostles did in Acts of the Apostles evangelizing the world and worshiping God. The life of Christ continues in us.
Speaker 1:You know, what you just did so wonderfully I mean really beautifully is and this is probably Chester to his point, but I think you did it even clearer in my mind you know, we had this desire for everything that you said, everything that you said. We have this desire. This is really important when those young men, again, this Gen Z men, are waking up and saying something's wrong. That's what everybody was saying, that's what we're saying here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they all. We all want to be part of something bigger.
Speaker 2:We all want to be part of a bigger story. Whoever your hero is, probably most of us can't be on tom brady's team. Only a hand, only 10 of us can play with tom brady at a time. If, like, I'm not a football athlete, but if I was, like, my greatest dream might have been I'll play with tom brady. Yeah, very few of us actually get to do that. Yeah, very few of us get to storm the beaches of normandy with patton or patton wasn't at normandy but very few of us get to serve under these heroic generals. Very few of us get to serve under these heroic generals. Very few of us get to fight alongside Achilles or America's great, most decorated warrior oh gosh, what's his name? The guy from World War II. He was America's most decorated warrior. I forget his name now. It's embarrassing, but, like, very few of us get to fight Now.
Speaker 1:My dad is still alive from World War II, so I was going to say my dad, but it wasn't him.
Speaker 2:Audie Murphy, eddie Murphy.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm ashamed. I should know those things, you know.
Speaker 2:I think it's Audie, something like that, something like that. Anyway, like America's most decorated, he's America's most decorated soldier. Very few of us get to do these epic things, but actually. William Wallace.
Speaker 1:Yeah, william Wallace, exactly, braveheart right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very few of us get to attack Mordor with Aragorn, very few of us get to defend Helm's Deep with Gimli. But we actually do get to live with Christ. We actually do get to die with Christ. We actually do get to evangelize with the church. We do get to be characters in the story of Christ. We get to be involved with this great captain and savior and king, jesus Christ christ. We get to be his servants and his brothers. We get to call his father father. He came and made his father to be our father and his mother to be our mother. So we get to be brothers with the humanity of christ and so sons in the son of the father. We get incorporated into this story. And you know, matthew, I wrote an article, boy, it was probably a couple years ago it might have been in the catholic exchange.
Speaker 1:We get incorporated into this story and you know, matthew, I wrote an article about it. It was probably a couple of years ago. It might've been in the Catholic Exchange and I quoted Chesterton in there. Because we're looking for heroes, you know, and it reminds me, you know, the power that you're describing is rising us up to the point where I am the hero, you know, in my own story, as a father, as a husband, as those people and I don't create, I don't say I'm the hero, but I see the way my kids or my grandkids now look at me.
Speaker 1:And if you rise up with Christ, you give them a model, even in our fallen nature and I'm very, very fallen, right and far from perfect, and they don't expect me to be perfect, but they still say, hey, if we need something or somebody's on our case, we know we can go to grandpa or dad or whatever. And we all become that hero. If we take on Christ, if we live as great friends, good husbands, whatever that is, whatever that role, a good priest, a great priest, a bishop you become the hero of your own story, whether people know it or not, they don't see it or not right. Sometimes you climb pretty quietly on the cross yourself, but you become a hero in the story and I think we all want that, don't we?
Speaker 1:As men, I mean who wants to look back at your life, matthew, when you're 85 years old, sitting on a rocking chair sipping lemonade, thinking about all the things you could have, should have, would have done right, yeah, yeah, it sounds horrible. It does sound horrible. Yeah, but that's where we're going if we're not careful. Yeah, right, yeah, fearful, yeah, yeah, look at, look at how many. How look? I'm from chicago 80 of those young boys in the minority homes are grown up without fathers.
Speaker 1:You think about the effect that that has on the, on the, on the absent fathers and also on those sons, right, they say most of the, the men in prison it's like a holding pen for children without fathers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, like 80% of people of men in prison didn't have a father at home, something like that.
Speaker 1:Right, so we need those. My point being and your point right we need to be the heroes in our own stories. Yeah, so I never finished my Chesterton thing. So Chesterton was asked the famous question you know what's wrong with Christianity? And he said I am. Yeah. I think in the article I said something like I think if GK was around today he would say the same thing. He would reply what's wrong with this culture, what's wrong with what we see?
Speaker 2:I am.
Speaker 1:Do we have to all step up? What you're saying is if we can get everybody, or at least a lot more young people, to stand up right and say I am.
Speaker 2:I don't know what that means, but I'm, I'm willing to walk into the story, right, yeah, to walk in and then live, live as part of it and partake in it and do it. And this includes, like, the difficulties of it, of living it, but it also includes, like believing and embracing the philosophy of the church, the, the truths of the creed of the of the church, which, of course, protects the truth of the church, the truths of the creed of the church, which, of course, protects the truth of the story. No, jesus literally came and literally died and literally rose from the dead. It wasn't just not, it's not something we made up later on. It's not something Christians, 200 years later, made up and wrote in a book. No, christ literally came and walked in Nazareth, in Jerusalem. He literally died under this guy punches Pilate, and then he literally rose from the dead body and soul three days later anthony, as we start to get run out of time here, I I want you to stay with that.
Speaker 1:What you just said there, because you know. You say here christ claimed to be god to come among men, but he did it in a different way. He he didn't come to to leave a written text, you said. You know he didn't come to write a book. He didn't actually even come just to teach us things, even though of course that was part of it. He came for what, matthew?
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Speaker 1:Back to the concluding episode of today's show. And this is one of the things you say. This is unique. Nobody else does this. First of all. You say in here, I'll just say it real quick, so I don't goof you up, but he's the only one to claim to be God first of all. Yeah, you say in here, I'll just say it real quick, so, so, so, I don't goof you up, but but you know, he's the only one to claim to be god first of all. And people don't realize that. The buddha, you say in here, abraham mo, muhammad confucius, they didn't say they were god, did they? So he says I'm god, and then he comes into the story, but he comes in for a purpose. That kind of blows your mind, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, this is. This is just his point that the founder of the religions, christ, is radically unique and unlike all their founders of religion, he exactly said he claims to be God and also he doesn't come to teach Abraham. What was Abraham's mission or task? Have children, have descendants as numerous as the stars. So what he did? He had Isaac Confucius taughtdha, taught different things with a philosophy or enlightenment muhammad and conquered and fought christ.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, he taught a lot. Christ the teacher very important, certain amounts as crucial, but christ didn't come mainly as a teacher. They they called him teacher, but he came mainly as the Savior. This, of course, when Gabriel appears to Mary, who used to celebrate his feast day yesterday, march 25th, you will conceive in your womb a very son and he will save his people from their sins. Christ came to save us from sin and death by the cross. So of course, fulton Sheen says Fulton Sheen was also a huge fan of Chesterton says Christ is the only man ever born to die.
Speaker 2:Christ came to die. His mission three years long not very impressive. The lives and careers of all your religious founders were a lot longer than that. Christ was his mission, his public ministry three years and aimed at the cross. He comes to the cross. He predicts his own death and resurrection and then does it and says on the cross it is finished. This is what he came to do. He didn't come just to teach us moral truth. He wasn't just a moral teacher. He came to die and save us from our sins and then overcome death in his resurrection, so we could also overcome death in his resurrection as well.
Speaker 1:And this is the power. You know, Jesus didn't come to manage our sins.
Speaker 1:He came with power and this is what we can encounter that power and the only way you're going to encounter that power, Matthew and this is so important for young guys, right, why should I believe in this guy, this Jesus Christ? Because he came with power. You know, if you get down on your knees and you really ask, right, Matthew, 7, 7, huh, Ask, seek and knock, huh. If you do that, he's not going to look, he's not a vending machine, he's not going to just spit out the candy for you. It may take a while. It may take, because Jesus says hey, Matthew, I want your heart, but I want your effort too. Right, In order to get your heart, you got to put some skin in the game too, but I will give you the grace right to complete that game. And this is something we can encounter. So it's not just like boom, it's over here on the shelf. That power of the cross that you're talking about, Matthew, we can experience it, we can. The cross is the power of the cross that you're talking about, Matthew.
Speaker 2:We can experience it. We can. The cross is the way Christ overcomes death. He could have done it other ways, but the way he did it was to die. And the resurrection is like the proof. He says the Jews ask him for a sign. He says, well, destroy this temple in three days, I will raise it up. And then he does. And it actually happened. And the historical proof of the resurrection is that the apostles preached the resurrection at pentecost, 50 days like after the ascension, so something like less than a couple months after the resurrection happened. They preached the resurrection. They said, hey, christ rose from the dead in jerusalem. Jerusalem was not it's not like a modern city. It was really small, a couple hundred yards across. Everybody there could walk over to the tomb and see the empty tomb so is that right?
Speaker 1:I?
Speaker 2:I didn't even realize that yeah, because ancient Jerusalem is something. Diameter is something like 500 yards. It's not very like, not very long. It takes a couple minutes to walk that far and of course it's a crisscrossy streets busy streets so it take longer to go through the city. But, like the ancient cities, especially drusum, because the whole city was walled in and because you want to have a walled in city and it's really hard to build walls and build rocks and stuff, so you have a smaller city right and so that's why, like, you sit at the gates of the city to do things, because you don't have these big. Ancient cities were smaller. Especially drusum was a small city. Everybody could just walk over in a couple minutes or like in an afternoon to go look at the tomb.
Speaker 1:Is that right? You know, I never really thought about that, I don't know why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could possibly preach the resurrection of Christ like a couple months after it happened, if he wasn't actually risen, if the tomb wasn't actually empty and the Roman soldiers who were the guards of the tomb were also there. They were still in jerusalem at this time. You could also go over talk to the talk to the roman soldiers, be them in the tavern or something, and talk to them over a beer, so like and those, and saint paul when he was talking about those 500 witnesses, that some of them were gone then at that time.
Speaker 1:But they were still walking around there too, right? They could tell you too.
Speaker 2:Isn't that crazy. The resurrection was like a provable fact back then because you could go look at the tomb very easily.
Speaker 1:So this is so great, Matthew, but we're going to sum it up, brother. I got you over time already here. Hey, give us a short summary. I've got your article here in front of me. It's summed up really well, but why don't you give us your last thoughts on this? Put a bow on this for us. I know there's a few things you could probably say, but yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're at a time where there's so many ideas available. Any one of us could study any religion we wanted to over the internet. There's so much information so we need to understand how we can compare and figure out which one's true, which. What's the true faith? Where do I actually find salvation? When you try to compare Christianity to other faiths, you end up not being able to compare much because they're so different. You end up almost only being able to contrast.
Speaker 2:Christianity alone claims that's the founders of God. Christianity alone has the way to overcome, even claims to have the way to overcome sin and death. Christianity alone combines monotheism with a rich philosophy in Trinitarian theology, with the robust ethical system, with also a real historical story. The vigor that comes with myth and story, because it's a myth come true. Christianity alone does all these things. It's so unique among other faiths the, the. The vigor that comes with myth and story, because it's a myth come true. Christianity alone does all these things. It's so unique among other faiths, that unique because the self is a big argument in support of its reality whoa.
Speaker 1:Honest to goodness, matthew, that was awesome, brother, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Definitely can this. You know, the beauty of a podcast is they can. They can go up on your shelf and keep pulling them down, just like Everlasting man or Orthodoxy. We can keep pulling it down and looking at it. I'm going to link your article in the show notes. Anything else you want me to put in the show notes no, no, that's good. All right then. Thanks for joining us everyone. Hope you enjoyed today's show. Talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.