It’s a fifth Friday, so Cy Kellett of Catholic Answers Live is asking Jimmy Akin weird questions from listeners, about topics like getting married after civilization collapses; what is Sh’ol; can Padre Pio still absolve living penitents; and more weird questions.
https://youtu.be/AmG1rVFJdsg
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Questions asked:
03:21 – Can St. Padre Pio still give absolution?
06:48 – If a faithful Catholic couple who are not yet married (but want to be) were able to find each other, or happened to already be spending time together, during a cyberattack or catastrophic natural disaster that ended modern society as we know it, how would they go about getting married? If they had no way to find a priest, would they just have to wander around the wasteland until they found one? Or could they make their vows in the presence of whatever witnesses they could find?
10:20 – In Psalm 139 in the New American Bible, it says ‘If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, you are there too.’ [Psalms 139:8] So, what exactly is Sheol?
21:00 – I heard a priest created a machine allowing him to see the events of the Crucifixion as they happened. Then the Vatican excommunicated him. Is this a true-ish story?
22:23 – Speaking in tongues and resting in the spirit—are they always legit or are they sometimes psychological?
29:24 – Mystics who claim to live without food for years. There are a few in the Catholic tradition but there are also claims of Prahlad Jani, an Indian Hindu. Is it demonic or a hoax?
36:48 – What is your opinion on the concept of Limbo as the eternal home of the souls of unbaptized babies?
42:29 – If they were still around, which human relatives (homo neanderthalensis, homo erectus, homo floresiensis, homo denisova, etc) would we likely be able to baptize if they were so inclined to be received by Christ and His Church?
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Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com
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Ruby on her own. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Cory Sticha discuss the latest 15th Doctor-less Doctor Who story that touches upon the folk horror genre and spins up an intriguing mystery that be related to Ruby’s true identity.
Inception for the Doctor. Dom Bettinelli and Fr. Cory Sticha discuss this dream-like episode focusing on the Doctor who is stuck in a dream-like state and must decide which reality is real and the Doctor’s struggle with identity and consciousness.
Some skeptics say that if God were real, then we’d see miracles of amputated limbs regrown and we don’t. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli examine a reported of just that, where a young man in 17th-century Spain regrew his leg.
https://youtu.be/DgIduVknMnc
Help us continue to offer Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?
You can also leave a voice message on the Mysterious Feedback Line at (619) 738-4515
This Episode is Brought to You By: Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World is brought to you in part through the generous support of Deliver Contacts, offering honest pricing and reliable service for all your contact lens needs. See the difference at delivercontacts.com.
Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com
The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.
Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.
Cy Kellett 0:21
Back to the phones.
We will go for Jimmy Chuck is in Cincinnati, Ohio watching on YouTube.
Chuck, welcome.
Go ahead with your question for Jimmy.
Chuck 0:31
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Hello, Mr. Akin.
We got to talk a number of times before anyway, so and this happened whenever there’s I don’t like using the word debate.
Maybe it’s a debate.
But just recently on the conflict.
Trent, you had a call a discussion with, quote unquote, Protestants, you and Mr. Trent.
And what happens usually when I hear . . .
Jimmy Akin 0:52
There’s no need for quotes, they were Protestant.
Chuck 0:57
Oh, yeah, quote, unquote.
I mean, that’s I mean, some people disagree with that word.
Oh, you guys are Protestants, which means you guys don’t exist.
Oh, thank you, Mr. Whoever, you know, so.
So that’s why I’m like, quote, unquote, anyway.
So whenever I listen to these, I’ll go ahead and call it a debate.
That is it’s like, initially, whoever’s talking, and it would be a Roman Catholic apologist.
Or maybe you are Mr. Trent.
And it’s like, the first half hour.
Us guys kind of sound like Martin Luther.
But then something else is added in.
So it’s like, Wait a minute.
And I and then I, of course, what happens, I end up calling Catholic Answers.
The same question again and again.
So I’m trying to trying to condense because there’s a lot of callers coming in, right.
So I’m going to try to condense this.
Jimmy Akin 1:45
Thank you.
Chuck 1:48
Thank you, sir.
So justification, is it faith in Christ, which results in imputation of His righteousness, which justifies full stop? Or is it actually faith in Christ, which results in imputation of the righteousness of Christ, but also your cooperation? In that you maintain it such that, to have peace with God and maintain it to get into heaven? It’s, it’s Christ’s work, but also your cooperation, Lord, I You should let me in because of Christ, but also because I stayed in it by cooperating.
Jimmy Akin 2:30
Okay, so I should provide a little bit of context for folks who may not know what you’re referring to.
Last week, Trent and I had a tag team debate on a program on YouTube called the gospel truth, which is hosted by a gentleman named Marlon Wilson.
And we were debating it was it was considered a debate.
It was we were debating two gentlemen, one of whom was a Reformed Baptist, and one of whom was a an Anglican.
And the debate was split into two halves.
The first half was sort of the biblical and theological dimensions of justification.
And I handled that.
And then the second part of the debate was on what the early church fathers believed about justification.
And Trent handled that.
So that’s the context in which this occurred.
And I do what I always do when I talk about justification, or when I approach basically any issue, I look for common ground to see what we don’t need to fight over.
And then whatever remains is something we can discuss.
But you know, you don’t start by trying to maximize differences between you and your opponent, you want to recognize where you have where you agree on things and clarify that so that, you know, we don’t waste our time arguing about something we actually agree on.
So to address your questions, we have to distinguish between what you do to get into a state of justification, and then what happens afterwards.
And that was a distinction that you brought up, when it comes to how you get into a state of justification.
Now, the ordinary way that this happens, is a person repents, believes and is baptized, but there are, you know, situations God knows you can’t always be baptized.
And so he makes provision for people who aren’t who don’t know that they need to be baptized or things or don’t have the opportunity to be baptized.
Fundamentally, the one thing that you need to be in a state of justification is faith in God through Christ.
And that faith needs to incorporate it not just any kind of faith saves.
Scripture makes that clear.
You know, James, James, chapter two, for example, refers to intellectual faith.
James says, even the demons believe, but they shudder at the prospect of God’s wrath.
So intellectual faith does not save you, St.
Paul, and First Corinthians 13 discusses what sometimes called fiducial.
Faith.
fiducial means trust him.
So this is Faith where you not only believe but you also trust.
And when St.
Paul says if I have faith such as to remove mountains, and if God’s moving mountains for you, you’re really trusting him.
But St.
Paul says, If I have faith strong enough to remove mountains, but I have not love, I’m nothing, it benefits me nothing.
So you don’t.
So merely fiducial faith is not enough.
But he says in Galatians, five, what counts in Christ is not circumcision or uncircumcision.
But faith working through love.
So that’s what you really need, in order to be justified, that’s the one if you have nothing else, the one thing that make sure you’re in a state of justification is faith that incorporates intellectual belief, trust in God, and love for God.
And if you have that kind of faith, it’s referred to as fit formed faith or faith formed by love or faith formed by charity.
And if you’ve got that you are in a state of justification.
And that’s something that a lot of folks agree with.
And the Protestant community, for example, John Calvin was one of those people.
He he, he said that if you try to take love out of faith, it’s not even worth calling it faith anymore.
So he agreed that formed faith is what saves.
And so that’s what you do to get into a state of justification.
Now, you then ask, Well, what happens after that? Do you have to do something to stay in a state of justification that you would appeal to, to God? Well, virtually all Christians, historically, except for those in the reformed tradition, have recognized that it is possible for Christians to commit certain sins that would cost them their salvation, because remember, one of the one of the requirements for justifying faith and is to repent and love God, well, if I decided to just go out and murder people of my own free will, you know, not under some psychological compulsion, but just, hey, I think I want to murder some people today.
Well, that’s inconsistent with love of neighbor, and it’s inconsistent with love of God.
So I no longer have saving faith, because the love component is gone.
And people in the Protestant community would agree with that.
They sometimes define exactly what kinds of sins would would cost you your salvation a little differently.
But the fact that it is possible to lose your salvation is agreed to by Lutherans and Anglicans and Methodists and Pentecostals and free will Baptists and general Baptists.
It’s really only people in the reformed tradition that object to this.
So all you really got to do in order to remain in a state of justification is just don’t commit mortal sin.
And so that’s, that’s not something that is anything that I would appeal to as a basis for salvation before God what I appeal to as a basis for salvation before God is the work of Christ.
And so, Christ is what saves me my avoidance of mortal sin is not what saves me.
And on that point, most of most people in the Protestant world actually agree with that.
And so if you want to accuse Catholics of teaching a false gospel on account of they recognize that then you’re going to have to accuse most Protestants, including Lutherans and Anglicans and Methodists and Pentecostals and free will Baptists in general Baptists have also teaching a false gospel.
So that’s a general sketch of how I would present the issue.
Cy Kellett 8:42
Chuck, I’m gonna say thank you very much for the call and for the question, as you’ve heard, we’re very busy with call so on we go.
The 15th Doctor and Ruby land in a minefield. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Cory Sticha discuss the stories complex attitude toward faith (both positive and negative) and the exploitation of war for profit as well as the mysterious actor who keeps showing up in different roles.
Today people are fascinated by cryptids—hidden creatures—like Bigfoot and the Loch NessMonster. In the ancient world, the most famous cryptid was the dragon, so did early Christians believe in them?
The term dragon (Greek, drakôn) appears in the Greek Bible, but normally it is in a symbolic context—like when the devil appears in the form of a dragon in the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev. 12). So this doesn’t provide good evidence for belief in literal dragons.
However, the term also appears in other contexts. For example, in Daniel 14, the prophet Daniel kills a large drakôn that the Babylonians worshipped. However, in secular Greek, the term drakôn originally referred to a snake or serpent, and it did not always have monstrous connotations. This is clear in Wisdom 16:10, where the author refers back to the snakes that bit the Israelites in Numbers 21 and describes them as “venomous drakontôn.” The author of Daniel 14 may thus have expected readers to imagine a big snake, and some modern Bible translations like the Common English Bible use “snake” in the passage.
The Bible thus doesn’t provide a good basis for documenting belief in literal dragons. However, we do find some in the early Church who were open to the idea. St. Augustine writes:
“As for dragons, which lack feet, they are said to take their rest in caves, and to soar up into the air. While these are not too easy to come across, this kind of animated creature is for all that definitely mentioned not only in our literature but also in that of the Gentiles” (Literal Meaning of Genesis 3:9:13).
This passage may not mean what it suggests, however. You’ll note that Augustine says dragons have no feet—which would point to snakes—but he says that they fly. There were—indeed—references to flying snakes in ancient literature. Isaiah mentions them (14:29, 30:6), and so does the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 2:75-76, 3:109). So Augustine is likely not referring to what we would think of as a dragon but to flying snakes. (Note: flying—or, technically, gliding—snakes do exist in some parts of Asia.)
The flying snakes that Herodotus referred to were small, but in another passage, Augustine envisions dragons that are very large:
“Now dragons favor watery habitats. They emerge from caves and take to the air. They create major atmospheric disturbance, for dragons are very large creatures, the largest of all on earth. This is probably why the psalm began its consideration of earthly creatures with them” (Expositions of the Psalms 148:9).
Augustine wasn’t alone in thinking about real, enormous dragons. Other Church Fathers did so also, and so did non-Christian thinkers.
The reason is obvious when you think about it. Although the term paleontology was only coined in 1822, humans have been running across fossils for as long as there have been humans. When they came across the bones of giant, monstrous animals, they correctly concluded that there used to be giant animals in the area.
In her book The First Fossil Hunters, historian Adrienne Mayor insightfully argues that it was the ancient discovery of fossils that formed the basis of the legends of dragons and similar creatures the world over.
St. Augustine himself reports finding a giant tooth on a beach, where the action of the waves presumably uncovered it:
“Once, on the beach at Utica, I saw with my own eyes—and there were others to bear me witness—a human molar tooth so big that it could have been cut up, I think, into a hundred pieces each as big as one of our modern teeth. That tooth, however, I can well believe, was the tooth of a giant” (City of God 15:9).
I’m not a Young Earth Creationist, but I have to agree with musician Buddy Davis’s fun children’s song D Is For Dinosaur:
“When dinosaurs first roamed the earth, many years ago
People called them dragons (and just thought you’d like to know)
So dinosaurs and dragons are both the same thing
The only thing that’s different is we changed the dragon’s name”
It depends on how you understand death. In the old days, it was relatively easy to determine whether someone was dead: They stopped breathing and their pulse disappeared.
That was a useful way of determining death because breathing is necessary to get oxygen to the blood, and a beating heart is necessary to push oxygen-laden blood to the cells of the body. Without that happening, every cell in the body would die.
Of course, mistakes could be made. Someone might be breathing really shallowly, and they might have only a faint pulse, but if they really stopped breathing and their heart really stopped, they were dead. End of story.
Things got more complex in the twentieth century. Techniques became available to keep someone breathing and to restart their heart.
In the 1950s, ventilators were introduced. These are machines that act like bellows to move air in and out of the lungs.
Also in the 1950s, the first (external) mechanical hearts became available, and by 1960, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) could help keep blood moving during a cardiac arrest, adrenaline could encourage the heart to resume beating, and defibrillators could hopefully shock it back into a normal rhythm.
All this raised the question of whether people who met the previous definition of death (no breathing and no heartbeat) should be considered dead.
By the late 1960s, a new criterion was proposed: absence of brain activity. This could make sense because a functioning brain was needed to keep things like breathing and hearts going without mechanical aid.
So perhaps—some reasoned—if the brain was no longer working, if the patient was “brain dead,” you could forego artificial respiration and heart stimulation and treat the patient as dead.
This meant you could harvest their organs—if they were an organ donor—including their precious heart. The first successful heart transplant took place in 1967, so maybe someone else could use the organ if the donor was brain dead.
There has been a lively debate about whether lack of brain activity should be used to define death, and advocates of brain death as they key criterion have won a lot of converts to their view.
At the same time, there have been concerns that doctors have been defining brain death in a loosey-goosey way, such as merely being in a persistent vegetative state rather than truly and permanently lacking brain function. This would let them take more people off life-support—freeing up medical resources—and harvest organs from more people.
Personally, I am not at all convinced that the brain death criterion is adequately defined—or applied—today, and so a person who is actually still alive may be killed by the removal of their heart for a transplant. Consequently, I have not agreed to donate my organs on my driver’s license.
While the brain death debate has been going on, the concept of death has begun to be questioned on a new front: the cellular level. Hypothetically, one could argue that a person’s body isn’t fully dead unless all of the cells in it have died, and things like brain function, respiration, and heart action are just things needed to keep the cells alive.
We thus might be able to help save more people if we could intervene to keep their cells alive long enough to fix whatever is wrong with their brain, lungs, heart, or other organs.
Popular Mechanicshas discussed a team of researchers who have been working on how to support the cells of the body when critical organs are not functioning. They call this system OrganEx, and preliminary trials on pigs have been successful, though human trials are still years off.
Other advances are also being made. It turns out that, if a person’s body and brain are cooled down in the right way, they can be brought back to normal functioning as much as six hours after cardiac arrest has occurred (see Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death).
We also now have implantable artificial hearts, and—though they aren’t yet as convenient and reliable as the one the biological version of Captain Picard had on Star Trek—we’re approaching the point where not having a functioning human heart may no longer be useful as a criterion for irreversible death.
What all of these advances have done is make death—which used to look like a simple either-or state—to look more like a process, and a process that in many cases can be reversed.
As medicine continues to advance, we may expect it to become more and more reversible, which will make it more challenging to define precisely when “final” death occurs.
When Quark, Nog, and Rom end up in 1947 Roswell, history takes a beating. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Cory Sticha discuss the change in Nog, similarities between 20th-century humans and Ferengi, and how this story pays homage to 1950s B movies.
