Tag: Frank Turek

Frank Turek – Charitable but still uninformed about Catholicism

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The very fact that the video’s title talks about “last rights” rather than “last rites” doesn’t instill great confidence…

I love Frank’s ministry, but he really should never speak about Catholicism. Every video and podcast I’ve seen and heard of him talking about Catholicism is littered with inaccuracies.

Saying “I was brought up in the Catholic Church” is no guarantee you understand what the Catholic Church teaches. The biggest example of it in this video is where he and the lady in the audience assert that Catholics believe they’re sacrificing Jesus again.

I hope Franks mum will see this video and read to him the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit”.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (Paragraph #1366)

This paragraph goes on to quote the Council of Trent:

[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper “on the night when he was betrayed,” [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.=

Council of Trent (1562): DS 1740; cf. 1 Cor 11:23; Heb 7:24, 27.

Frank Turek’s Blind Spot

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I enjoy a lot of Frank Turek’s apologetics and listen to his weekly podcast, but he really does have a few blind spots. I recently came across this video which shows that the canon of Scripture is one such blind spot…

What he says here concerning the discernment of the canon isn’t entirely false, but he offers a very insufficient description of what took place. It was the Catholic Church who determined the canon in the early centuries of the Church. In fact, it’s a bit embarrassing that it’s the questioner who is the first person to bring up these councils!

His statement about the Protestant Bible lining up with the Jewish Old Testament is too simplistic, so much so that it’s misleading. The Protestant Old Testament matches the canon of the Jews today… but not of all the Jews in the First Century! After all, there were a number of different Jewish sects in the First Century, such as the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Each of these groups had a different canon of Scripture…

Now, the Protestant canon matches the canon settled by the rabbis in the Second Century, following the establishment of the Church and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. However, this begs the question: why should Christians accept the opinion of this particular Jewish group? After all, these are the successors to those who rejected that Jesus was the Messiah! If they didn’t recognize the Word incarnate, why would they necessarily correctly recognise the written Word of God? Not only that, wouldn’t they have motivation to exclude books from the canon which very clearly prophesy the suffering of Jesus?

The really egregious error in this video is Frank’s assertion that Roman Catholics added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent. That claim is patently false and honestly I’d expect more from an apologist of Frank’s calibre. Catholics did not add books to the Bible at the Reformation, the Protestants removed them. This is just one of the worst arguments used against the Deuterocanon. Incidentally, Luther even tried to remove books from the New Testament, such as the Epistle of James because he couldn’t reconcile it with his novel theology of Sola Fide…

The Catholic Bible aligns itself to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament which is the translation most often quoted by the New Testament authors themselves. The Catholic Canon was declared by the early councils of the Church, as well as later ones such as The Council of Florence (AD 1431). You don’t have to wait for the Council of Trent (AD 1545). For further proof of this, just ask a Coptic or Eastern Orthodox Christian if they have the Deuterocanonical books in their Bible. These Churches separated from the Catholic Church long before the Reformation, yet still have these Deuterocanonical books…conclusive proof that what Frank said here is incorrect.