Responding to Nathan Finochio's response to "The Limits of Evangelical Ecumenism"

What he gets wrong about the Catholic church

The Substack algorithm did its thing and five people ended up sending Nathan my article critiquing the selective retrieval of church fathers to reinforce novel ecclesiologies. Thanks to them I now have to write another one (after shelling out $28 to subscribe to Nate to read what he wrote).

Here’s his rebuttal, if you also want to pay him the equivalent of a new book. He does post almost every day though.

Nathan’s first critique was that my article could have been the length of a homily and instead I stretched it out to the length of pentecostal sermon. Touché. I’ll try to fire from the hip here.

Not going to pick apart everything he wrote in the article—he spends most of his time defending the pentecostal hermeneutic. I don’t think everything about that hermeneutic is wrong, but it foregrounds the wrong things. That’s a consequence of the Reformers throwing out transubstantiation and the sacrificial purpose of the liturgy: something else has to take the Eucharist’s place as the vehicle of God’s manifest presence.

I’m going to spend my time digging into his “Why I’m not Catholic” critiques.

Their services are literally awful. The preaching/teaching is so bad, the mood so somber. It’s like a funeral. There is no prayer. No joy. Everything is passive.

Lots of catholic priests lack the charisma of the average hip pentecostal pastor, that’s true. But your mileage may vary. My priest is great and always gives me something relevant to the readings to chew on.

“No prayer.” Really? Yeah maybe not with the histrionics that you’re used to, but it’s there. The whole mass is a prayer.

A common theme with some of these: Nathan’s mixing in his personal preferences with truth claims, but let the reader understand that how entertained you are has no bearing on the veracity of the religion. They may inform his decision not to be Catholic, but they’re subjective and not worth me addressing.

There is only one priest offering spiritual sacrifices.

Yeah it’s Christ. 😂

But no, the Catholic church recognizes that the laity are priests too¹—we just preserve the Aaronic typology of the old testament where the ministerial priests facilitate the sacrifice. Our (the laity) participation in the sacrifice of the mass is with our ministerial priest who participates in Christ’s priesthood. The consumption of the Eucharist completes the sacrifice, hence why I invoked the animal sacrifices. The killing of the sacrificial victim is only one step in the sacrifice, it is not the totality of it. That’s a big difference in our soteriology: the blood of the Lamb is continually applied to my life because, guess what, I still sin and my soul needs continuous healing. It’s a mercy that Christ has given himself to us under the appearance of bread and wine.

Mea culpa: my original article definitely undersold the role of the laity as priests. There are other spiritual sacrifices the laity offer, but the highest and central one is still the Eucharist—the Son. That’s just good Trinitarian theology.

Their hermeneutics are hilariously one-dimensional: everything is the Eucharist. Animal sacrifices? Eucharist. Priestly offerings? Eucharist. Church? Eucharist. David and Bathsheba’s baby? Eucharist. The name of Judas’ first girlfriend? Eucharist…

I’m reminded of that worship song we used to sing: “Jesus at the Center.”

Duh, dude. We think the Eucharist is Jesus. If you actually believed it was Jesus, wouldn’t you reverence it as the central thing? Isn’t all of scripture pointing towards him? (Catholics aren’t alone on taking it this seriously either).

Matthew Kelly tells a story about a Muslim guy who, when asked what he would do if he believed he could eat God, said that he would crawl naked over hot glass for the privilege.²

The Eucharist is a picture of God’s plan of salvation for us: that he transforms, glorifies, and divinizes his creation by grace through faith. It’s a foretaste of Heaven, when he will set the whole world right.

Sam pretends that his church is together on things. They absolutely are not. And they are getting Woker by the minute. Same Sex blessings are now a thing. In our lifetime we will see them marry same sex couples—there is nothing in the way anymore. Political Progress is the hobby horse of the Papacy now. And all the runner ups are Left of Francis and Leo, which is crazy to think about.

The Catholic church survived worse, have you heard of the Renaissance popes? Huge libertines. The crazy thing is that the church’s moral teaching never got lax even when popes were having children with their concubines. Marrying same-sex couples would constitute a reversal of church dogma which doesn’t happen, despite the wishes of many Catholics. There’s a reason we still haven’t budged on contraception, divorce & remarriage etc, even though everyone else has. Other denominations just convene a synod/board meeting and vote on it lol. Nothing’s set in stone. The ESV on the table isn’t going to start talking and tell them not to.

Chesterton converted to Catholicism when it was still the voice of social reason and cohesion. The priests taught the Bible. That is completely gone. Every homily I heard for two years was worse than any awful female preacher that married a church entrepreneur with zero Biblical training. It’s really that bad.

You don’t become Catholic because of how well it’s going at some particular moment in time, you become Catholic because of what the Church claims to be and what it claims to possess. Becoming Catholic in 1300 would’ve been worse than becoming Catholic in 1891. It's still the right thing to do. That’s the ebb and flow of history.

The last conference I ever attended as a protestant was a regional conference for our “family” of churches. Silliest, most unserious thing I’ve ever been to. Lots of vague (and occasionally dead wrong) prophecy, tongues-on-command, and covers of lousy Elevation songs. All hype and hysteria, no edification. I’m not kidding, I got nothing from it other than a story to tell. But I wouldn’t judge the entirety of Pentecostalism off of that. I’ve heard about the miracles my grandparents witnessed and met some of the lives they touched. I’ve seen authentic words of knowledge given in charismatic spaces. I've sat under excellent preaching. The present condition of a church is not a barometer for the eternal truth of its claims.

The wolf is in the chicken coop—they won’t deal with the Liberation and Social Justice crew. That all died with Ratzinger—he was the last one with any authority to do anything about it.

Really?

Anyways, I realize “social justice” is a dirty word for Nate, but one of our “trad” and “conservative” popes, Leo XIII, wrote a lot of excellent theology about it that people should read. It’s not at all Marxist.

Sam picks and chooses his patristics, just like I do; in fact, Catholicism is a very wide umbrella, and they all have their interpretations.

I see this accusation a lot, but Catholic theology doesn’t develop by quote-mining the fathers. There’s a rung of authority higher than scattered quotes from Augustine: ecumenical councils and papal ex cathedra decrees, and doctrine has been promulgated from this level of authority since the early church (it’s there in Acts, in fact). Catholicism builds upon itself like tree rings. The protestant branch is stuck trying to draw water from the roots of the tree it fell off through retrieval efforts.

Wake me up when an Augustinian or Thomist is Pope. It will never happen.

You can’t tell me that Paul and Silas in jail, singing hymns at midnight until the prison shakes, or the prayer-and-worship marathons in the Upper Room before Pentecost, aren’t “peak Presence” moments.

“He who sings prays twice.” God answers prayers. More at 11.

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Nathan is right that my central critique boils down to “he’s not Catholic” because the further removed you are from the magisterium, the more you are stuck constructing your own doctrine piecemeal. He basically admits to doing that. That’s not wise, pastoral, or sustainable. And again, I cannot stress this enough, this stuff shapes how we live our lives in the most important ways. Disagreements on ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ issues are super consequential, you can unwittingly lead people’s lives to ruin. That’s why I’m grateful for the catechism, the code of canon law, and my local priest who is familiar with what they teach, how they make sense of scripture, and how to apply them.

But the saddest thing about this way of living is that your gifts are cut off from the greater ecclesial body (the one that actually can confect Christ’s corporeal body). I think Nathan is a really funny, witty, and creative guy and the impact he could have as a Catholic is insane. As an evangelist and commentator, I could listen to him for hours. I know TheosU has led lots of people to Catholicism (some that I know firsthand), and I’d love to see him go all-in. The body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus in the Eucharist await.

Plus, there’s this Catholic church in Baltimore that sings Elevation songs and looks indistinguishable from the megachurches that Nate preaches at. Maybe something like this would tickle him in ways that Sacred Heart didn’t.

1. Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. 2nd ed., United States Catholic Conference, 2000, §784.

2. Matthew Kelly, 33 Days to Eucharistic Glory: A Spiritual Pilgrimage. Blue Sparrow Press, 2024, p. 79.