April 8, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
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| Okay, it's 8 April in the year of our Lord 2020. | ||
| It is Holy Saturday, the traditional Christ descent into hell. | ||
| I guess, Dr. | ||
| Williams, it would be to free the pagans and the Jews and others that had been in limbo prior to his death and resurrection. | ||
| You make a strong argument in the book about this persecution of Christians is going to get a lot nastier, a lot more dangerous in what is to come. | ||
| You single out courage as one of the virtues or the virtue that we have to depend upon. | ||
| But can you walk our audience through on this holiest of all days in the Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the most somber of all days in the Christian calendar? | ||
| What is to come and how can they help to prepare for it? | ||
| Well, I think courage is so important, because it's like the forgotten virtue of our day. | ||
| It used to be something that was front and center of classical civilization. | ||
| They would talk about the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, intemperance, fortitude, courage. | ||
| This ability to stand fast in the face of opposition is something that we hear very, very little about today. | ||
| Everything is supposed to be easy. | ||
| If it hurts you, take a pill. | ||
| If it bothers you, lie down, take a timeout, do whatever it is. | ||
| We don't realize that a big part of human life and a big part of Christian life is being willing to stand up to opposition. | ||
| It's being willing to stay in the fray. | ||
| Even when your life's on the line, even when your personal property, your personal goods, your personal well-being are all on the line. | ||
| And courage is a virtue, boy. | ||
| I mean, Holy Week and Good Friday that we just lived is rife with us. | ||
| Look at Jesus on the cross. | ||
| I mean, that's for our admiration, yes, our gratitude, yes, but also that's an example of the witness, the faithfulness unto death, that Christians are called to live. | ||
| And this is something, this is our model, this is our role model of what it means to actually live our faith to the full. | ||
| And I think that this is something that's very daunting, it's very scary, it's something that's very even repugnant to our nature. | ||
| We don't want that. And yet, at the same time, I think we know that we're called. | ||
| This is a part of what it means to be Christians. | ||
| We have to fight the good fight. | ||
| Like St. Paul said, as he neared the end of his life, you know, I've finished the race. | ||
| I've run the race. I fought the good fight, and now I await the reward that's coming to me. | ||
| Would that we could all say that? | ||
| Would that we could reach the end of our lives and say, I did. | ||
| I finished the race. | ||
| I stayed in the game. | ||
| I played it to the end, and I won. | ||
| This is what we're called to. | ||
| And whether that means praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters, whether it means praying for ourselves and the strength to endure whatever we're going to be asked, Whether it means fighting for religious liberty, which Pope John Paul II called the cornerstone of the edifice of human rights, this sense of restoring it to its proper place as America's first liberty, religious freedom, and a willingness also to push for that all around the world. | ||
| There's a great challenge for us as Christians right now, not to back away, not to hide in a hole, but to go out on the streets and to proclaim the truth, and to live the truth, and to be willing to stand up to the opposition that is trying to beat it down. | ||
| Do you believe that the white persecution, the harassment of daily life and thwarting opportunities and all that is going to get more intense and lead to transition over to the red type of martyrdom or the red persecution as seen in the Covenant School? | ||
| Because the Covenant School should be a bellwether to the people. | ||
| That should be like a fire bell in the night. | ||
| Those kids were specifically targeted by a student that had gone there And who, from everything we read, had intensely devout Christian parents, that her hatred of Christianity, her hatred of this faith, that's why they won't release the manifesto. | ||
| It had to be quite deep. | ||
| Is your fear that we transition from an intensifying white persecution, which is obviously horrible in itself, to a form of a red persecution, a red martyrdom? | ||
| I mean, I think signs of it are all around us. | ||
| And I think that we're living in a time of accelerated transformation of society, and especially with regard to the way Christians are perceived and the way Christians are treated. | ||
| Look at a couple examples here. | ||
| Look at the FBI. Since when does the FBI target and use RICO laws against peaceful protesters outside an abortion clinic, the way we have been seeing the last couple of years. | ||
| Since, when does the FBI have an internal memo saying, we're going to be targeting those who go to the Latin, the traditional Latin mass, because they have a high propensity to become Christian nationalists and white supremacists? | ||
| And so we're going to target them, despite the fact that, obviously, there is zero evidence of this. | ||
| So, when you're militarizing are security forces against the American people and against those who take their Christian faith seriously, whether it's because they're upholding the moral truth of the dignity of the human person, or whether it's because they want to worship in a way that is dignified and does honor to their god. | ||
| And they're targeted by government for this. | ||
| I mean, and what is that, if not an indication that it's open season? | ||
| If the government will do that, that also is an indication to regular citizens, hey, it's a free-for-all now. | ||
| You can do this because these, this group is no longer something that should be tolerated the way that they're living. | ||
| No, I think there are signs all around. | ||
| And I think, as you mentioned, this, the Covenant school shooting was horrific. | ||
| It's a very good example, especially the way that it's reported on and looked upon and justified. | ||
| No, it's going to get worse and it's going to get bloodier. | ||
| How can people take a couple of minutes and tell us how people how can Christians prepare? | ||
| I mean, I think we have to do what Christians have always done. | ||
| We need to remember in the first place, remember the martyrs, this do this in memory of me, this idea of looking back and of drawing strength from our heroes. | ||
| The saints in every tradition, in every Christian tradition, the saints are our heroes. | ||
| They are the ones. They are Heaven's athletes. | ||
| They are the ones who have fought the fight. | ||
| They are the ones who have won the battle. | ||
| And we need to look to them for inspiration. | ||
| We need to look to them as role models of what we're called to be in this world. | ||
| Why is it that we're alive today? | ||
| What is it That is our task in the world today. | ||
| Why are we living now and not 200 years ago, not 200 years in the future? | ||
| If we're Christian believers, we know that God has us here for a reason. | ||
| And we're called to live in this time, in this historic moment, because we have a job to do. | ||
| We have a mission. And I think that becoming more and more aware of that, informing ourselves about the situation of what's going on, and taking it upon ourselves, shoulder and shoulder with our brothers and sisters, To fight that good fight and to stand firm and to proclaim the truth, both of the gospel but also of the need for respect and religious freedom, which is again our first freedom. | ||
| I think that is what is incumbent upon us today. | ||
| Do you believe that this transition, you say it's rapidly transforming, you think you're going to see this in the United States, an acceleration of this process here in this country? | ||
| Oh, I think we're already seeing it. | ||
| And it's something—you remember Cardinal Francis George, who was a wonderful archbishop of Chicago and died maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago. | ||
| But he said something while he was alive. | ||
| He said, I'm going to die in my bed. | ||
| My successor will die in prison, and his successor will die as a martyr. | ||
| He foresaw, and this was before I wasn't seeing what I'm seeing today, even 15 years ago, again, the accelerated pace of transformation and the way Christians are now looked upon as bigots and homophobes and enemies of right-thinking society. | ||
| Yeah, I think we're seeing this develop at such a rate that we're going to see martyrdom in our lifetime. | ||
| The book is very chilling, but for the two most somber days of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, it is something that people ought to delve into. | ||
| How do people get to the book, The Coming Christian Persecution, Tom? | ||
| And how do people follow you on social media and get to more of your writings? | ||
| So, I have a website, thomasdwilliams.com. | ||
| You can find this book. | ||
| It's published by Sophia Institute Press and their division called Crisis Publications. | ||
| You can find it on their website. | ||
| It's also available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. | ||
| And people can follow me. | ||
| I'm still only on Twitter. | ||
| I'm behind the times. | ||
| I have to get with Getter. | ||
| But on Twitter, I can be followed at at TDWilliamsRome. | ||
| Well, thank God that you have not been thrown off there. | ||
| Thank you for joining us from Rome today. | ||
| By the way, Sophia Institute Press, just incredible. | ||
| Everybody should go to the site, particularly over this weekend. | ||
| You'll see just incredible variety of just great writing from great writers and great thinkers. | ||
| Tom, great to have you on here. | ||
| The book is very chilling, and I think only Tom Williams could have written it. | ||
| Very, very chilling, very analytical, very powerful. | ||
| So thank you for doing that, sir. | ||
| Well, great talking to you, Steve. | ||
| And God bless you. Have a beautiful Easter, and all the best to you and yours. | ||
| Thank you, Dr. | ||
| Tom Williams from Rome. | ||
| Very powerful, particularly for Dr. | ||
| Williams, who is not a person to waste his time for him to focus over the last couple of years on a very, very disturbing book. | ||
| And I think that's why the Covenant School, as we have said, in this increasing language about All these conservative Christians, traditional Christians, are really Christian nationalists. | ||
| It's what they call the stochastic terrorism. | ||
| They're trying to associate Christianity and traditional Catholicism with something sinister, something very sinister. | ||
| And that's why they're making an open target, open season on Christians. | ||
| The Covenant School... This Covenant School massacre, in particular the way it's been covered, is example enough. | ||
| You just have to look at the heroism of those children, and it's not even talked about. | ||
| The Christianity part's not even talked about, and the targeting. | ||
| They won't release the manifesto. | ||
| Okay. What we're going to play when we come back from break, and then the break after that, is that we had an interview with Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall. He was on the show last night, but last year in our special, I had Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall. And the part of it was so good and so powerful. | ||
| What I wanted to do was to replay this. | ||
| So we're going to come back from break. | ||
| You're going to get an opportunity to see that. | ||
| Another incredible original thinker that we're very privileged and very honored to have. | ||
| Over this weekend, and this is why it's a time of rejuvenation, particularly, obviously, Easter Sunday, we must gird ourselves here. | ||
| It's a time for reflection, a time for deep reflection. | ||
| I think Good Friday and Holy Saturday are being the two of the most somber and more meaningful days on the Christian calendar. | ||
| It's a perfect weekend to do that, and that's why we have traditionally, since we started the War Room, done this show and done it over Good Friday evening and then Holy Saturday to make sure that we really start to think this through because at the end of the day this is a spiritual war. | ||
| Yes, we talk a lot about the economy. | ||
| We talk a lot about the geopolitical situation. | ||
| We talk about taking down the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So much of this gets back to the spiritual struggle. | ||
| Remember, in the great fight against the Chinese Communist Party, in the great fight against the What you see is what I call the Legion of Doom, whether it's in Persia, whether it's in Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Pakistan or North Korea, particularly with the KGB in Russia and the CCP in Beijing, the leadership. They're either radically opposed to Christianity or deeply atheistic. | ||
| And you're seeing this is the power of Tom Williams' book, because in the West right now you're seeing this suppression and oppression of Christianity, what he calls white martyrdom. | ||
| He goes back to the Fathers of the Church to explain that. | ||
| But that can transition into red martyrdom. | ||
| And you saw that in the Covenant shooting. | ||
| Very, very disturbing. So I want to make sure everybody, we're going to have a special, we're going to pull up the interviews I did with Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall next, and then I'll be back to walk through, I think, the meaning of those interviews and then talk about the rest of the weekend. | ||
| Obviously a very incredible, intensive time. | ||
| For the people of the United States, for the Catholic Church, for the Christian Church, for all of it. | ||
| Okay. We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| When we return, we're going to have Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall, my interview with Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall on descent into hell and his great and very deep thinking. | ||
| I want to thank Sophia Institute Press for making Dr. | ||
| Williams available. | ||
| We got him for the better part of the show from Rome. | ||
| It was just incredible. I cannot state enough. | ||
| Either get the book or go to a site and read, and I know money's tight, but go to his site. | ||
| And to understand what is going on here, particularly in his detailed explanation of how the first century and the second century church were persecuted, why they were persecuted, the options that were offered as far as accommodation, that that would get you off the hook, and he relates it to modern man and to the modern world. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| I'll be back with Dr. | ||
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Taylor Marshall, only in the War Room. | |
| Okay, well, that's it for now. I'm going to go to bed. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye. | ||
| welcome back. We're in the War Room. | ||
| It's Good Friday, our Good Friday special. | ||
| It's one of the, if not the most solemn day of the year in Christianity. | ||
| Of course, it's also Passover. | ||
| We've had specials all week during Holy Week and Passover week. | ||
| I want to thank Dr. Taylor Marshall, one of the, I think it's safe to say, one of the more controversial thinkers, thought leaders, and writers in what I would refer to as the traditional Catholic Church. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, do you think this is a time of understanding that it's always spiritual warfare against Satan, but do you think particularly today in world events that it's actually so much of what we're facing in our country and now what we're facing throughout the world, this is a time of spiritual warfare? | ||
| Most certainly. I mean, you have in the 1900s more martyrs worldwide than all the centuries before that. | ||
| So take from John the Baptist in the first century, all the way up to the 1800s, there's more martyrs in the 1900s. | ||
| And I think that's been accelerating now in the world. | ||
| Now we see it's in Africa. | ||
| You see this with, you know, Muslims coming in through towns, kidnapping, but also murdering many of the people because they're Christian. | ||
| You've seen this in China and in many parts of the world, Egypt, North Africa, these places, Lebanon, More and more, Syria, Christians being persecuted. | ||
| A year ago, I was with some of the Chalcedonian Christians from Iraq, and every single one of them—we were at dinner at a big table, it was a political event—but every single one of them, as I was having conversations, had a relative who was a martyr. | ||
| In the Chalcedonian Church, Catholic Church in Iraq, you know, they would talk about their uncle who was hung from the rafters and all these horrible stories and how much reverence they had for their people and for their immediate family because each of them had a martyr in their family. | ||
| And I mean, in America, it's so It's hard for us to even understand that when you get baptized, when you make the sign of the cross, when you say, I serve Jesus Christ, Christ is my King, in certain cultures, like the culture they came from, that puts a target on you. | ||
| When you do that, you know, this could be the end for me. | ||
| I could be murdered for loving Christ. | ||
| So most certainly, and then there's also what we call soft persecution, Stephen. | ||
| This is the pressure that's put on Christians by the government to compromise their conscience, compromise their beliefs, compromise their families, the way they raise their children. | ||
| And of course, you know, I don't have to name all these things, but whether you're in Canada or you're in Germany or in certain states in the United States of America, there is this soft persecution on Christians and particularly families as they're trying to navigate our culture wars. | ||
| So help us out here. | ||
| If you go on any Sunday and on, I'm not going to say most, but I think a majority of pulpits in a Catholic church, you're hearing Social Justice Warrior And if you go to a lot of the evangelical churches, you're hearing prosperity gospel. | ||
| Why are Christians and Catholics not preaching the persecuted church every day? | ||
| Because our taproot of this religion is the Desert Fathers. | ||
| It's from Damascus to Antioch, North Africa, St. | ||
| Augustine's from North Africa. | ||
| The very basis and taproots, even outside the Holy Land, It has not just been persecuted, it's been taken over. | ||
| And as you said, the persecution of Christians and Catholics in those areas have been monumental, as bad as it is with the Chinese Communist Party, as bad as it is in Sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| Here, the basis and foundational elements, those great monasteries, those great churches, where the Great Desert Fathers came from, is absolutely under full-on assault And persecuted, and yet it is virtual crickets from the pulpits of Catholic churches and from the pulpits of evangelical churches, with some exceptions. | ||
| Dr. Taylor Marshall. | ||
| The reason that you don't hear it is, I think, two reasons. | ||
| First off, no one wants to hear it. | ||
| You know, people want to come on Sundays and they want to feel uplifted, they want to strengthen their family, they want to See their friends, talk about their golf game. | ||
| In the mainstream, whether it's Protestant or mainstream, Novus Ordo Catholic, there's just this sort of idea, I'm religious, I believe in God, I'm going to check these boxes, I'm going to put in my due, I'm going to see my fellow Christians, but don't bother me with the hard teachings of Jesus Christ, like take up your cross and follow me. | ||
| I mean, you and I don't want to do that. | ||
| We don't want to go the hard way. | ||
| So hearing about it is not a popular sermon topic. | ||
| I think the second reason why we don't hear about it is because other than China, most of the persecution that happens against Christians happens at the hands of those professing the religion of Islam. | ||
| It is politically incorrect to discuss These things like Boko Haran and these things in Africa, where some of the most horrendous things are happening at the hands of Muslims on Christian villages, these don't get a lot of traction in our news, so people don't even know about it. | ||
| Beheadings and rapes and kidnappings and all kinds of just horrible things. | ||
| I don't think they get the traction in our Western media because of this delicate situation with Islam. | ||
| So I think those are the two reasons. | ||
| Is it possible to have a vibrant Christianity, whether that Christianity is Reformed Protestant or Evangelical Christianity or traditional Catholic, unless that church has a more direct connection? | ||
| With its desert roots, with where the church came out of, which is the Middle East, which is Damascus and Antioch and North Africa and Egypt. | ||
| Can it be vibrant and robust and real unless it has that connection? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And I'm glad you brought the Desert Fathers up because the Desert Fathers were a movement that happened in Egypt, out in the desert, After Constantine began to turn the Roman Empire into a Christian form of what becomes Christendom. | ||
| And what happened is, you know, before Constantine, almost all the bishops were being martyred. | ||
| The popes were being martyred. | ||
| Christians were meeting underground. | ||
| It was a persecuted movement. | ||
| It was hard to be a Christian. | ||
| When Constantine legalized it, Suddenly there were so many more converts. | ||
| The church grew. They built beautiful cathedrals and basilicas. | ||
| They had golden crosses and beautiful vestments. | ||
| And a lot of the Christians who were on that transition there, the threshold there between the old way, which was hard, and the new way, which was comfortable, said, you know what? | ||
| We're losing our edge as Christians. | ||
| We're losing what it means to suffer for Jesus Christ, to be the servant of a king who wears a crown of thorns. | ||
| And so what happened is you see just this explosion of monastic movements, especially in Egypt with the Desert Fathers, and they say, we want to restore the grittiness The suffering, the hunger that Christians had felt for coming up on 300 years at that time. | ||
| And they went into the wilderness and they fasted, they prayed together, they prayed the entire Psalms every single day, all 150. | ||
| They didn't eat meat. | ||
| They basically were becoming like John the Baptist. | ||
| That was the model. And then there was also women's communities. | ||
| I think, you know, I was an evangelical. | ||
| That connection to that reality was not so strong. | ||
| I didn't encounter it until I became a Catholic. | ||
| You meet monks, you meet nuns who are living that. | ||
| But I think what we have in the Catholic tradition, and the Eastern Orthodox actually do it better than us right now, and that is there are periods of suffering, periods of penance worked into the year. | ||
| So the most obvious one is Lent. | ||
| The 46 days of Lent before Easter, we impose on ourselves suffering. | ||
| Now, it may not be living in the desert. | ||
| It may be not eating meat and not drinking alcohol and not turning off all of our screens and not watching TV and not watching Netflix, but we have to deprive ourselves We have to live a good Friday in order to get to an Easter Sunday. | ||
| There has to be a crucifixion. | ||
| There has to be a scourging, a crowning of thorns before you get to the joy and the glory and the beauty of a resurrection. | ||
| And I think that's just built into human nature, that if we're always in luxury, if we're always eating the best food, always drinking the best wine, we can never really level up in our devotion to God. | ||
| Is this what Pope Benedict actually said when he took the name Benedict, is that along the lines of the monastic communities, he'd rather have, or at least the implication was, a smaller Catholicism, but a more lived Christianity. | ||
| Is that what the Desert Fathers teach us? | ||
| Is that the link to what at least certain members like Pope Benedict and others were trying to get out about modern Catholicism? | ||
| I mean, we have a tension here, and I think Pope Benedict is right, but the tension is we want to cast the net wide, we want to get as many people in relationship with Jesus Christ, as many people baptized, as many people coming to church, right? | ||
| But then once we do that, there needs to be a system, a program that says, now here's how you live as a Christian. | ||
| You know, one of the great things before Vatican II is all Catholics didn't eat meat on Friday. | ||
| It made every single Friday of the year into a good Friday. | ||
| Christ gave up His flesh on Friday. | ||
| We give up eating flesh on Friday. | ||
| And it was this sort of weekly reminder that was communal amongst all Catholics. | ||
| Hey, we kind of have to suffer on Friday. | ||
| We don't get the best food. | ||
| We don't get to have hot dogs and burgers or ribeyes once a week. | ||
| And that's just sort of Reminding us again that every Friday is a good Friday. | ||
| Every Sunday is an Easter Sunday, year-round. | ||
| And we constantly have to tell ourselves, be humble. | ||
| You're not that important. You're going to return to dust. | ||
| One day you're going to be a skeleton. | ||
| You have to deprive yourself so that you can ascend to something greater. | ||
| And that's, of course, heaven with our Lord. | ||
| Dr. Taylor Marshall, short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return in our Good Friday special here in the boardroom in just a moment. | ||
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We're going to return in our Good Friday special here in | |
| ♪♪ | ||
| . Okay, welcome back. | ||
| We're in the war room, and this is our Good Friday special. | ||
| We're very honored to have Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall, one of the more, I guess, controversial thinkers, thought leaders, writers in the traditional Catholic movement. | ||
| Tomorrow, we're going to do, we're having a special. | ||
| I have Jack Posobiec, who will be in studio, and also Joe Allen will be with us, who heads up and does all of our work in transhumanism. | ||
| He also has a master's degree from Boston University in theology, where Dr. | ||
| Martin Luther King went. We're going to be talking about Anne Catherine Emmerich and going through some of her visions and about The Descent into Hell much more and how this series of books inspired and was the basis for the screenplay for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and for his new movie that's going to come out in a year or two on the resurrection. | ||
| Dr. Marshall, you've done a lot of work in this area about The Descent into Hell and going about Thomas Aquinas and I know in modern Particularly in prosperity gospel evangelical Christians, I'm not picking on them, but the prosperity gospel evangelical Christians and the social justice warrior, you know, Christ as a social worker, Catholicism, they don't really talk about the penitential side of this. | ||
| They don't really talk about heaven and hell. | ||
| When you're with some of these people, it's almost like an embarrassment. | ||
| You're such a troglodype even bringing it up. | ||
| Walk us through your thoughts about this and the reality of hell and how central that is to the message of Christianity. | ||
| Yes, so the message of Christianity going back to the earliest days, so you'll see this very strongly in Catholicism and also in Eastern Orthodoxy, maybe even More in Eastern Orthodoxy is that in the Old Testament, from Adam and Eve all the way up to Jesus on the cross, | ||
| when the righteous died, the faithful died, so we're talking about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esther, Sarah, Rebecca, all these Old Testament people, where did they go? | ||
| It was the universal teaching, and still is, that they didn't go to heaven. | ||
| Why? Because the gates of heaven were closed. | ||
| Just like when Adam and Eve sinned, they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. | ||
| It was closed off. The teaching is when Christ died on the cross, he opened back up the gates of heaven. | ||
| And so the idea is, just as Christ is fully God and fully man, he also has a body and a soul. | ||
| His soul descended into hell. | ||
| We say this in the Apostles' Creed. | ||
| A lot of people are like, what's going on? | ||
| Did Christ burn in hell? | ||
| No, Christ did not burn in hell. | ||
| He went to the lower world in order to proclaim and preach the That death had been conquered, Satan had been defeated, and then to transfer the Old Testament faithful from what's called limbo—have you ever heard of waiting in limbo? | ||
| This is the idea, waiting in limbo—also called Abraham's bosom—and bring them to heaven. | ||
| And this is recorded several times in the New Testament. | ||
| For example, at 1 Peter 3.19, St. | ||
| Peter, the apostle, says, Christ coming in spirit preached to those spirits that were in prison— End quote. | ||
| So, Peter's talking about the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and right in the middle of this he throws in this idea that Christ, in his soul, in his spirit, descended to the underworld and preached, preached the gospel, presumably, and saved them. | ||
| Also, Peter in Acts says the same thing, that Christ went and loosed the sorrows of hell. | ||
| He went down in there. | ||
| So, It's not the idea that Christ has to suffer in hell. | ||
| He doesn't go into the fires of hell. | ||
| There are sections of hell in Jewish theology and in Catholic and Orthodox theology. | ||
| There's a purgative area, which we call purgatory, where you actually can get out of. | ||
| People pray for you and you suffer. | ||
| There's Gehenna or Jehenna, which in Jewish theology, also in Catholicism, is the hell of the dam. | ||
| You never get out. It's horrible. | ||
| That's where Satan is. So the idea is these people are waiting in limbo. | ||
| Christ descends. | ||
| into hell as a victor, triumphant. | ||
| All the Eastern icons, the Western images of this is Christ trampling down the gates of hell. | ||
| He's standing on the gates and he's reaching out to Adam and Eve and all the people in there and pulling them out. | ||
| Why? Because on Good Friday, he died on the cross and the veil in the temple tore from top to bottom. | ||
| You see this in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. | ||
| It's beautifully done. What does that mean? | ||
| It means the gates of heaven The entry to the Holy of Holies, which was separated by veil, is ripped by whom? | ||
| God. God rips it from top to bottom. | ||
| And now humans, through Jesus Christ, because he died for our sins, can again enter into communion with God in the Holy of Holies, in heaven. | ||
| So this mystery is called the harrowing of hell, is the proper theological term. | ||
| The harrowing of hell is celebrated on Holy Saturday. | ||
| It's this mystery that in quietness, Christ descended as a victor and rescued the Old Testament faithful, Abraham, all of them, and brings them to heaven. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's part of our theology going back to the earliest days of the Church. | ||
| Sadly, it's something that most people don't talk about. | ||
| They do Good Friday, Jesus died. | ||
| They do Easter, He rose again. | ||
| But that mystery of what goes on in the parenthesis deserves our attention because it's in the New Testament. | ||
| Well, let me go, because this obviously would be one of the foundational and most important parts of a religion. | ||
| But it is controversial in two things. | ||
| Number one, there was a huge fight of whether even to keep it into the creed. | ||
| So this has been a fight of just the phrase, descended into hell. | ||
| The other was, did he go to hell to suffer, as you just talked about, or did he go in victory? | ||
| So take both of them. | ||
| Why was it so controversial that it was going to be part Of the Apostles' Creed and Nicene, what was the controversy that even the early Christians, it seemed like the theologians were divided about this very concept, and then I want to go to the concept of did he go to suffer and bear the suffering of the damned, or did he go in victory to free the damned? | ||
| Yeah, so in the former you have early manuscripts of the Apostles' Creed that have into hell, he descended into hell, and don't have it, and as you stated, the Nicene Creed does not Have this mystery if he descended in hell. | ||
| The reason for this is, when you look at Greek and when you look at Latin, we have the word hell in English. | ||
| When you go into the ancient languages, in Hebrew you have Sheol, which just means basically underworld or grave area. | ||
| In Greek you have Hades, you have Jehenna, you have Tartarus, you have all these different words for it. | ||
| The popular mind hears that and they're thinking, like, if I say to you, go to hell, that's bad. | ||
| I'm telling you to go suffer, to go burn on fire in a lake of fire forever. | ||
| So that phraseology can be scandalous to people. | ||
| However, as it was worked out and it was explained, Christ did not descend into hell to suffer. | ||
| He descended as a victor, triumphant, destroying the gates of hell, destroying the works of Satan, the pomps of Satan. | ||
| So, once that theology is clear, it's mainstream. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, Steve, the Jesuit theologians in the 40s and 50s and 60s, primarily with a Jesuit theologian, Father Balthazar, he worked out a theology that is considered by many to be heretical. | ||
| He says that Christ descended into hell. | ||
| Hang on, I just want to say, he's also one of the more prominent Jesuit theologians overall, but particularly Jesuits, correct? | ||
| Correct. I mean, yeah, of the last hundred years, he's in the top three. | ||
| So he's very influential. | ||
| And he's very liberal. | ||
| I mean, extremely liberal. | ||
| He's the one who says we should hope that all men be saved. | ||
| And part of that theology is related to the fact that he teaches—this is not Catholic, there's been dissertations written on it—that Christ descended into hell and had solidarity with the damned is his phrase work. | ||
| There is no church father, there is no one in the Catholic or Eastern tradition who will ever say that. | ||
| This was something new in the 1900s, that Christ ascended into hell and had solidarity with the damned. | ||
| He had solidarity with Judas. | ||
| He had solidarity with Pharaoh. | ||
| He had solidarity with everybody. And this gives you the hope, the Jesuits teach, that all will be saved. | ||
| And I've spent a lot of time podcasting, writing, you know, Writing articles trying to show that there is nothing in the early church that has this idea, because it basically borders on Christ's suffering in hell, that he's entering into the realm of the doubt. | ||
| Was the connection they were trying to make is that he was in solidarity with the suffering of fallen man? | ||
| Was that the concept that they were trying to push? | ||
| Yeah, but particularly with the damned. | ||
| So, traditionally, Christ comes to The Hades to the underworld and he says, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, you looked forward. | ||
| You didn't fully understand who I was going to be or what I was going to do, but you believed and you looked into the future and you placed your hope into a Messiah. | ||
| That is me. You are believing in me. | ||
| You are saved. That was the traditional teaching. | ||
| In the 1900s, no one wants to believe in hell. | ||
| No one wants to believe in damnation. | ||
| This is all embarrassing to social justice warriors. | ||
| This is the part of Christianity they don't like. | ||
| So in order to sort of scrub it away, they say, well, Christ, when he descended into hell, he actually descended and he was with all the damned people, and they kind of just had this solidarity or like this group hug of Jesus and all the damned. | ||
| And so we can kind of insinuate from that that he also saved all the damned as well. | ||
| And that's the problem. Give us this concept again of the harrowing of hell. | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| Harrowing, I believe, refers to—it's an agricultural term. | ||
| So you're sort of— Bringing up or, you know, like as you prepare earth and bring things up, I believe that's the original context. | ||
| I should be wrong. And so, you know, in ancient culture, that's sort of how they understood, you know, Christ kind of goes down into the earth and brings up from the earth, you know, these ancient saints from the Old Testament. | ||
| So that's the harrowing of hell. | ||
| One of the things that you've kind of dedicated your life to as a convert, first of really as a convert to Christianity and then as a convert from more of the evangelical or Protestant to Catholic and then to the Catholic to the most traditional side, is how the church itself has gotten away from its root teachings and then needs to get back to more of a traditional side. | ||
| We've got about a minute here before we go to break. | ||
| Walk us through that. Why are you so focused? | ||
| You talk about the infiltration of the of the church is this magnificent book you wrote, and I recommend everybody read it, right? | ||
| Infiltration. You're very much going back to source teachings and source documents in a Catholic church that used to be this way. | ||
| And you're saying that the Catholic church, more than any other religious institution, has lost its way. | ||
| I tell you what, let's wait, and we'll come through the break, because I want to make sure you get a lot of runway on this, because it's The infiltration, and having spent a lot of time in Rome and the Vatican, this book will chill you to the bones. | ||
| There's been other books that have led up to this, but this book is quite harrowing and very scary, and it just came out a year or two ago. | ||
| So Dr. Taylor Marshall, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return in just a moment. | ||
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So, let's go. | |
| We're going to return in just a moment. | ||
| The end. | ||
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| Thank you for watching. | ||
| Okay. I really want to thank All America's Voice, the team in Denver, for always helping us with these specials. | ||
| Dr. Tom Williams, Dr. | ||
| Marshall Taylor, Dr. | ||
| Taylor was on the show last night to tee it up. | ||
| You know, we really, these specials are very important to us, whether they're Memorial Day or Fourth of July, you know, the patriotic holidays that we put a lot of time and effort into, the team does, really, too. | ||
| And then, obviously, the religious days. | ||
| We think this is particularly important, as we talked about throughout the show and then with Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall last night, given the massacre at the Covenant Christian School, we are in a different time, and I think it's very appropriate For traditional Catholics and for our Christian audience to think about in the two most reflective and somber days in the Christian calendar, Good Friday and Holy Saturday exactly what the meaning of all this is. | ||
| Obviously all of our Jewish audience with the traditional Passover. | ||
| But there's something we've really crossed over into something I think is quite dangerous and quite dark. | ||
| That's what we had Dr. Williams on here about his amazing book, The Coming Christian Persecution. | ||
| And to relate it back to the beginnings of the Christian faith and particularly To the persecutions by the official apparatus of the Roman state and this concept of accommodation. | ||
| And this is why with Dr. | ||
| Marshall last night and then today, to talk about you cannot... | ||
| This issue of accommodation is going to be a bigger and bigger issue as you go forward. | ||
| You have the white form of being a martyr, which is the harassment every day and the thwarting of you professionally and the deplatforming of you and making sure you don't have opportunities. | ||
| And then that can transfer over to obviously the much more dangerous, the red martyrdom. | ||
| And you're starting to see that. | ||
| I mean, the Covenant School situation. | ||
| You can't look away from that. | ||
| In fact, you've got to get down and got to make sure you fully understand it and is exposed for what it is. | ||
| So I really want to thank Sophia Institute for making available Dr. | ||
| Tom Williams from Rome for the last couple of hours and always Dr. | ||
| Taylor Marshall always makes himself available and has such a great and tremendous following. | ||
| For our audience, the next couple of weeks, as people get back, and not next week, but we'll be going through it in depth, but the following week, the intensity is going to pick up on the political and the cultural side, but I think this is the weekend to be with family, | ||
| this is the weekend to You know, understand your faith, to spend time with your faith, to spend time with divine reading, and things that draw you closer to whatever angle of attack you take on your faith, whether you're evangelical Protestant, mainstream Protestant, of the Jewish faith, or traditional Catholic. | ||
| So we really want to thank everybody for joining us here. | ||
| We're going to be back live on Monday with the firing off the football. | ||
| So much going on. Over the weekend, I'll be updating everybody on Getter. | ||
| So make sure you go to Getter. | ||
| Download it also. | ||
| And if you can support our sponsor. | ||
| The great Mike Lindell. | ||
| And Mike Lindell's Christianity is something to behold. | ||
| I've seen this guy put under incredible pressure. | ||
| Not just business pressure, political pressure, but also legal pressure. | ||
| And the way he just comes through with that great smile and that great attitude. | ||
| So go to MyPillow.com, promo code WARROOM. Go check it out over the weekend. | ||
| Have a fantastic weekend. | ||
| Have a great Easter. | ||
| We always do these shows that are kind of... | ||
| I don't want to say dark, but we try to get into the issues that maybe we don't get a chance to talk about in the spiritual warfare of every day in the war room. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| I want to thank the production team in Denver. | ||
| It always goes out of the way to work with us on these specials. | ||
| I want to thank my production team here in the nation's capital and wherever we roam for putting this together. | ||
| Maybe we can start the beautiful music. | ||
| It's not exactly traditional religious music, but I think it's some of the most powerful music out there. | ||
| It's Mozart's aspects of Mozart's Requiem. | ||
| So we can go ahead and we'll end the show at that. | ||
| I'll be up on Getter all weekend. | ||
| Make sure you check it out. | ||
| If you're on Getter, you can DM me. | ||
| And if not, I will see you have a great rest of Holy Saturday. | ||
| Also have a great Easter Sunday with the family, and we will see you back here in the War Room, live, 10 a.m. | ||
| Eastern Daylight Time, here at Real America's Voice in the War Room. | ||
|
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See you back here Monday.. |
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