The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 98 – Frank Beckwith

Episode 98: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show podcast, host Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. Frank Beckwith, a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University, to discuss the life and intellectual legacy of Pope Benedict XVI (formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) following his recent passing. Dr. Beckwith, a respected Catholic scholar who has published extensively in academic journals, provides evangelical Christians with insights into why they should pay attention to Benedict’s teachings and writings.

The discussion covers Benedict’s remarkable background – from his early life in Nazi Germany where he reluctantly joined the Hitler Youth before leaving with his father’s help, to his rise as a world-class theologian who preferred academic work over administrative duties but served faithfully in various Vatican positions under Pope John Paul II.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:01):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. We’re coming to you from the beautiful Mike S. Adams studio at the Summit Ministries headquarters in the little hippie town of Manatee Springs, Colorado. This show is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Liftable, Edifi. Wherever you get your podcast, I’d love for you to review the show so that other people can find out about it. Why? Because this is the show where I interview major thought leaders to show how our worldview changes everything.

Today’s guest is going to comment on something that I think evangelicals will be very interested to know about. Now, Catholics would be familiar with perhaps the writings, the teachings of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict the 16th and recently passed away. So we’re going to talk with somebody who’s very familiar with his writings about why Evangelicals should pay attention to them. Our guest today is Frank Beckwith.

(00:58):
Dr. Beckwith is a professor of philosophy and church and state studies at Baylor University. He’s published in all different kinds of journals. He’s written several books, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and this is going to be a really insightful interview to kind of break down the influence of this individual as we saw people around the world mourning his passing and why even people who aren’t Catholics would be interested to know what he taught and how it can change our lives. Welcome to the show, Dr. Frank Beckwith. Welcome back to the Dr. Jeff show podcast.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (01:36):
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:38):
Now, you’ve been on the show before. We talked about pro-life issues, and it was such a fascinating conversation. You took us really deep on a lot of aspects to that topic that sometimes don’t get talked about. How do we understand this philosophically? How do we understand pro-life issues theologically? But this show’s going to be a little bit different, and I’m really grateful for your joining.

A lot of people remember in the news just within the past few weeks, the passing of the Pope Emeritus Benedict the 16th, and I think I saw a lot of things in the Evangelical Christian press about him passing, but not a lot about the influence that he had. And I wanted to talk with you for a couple of reasons. You’re a well-respected Catholic scholar, you’re a well-respected philosopher, your professor at Baylor University talking to us on your day off from teaching in your home office. So thank you for taking the time to do that.

Frank, tell us a little bit, just give us a little bit of the history of Pope Benedict and then I’d like to just dig into why evangelical Christians who I think make up most of the audience here. We have evangelical Christians who have Catholic Christians, but probably mostly evangelical Christians, why evangelical Christians should be paying attention to what this brilliant man wrote and said.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (03:02):
Yeah, so he was born Joseph Inger in Germany. He grew up during the ascendancy of Nazim. In fact, he was as most young men in Germany at that time, he was recruited into the Hitler youth or whatever they were called, and he didn’t want to join and eventually left with the assistance of his father who was an opponent of the Nazis he went to. He was recognized very early on as a very brilliant young man.

He eventually went to seminary or college seminary and then became a world-class theologian and then eventually was selected to be a bishop, I think, by Pope Paul I vi. And then he was then elevated by John Paul II to several different important posts in the Vatican, including a post in which he was in charge of basically the doctrinal direction of the church before. In fact, from what my understanding is from some of the things that he had said when he was selected to be part of the kind of bureaucracy of the Vatican, is that he was doing it basically because it was a duty.

(04:37):
He would rather have spent his time teaching and doing research. He was by nature a professor and being the head of a religious organization, one as large as obviously the Catholic church, involves a different set of skills. But he nevertheless took those positions and eventually was elected to be Pope In 2005, soon after the passing of John Paul II, his work in theology is quite significant. In fact, he didn’t even stop doing work after he became Pope.

And he published early on in his papacy a three-part book series called Jesus of Nazareth, which is considered by not only Catholic scholars, but Protestant evangelical ones as just an outstanding analysis of the gospels. And one of the things that Benedict focused on was the centrality of Christ for not only the Christian life, but also how best we’d understand scripture, how best we to understand church history.

(05:54):
So for him, Christ was the center. And interestingly enough, when he died moments before he passed away, those that were by his bedside said, his last words were, Jesus, I love you. And then he passed. But his work is, has it been an influence on me and my own intellectual development? And I can tell you a little bit about that as we move through the interview, but he was a towering figure. One that is very rare in the history of any church you have typically people that become bishops, they’re usually pretty smart folks, but they tend not to be professional theologians.

So to have somebody who, not only a professional theologian, but one that will be read decades from now, centuries from now, is pretty significant. And I must admit, as a Catholic, I think we were spoiled, Catholics were spoiled over the past 30 years or so with two popes, John Paul II and Benedict, who were in the case of John Paul II. He was a philosopher and Benedict a theologian.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:20):
You’ve brought up a really great point. I don’t think it occurs to a lot of people that those two men were brilliant scholars. They would’ve had they not been elected to be, Pope would still have lived all of their lives as people making a significant contribution to the scholarship in a Christian worldview. John Paul II, for example, had two doctoral degrees, two doctoral degrees. I mean it, it’s unbelievable the level at which these guys were working on the things that were really important.

But let’s talk about Joseph Razer for a minute. Of course, one of the places I first started reading his writings was in the journal First Things, which was initially produced by Richard John Newhouse, who was a Catholic theologian here in the United States. And that was a publication widely respected by Evangelical and Catholic leaders alike. And then Dr. Raser would regularly publish in that journal, all different kinds of things. But let’s talk about, how did his work come to your attention, particularly? And how has it shaped the way you teach philosophy?

Dr. Frank Beckwith (08:34):
Yeah, so years ago, one of my colleagues at Baylor, Ralph Wood, who just recently retired, he’s actually a Baptist scholar and is a theologian and a scholar of literature. He’s written works on GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, Flannery O’Connor. He taught this course. It was kind of a first year introduction to Christian doctrine course. And he used, in fact, I have a copy of it with me, this book called Introduction to Christianity.

(09:12):
And I had not read it before, and I read it, and reading it, it struck me that what Ratzinger was concerned with in the book was addressing modern people who had objections to Christianity. And so the book, and he wrote this I think in the seventies, 1970s, and he saw way in advance what we’re living through today in terms of unbelief. And so the book is written for people that at least in his native Germany, were leaving the faith. And so you can read it and it makes sense why Ralph used it.

I mean, the book obviously is written by a Catholic priest, but the issues that he discusses or issues that I think are universal in the Christian world. So he talks about the relationship between Christianity and philosophy and how the church from its very beginnings when it encountered philosophy, had this kind of mindset that God had in fact given us the power to reason, and that some of what philosophers who weren’t Christian were saying could be helpful to explaining the faith.

(10:45):
And one of the things that he points out in the book is that if you even think about the beginning of the gospel of John, where John says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God. He says this not only in this book, but he says in other places that the imprint of Greek categories is found in the Book of John. He’s in a sense, if you think about when the gospel first appears in the history of humanity, it appears in the Roman Empire with citizens who are embracing particular philosophical views that make it almost easier for the gospel to be communicated.

Think for example of Paul on Mars Hill in Acts chapter 17, right? So he’s before in the first part of Acts chapter 17, he and Silas are in a synagogue and they’re talking to Jewish people that have doubts about what Paul is preaching, and he addresses them by appealing to the Old Testament.

(11:55):
But then when he goes to Athens, what does he do? Well, he says, I’m going to tell you about the unknown God. You have this temple to this unknown God, and is he in whom we live and move and have our being? And he’s there actually using language that is kind of platonic and they understand. And then he moves on from there.

He says, well, I will tell you something else, that he has revealed himself through a man who died and was crucified and rose from the dead. And many of them walked away. They thought that was silly, but some actually did come to believe. And so one of the things that Ratzinger is I think trying to communicate in this book is that Christianity, because it is in fact true, is the sort of, it’s a kind of revealed message that is going to in some cases or in many cases, appeal to a natural inclination that human beings have for transcendence.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:09):
Wow. Now, when you’re communicating this with your students at Baylor University, is it your sense because it is a Baptist university, your chances of meeting people who believe in God and Jesus on that campus are substantially higher than a lot of other campuses and even other universities where you’ve taught? How are they reacting to that?

Dr. Frank Beckwith (13:40):
Yeah, I think even Christian students that grow up in Christian homes, they are inundated by the culture, the wider culture. And even if they attend church, even if they grow up in a devout family, they still have some of the same objections, or I shouldn’t say objections, but concerns about Christianity that are raised in the wider culture.

I mean, I find it kind of astonishing, and this is why I think Summit Ministries is great, is that we should never assume people that grow up in a Christian home are in some way insulated from the wider culture. And it’s weird to hear some of my Christian students’ concerns about Christianity that you think, well, wait a second, that’s been answered for a long time. How come they never have been introduced to that?

And I think it’s because I think a lot of times we just take it for granted, and we don’t realize that the sorts of challenges that we attribute to unbelievers, they just naturally appropriate. Many of them continue to believe, but they just don’t think there are answers to these particular objections or they set them aside. So the thing that amazes me is how little they actually, I would just say how little they know, that’s not fair. But I think how they’ve never been introduced to ways of responding to challenges, even in their home churches.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:36):
Yeah, yeah. Well, they’re very bright young people. Obviously, they’re going to a top university, but if they haven’t had people who put them into a direct encounter with the kind of evidence that you’re talking about, they might have never considered it. In fact, they might even consider the very idea of reason and logic as a cultural artifact of Christianity, perhaps with some strains of Greco-Roman thinking in it.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (16:01):
So there’s a couple of classes I teach at Baylor, one called Faith, Reason, and Christian Belief, and that class, there’s different ways you can teach a class like that. Some people at Baylor who teach a similarly worded class will introduce the students to unbeliever challenges of unbelief and then Christian response. And that’s one way to teach it, and it’s a fine way to teach it. But what I like to do is I have them read different ways in which Christians have wrestled with the same issues. That is, I want to introduce to them kind of the pluralism within Christianity on issues of faith and reason.

I have my own views about faith and reason, but I know that there are other Christians that have slightly different views. And I think it’s important to tell young Christian people, you are part of a 2000 year old sophisticated, well thought out theological tradition that has within it some of the brightest, most intelligent, creative people, some of whom have struggled with the faith, just like you’re struggling. And so the way I like to do it is to kind of say, you’re part of this. Let’s have a conversation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:23):
Yeah, yeah. Tell us about the conversation that Dr. Zener initiated. I think you had mentioned this, and as we were prepping for the show, this Regensburg address, because that was a direct analysis of the relationship between faith and reason, but I don’t know too many people who are that familiar with it.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (17:50):
So that address was given I think in 2006. So he had been Pope for a little over a year, maybe a year and a half or so. It was September, 2006. It was to his former doctoral students. So apparently for years, his doctoral student, they would’ve this retreat every September. And when he became Pope, that didn’t change. They still had it.

And so in the address, he talks about something that he actually had published on many times, and that is the relationship between faith and reason and how they work together in the development of Christian theology. And so he talks about that. If you look at the history of Christianity, when the church throughout the ages has wrestled with questions, beginning with the Aryan heresy, which is an ancient heresy affirmed by Aria at Alexandria, that Jesus or the Son of God was created and that rejected by the Council of Nicea.

(19:04):
So he talks about how philosophy helps better understand these theological views, and he uses an illustration of an encounter between a Muslim sultan and a Christian in the Middle Ages where the Christian mentions the fact that what Muhammad had instructed some of his followers to do was unreasonable. That is in terms of persecuting those that were not accepting of Islam, and I’m no scholar of Islam. But soon after that, there was a huge controversy about that address.

A lot of people called Rat Pope Benedict Islamophobic. But what they missed was the sort of deeper thing that he was trying to communicate. And that was that when we read the Bible, we obviously believe it’s the inspired word of God, and we believe that we can acquire revealed truth from that. But the fact is we approach it with a set of assumptions that we make about what our predecessors have said, what we’ve inherited from those that have wrestled with some of these same issues. And that reason isolated from Revelation gets a kind of narrow view of what reason is. On the other hand, revelation without reason gets a kind of fanaticism.

(21:02):
So what he was trying to say is that reason and revelation work together, that human beings, and this is something that goes all the way back to Augustine and even I think St. Paul, right? So the idea that there are certain things that we can only know because God has revealed them to us, but then there are things that we can know as a result of our natural reason, and that they in principle should not be inconsistent with each other.

And so the Regensburg address became controversial because of this little illustration he uses. But the general theme of it I think is profoundly important, and it’s something that regardless of whether one is a Catholic or not, one can I think applaud what he was trying to accomplish in that address. It’s interesting that soon after that, that’s when I began reading another book of his called Truth Intolerance, and I discovered that’s where he had actually first talked about these things.

(22:24):
I called up a friend of mine, a friend of ours, J. P. Moreland, philosopher, evangelical philosopher at Biola. I read him a portion of truth intolerance over the phone. I said, who do you think that is? He actually said, isn’t that Dallas Willard? I said, no, it’s Pope Benedict. And so there’s interestingly, during the same time, there are people like JP Moreland, Dallas Willard, people not in the Catholic world, who are kind of defending a very similar understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. So it’s something I think that resonates with Christians from whatever tradition they find themselves.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:09):
I really like that. That’s a great illustration. So just to be clear, in the way, because the media reports were very critical of Pope Benedict, he was not dismissing the work that Muslims have done in the world of philosophy or math or other areas of science, nor was he dismissing the convictions of Muslims. What he was addressing was the need to tie reason and revelation together at all times rather than to view them as separate pursuits.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (23:47):
That’s right. So imagine let’s say a Christian that reads that one portion of where Jesus says, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off, or if your eye causes you sin, pull it out. And they go, well, my hand causes me to sin, so I’m going to get it amputated. What Joseph Ratzinger would say is that, no, you have to bring reason to the text and say, okay, so how have Christians understood that passage for generations? How did they look at it? Well, they looked at it as Jesus using an exaggeration in order to make a point about if in fact you place yourself in a position of temptation, get out of there.

(24:39):
I mean, the whole point of it, it’s a genre of speaking. It’s a way we use hyperbole as a way of expression. So that’s an example of using reason to wrestle with what the scripture teaches, because if you think about it, the idea that it’s permissible to amputate healthy organs seems unreasonable. So that’s what he’s trying to say. So I’ve used that illustration in class before to try to explain what he’s trying to say.

He’s not saying that you sort of just sit down and kind of figure out the whole council of God with your reason. What you do is you bring to the text what seems to be a kind of natural understanding of the obligation that we have to ourselves to live a healthy life, to live in ways that lead to our flourishing. It seems that if Jesus literally meant to chop off your hands, that would be inconsistent with that. And clearly that’s not the way the early church understood it. So that’s an example of, I think, what he’s trying to communicate.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:04):
Yeah. Well, that’s really good. Even the work we’ve done at Summit Ministries for so many years about teaching apologetics, helping students think through answers that are consistent with biblical revelation, but that you can also make sense of using your human reason does get some criticism. It does get criticism. There are people who say, well, the Apostle Paul says, don’t rely on human reasoning. And there are other people who say, you’re diminishing the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding you. So there are all different kinds of things that people say. Your students ask those kinds of questions, and how do you help them?

Dr. Frank Beckwith (26:45):
Yeah, sometimes they do. One of the things I try to tell them, especially with you mentioned the Holy Spirit, and I think it’s a mistake to always think of divine action or the activity of God as a kind of zero sum game, that it’s either the Holy Spirit or your reason. We think about the way in which we think of scripture. So we think of how, why is it, it’s actually sometimes called the theory of inscripturation.

So we say, for example, that Paul wrote the book of Romans. We believe that he wrote Galatians, John wrote three epistles, but we also say it’s the word of God. Now think about that. We say it’s a hundred percent the word of God. It’s a hundred percent written by these guys. And so we don’t think that they’re coauthors. We don’t think, well, God wrote half of Romans and Paul wrote the other half, sort of like Lennon and McCartney.

So that’s the great mystery. God is so powerful. He’s so omnipotent that he can use free creatures to communicate his message in their language without error. So if God can do that concerning scripture, why can’t he do that with other things? Why can’t the Holy Spirit be in the argument, so to speak?

(28:16):
So the idea that there’s an old joke of the guy’s in a flood and he’s on a rowboat and he prays to God to or he’s in his house. I’ve already blown the joke probably. So he’s in his house and the water is getting higher and higher. He is on the roof, and he prays to God, please save me God. And then a guy in a boat comes by and he says, come in the boat. He goes, no, I’m waiting for God to help me.

And then a helicopter comes by and he says, come on, jump on the ladder. And he doesn’t do anything. And another guy in a boat comes by and he makes the same offer and he says, I’m waiting for God. And then he drowns and he goes to heaven. He says, God, why didn’t you save me? He said, I sent you two boats and a helicopter.

(29:06):
There’s a sense in which, that we limit or we limit the possibilities of what God can do by thinking of him as a kind of just another creature in the universe who acts in place of us. And now sometimes he does do that. He sometimes does perform miracles, but sometimes, and most of the time I think, and I think you see this in scripture, he uses people, and sometimes you don’t really see how you’ve been used until you look in retrospect and you go, wow, I see the thin string of providence that connects all these things. And I think we forget that, and I think we limit God if we think that it’s either one thing or the other.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:54):
This is a great discussion. Thank you for putting it at that level. I’d like to close the time we have together by talking about something you mentioned earlier in the show that before being elected to be Pope, that Joseph Ratzinger was a very studious man, a man who was comfortable with his students teaching doctoral students, doing a scholarship, writing, reading, researching, and then to be called into a position of leadership was a dramatic departure from really, from what he might’ve assumed was his gifting.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (30:35):
That teaches us, I mean, yeah, the idea of being called to do something you don’t want to do is actually quite biblical. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. Abraham didn’t want to sacrifice Isaac. I mean, of course the angel intercedes at the last moment, but Jesus said, if this cup could pass from me, I mean, this is part of, I think what it means to be a Christian. Sometimes as I say this, I’m thinking a week from now I’ll be asked to be president of something and have to eat my words.

So I think the idea that what our plan for our lives is, God’s plan is, I mean, if we learn anything from scripture, that’s usually not the case. The great heroes are people that do things that they’re called to do even when they’d rather not do them. And so for him, from what I’ve never met Joseph Zenger, although I have several friends who did meet him and two who actually knew him quite well.

And according to what they tell me, he was a gentleman, very soft-spoken, but also committed to the historical doctrines of Christianity. And so during a brief period of time when he was in charge of, the name escapes me right now, the doctrinal office at the Vatican, he was nicknamed God’s Rottweiler, which was not a compliment.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:32):
It doesn’t sound gentle at all.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (32:35):
Because he had forced several theologians that were teaching at Catholic universities. They couldn’t teach certain courses because they were teaching heretical doctrine. And yet he got that reputation. But at the end of the day, he was doing it because he believed that holding the right beliefs in the long run was the right and correct thing to do.

And so sometimes even when you’re put in a position of authority, and I’m sure you’ve had this sort of thing happen at Summit. It happens everywhere. You have to sometimes make very difficult decisions, ones that are perfectly correct and justified but aren’t going to please people, but for what reason? Because you believe it advances the common good of the institution.

And so he gets this reputation of being this kind of tough enforcer, but that’s not the way he really was privately and personally. He was committed to correct doctrine. And that of course, in this day and age, regardless of whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, is going to have you on the outs with the wider culture. And that’s what happened to him.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:02):
Wow. At such a high level, it’s really humbling to hear that and to think about it. Now, Pope Benedict resigned as Pope after a number of years in that position. Talk about that briefly and what happened, what was going on, and then what he sort of did from that point forward until his death.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (34:28):
Yeah. So yeah, that was a shock to most everyone. There had only been, I think he was only the third Pope to resign.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:40):
Out of how many are we talking?

Dr. Frank Beckwith (34:42):
Yeah, 260 something. And there might’ve been, I actually was looking this up, and there’s a dispute when you’re getting back to the fifth or sixth century, but the last one to resign was I think 500 years ago, I think, Celestine. And so he resigned. He said he resigned because he felt he was too old and couldn’t deal with the sorts of day-to-day complexities that a person in that position has to deal with. According to several people close to him. He thought he wasn’t going to live maybe two or three more years. So he lived for almost a full decade. In fact, he actually lived longer the time of his life after being Pope was longer than his time being Pope.

(35:48):
And for many Catholics, they were kind of upset about this because he was in many ways a defender of very traditional Catholic beliefs. But while he basically lived quietly in a section of Vatican City with, he had a couple of people there, other priests that he lived with, but he did mostly reading and writing, and he met with people every once in a while.

There was once or twice where he had said things publicly or said things privately, which leaked out, which caused somewhat of controversy, but generally he tried to stay out of the way of his successor, Pope Francis. And they’re two very remarkably different people. So the last eight years of his life he met, it was basically kind of a contemplative life of prayer. And I think he was probably as surprised as anyone for how long he lived afterwards.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:05):
Well, that’s one of the marks of a leader is how to know when your time is done and then to be gracious in leaving that position behind and not trying to grab onto it by continuing to exert influence.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (37:23):
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:24):
That’s really a remarkable legacy.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (37:28):
Yeah. I think people speculate as, I mean, he believed that God told him to resign, so he says that, I don’t doubt that’s what he believed, but there are some that regardless of whether you think God told him or not, I think he saw a lot of problems in the Catholic Church that as Pope he could not resolve. I mean, one of the things that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that just because someone is the leader of an organization, especially one as large and as unwieldy as the Roman Catholic Church, it doesn’t mean that you can do anything you want.

I mean, you have to give people orders and they have to carry them out, and you also can’t know everything that’s going on. You have to trust people under you. And so one theory that people have offered is that he did it because he thought that the only way that the church was going to deal with some of its problems was for it all to just rise to the surface and that this was his way to sort of let that happen. Again, I’m just speculating from what others have suggested. I have no idea. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:49):
Yeah. Well, a remarkable man, a remarkable legacy, and I appreciate your breaking that down for us. Frank, you did mention that as Pope, he wrote three volumes that you could take a look at if you’re interested in knowing sort of how he thought processed things, I’m sure the archives of that publication we mentioned earlier, first things would be available as well. You could find some writings there.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (39:20):
Yeah, you could find, and then if you just, I suspect that there are probably a few websites out there that actually have his collection of his accessible works with PDFs or other forms of publication. So yeah, I think you just Google his name and you’ll get lots of stuff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:42):
Yeah, great.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (39:42):
But of all the addresses, I think the Regansburg address, it’s easy to read, it’s quick, and I think that’s something I highly recommend for people to read because it really gets at the heart of his understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:00):
Yeah. Frank, thanks so much for being on the show again, I really appreciate it. This has been a really wonderful discussion.

Dr. Frank Beckwith (40:07):
Well, thanks for having me, Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:09):
I want to say thank you to Dr. Frank Beckwith for joining some of the Dr. Jeff Show podcast today. As I mentioned, Dr. Beckwith is a professor at Baylor University. You can find out about the philosophy program there going to baylor.edu. Also, he’s a great resource to help communicate some of the connecting points between evangelical Christians and Catholic Christians. There are a lot of differences, but there are a lot of similarities as well, and it’s really interesting to talk about all of this. So thank you so much for joining in the show today. I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

(40:42):
Hey everybody. The Dr. Jeff Show podcast is part of the Ministry of Summit Ministries. Now we’re in the Summit Ministry Studio, the Mike S. Adams studio here in Manitou Springs, Colorado. This studio was built by people like you, people who gave a few dollars, some who were able to give thousands of dollars, but they built a studio and millions of people are being reached through the work that takes place here.

Let me present you with another opportunity. How would you like to have that kind of a legacy in the life of a young person? This year, you could sponsor a young person to attend one of our Summit Ministries two week programs. Basically, it’s $33 an hour for training a young person, and they’ll receive about 60 hours of training. During those two weeks, you could sponsor an hour or two or three or maybe more. Maybe you’d want to sponsor a young person to attend.

I personally interact with young adults who’ve been through this program and whose lives have been completely changed, some of them in just one hour of teaching, changed the whole course of their lives. Would you help us get young adults trained who are going to be the leaders for the next generation?

(41:47):
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