Our Outpost with Joseph and Crystal Gruber
Our Outpost with Joseph and Crystal Gruber
We just want to awaken authentic Catholic culture through holy matrimony. We spent well over a decade as Catholic missionaries on college campuses and in the parish setting, and now are devoting our energy to form Catholic men and women to live out the call of matrimony, as well as the call to missionary discipleship, in their ordinary, everyday lives.
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He might be a Catholic saint one day!
John Michael is a great preacher. Some people are just more spiritual than others.
This is amazing
A deep 5 on the scale of relevance. Thank you!
Love it!
Thanks for having me on!
Hey 👋 I am kinda down. My mother in law told my wife there’s something wrong with me. That cuts deep because it makes me wonder what if she’s right ? I only make $50,000 in a dead end job, and have no ability to make friends despite much volunteering. I told my wife if she wants to leave let’s just get it over with. She denies she will of course. And I don’t think she wants to. But women are all about what people say I know it’s taking a toll. I just feel down and like a failure. I don’t have skills or personality to get a good corporate job. I’m lucky to get the $50,000.
Hello @catholicconvert2119! I will say that we don't address the initial making of friends in this talk. But this is where friendships of use and of pleasure are so essential. Almost every friendship of virtue, in my experience, grows from a friendship of use or of pleasure-- so these would be the friendships with co-workers and fellow volunteers or with neighbors or people at church or people in a club. Then comes trying to grow in intimacy with them, as far as they want to reciprocate. I've found some of the friendliest people at a club called Toastmasters-- there's a good chance such a club meets in whatever town or city you live in, and if you drop by to check it out, you should find a nice welcome. It's a club that teaches public speaking, which may help your situation if you feel incompetent right now. They're very encouraging, as a whole. Otherwise, it seems like finding friends is one of the larger problems of our society. You're not alone in feeling alone. But if there's no one around your marriage speaking up for it, then it's worth finding people who want to support your marriage. We have another podcast, called "Love Your Marriage"-- there aren't many episodes of it yet, but we want it to be short and encouraging for those who are living out the sacrament of matrimony.
(18:30) "The first is, to hold the truth of Scripture without wavering. The second is that since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation, only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it, if it be proved with certainty to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing." St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 68, A. 1
I'm curious....what were the outcomes of the two different approaches on the two campuses? Did you have more encounters that resulted in conversations with the MIT approach, or the Carnegie approach? Did one strategy result in more follow-up by the students?
Comparing the two campuses is hard, since we couldn't do opt-out evangelization at CMU and we didn't do almost any opt-in evangelization at MIT. But at the third campus we served at, Western Washington University, we did do a mix of both. The most notable thing about it was that for my teammates and the Catholic students alike, the opt-in (i.e. cookies and conversation) was a stepping stone to becoming comfortable for opt-out evangelization. And correspondingly, the students who had trouble focusing on new people who were across a table from them had even more trouble approaching students without a table between them. The other nice feature of being able to do both is that it gives a reference point for the opt-out evangelization-- we could always tell the students we met more randomly on campus that we also were at a table in the middle of campus every Wednesday midday, so they could always opt-in if they wanted to later. The reality on the college campus, I've found, is that it's hard to start a new relationship anytime other than the very beginning of the year. In that way, most of the school year is actually pretty close to the rest of adult life-- an uphill battle to build relationships. So neither were astoundingly successful for follow-up, though we did form some relationships each way. Interestingly, the relationships we formed with people via opt-out strategies (talking to people in lines for food, sitting with them at a meal, striking up a conversation with people walking through campus, etc.) always felt more real to me, for what it's worth-- they felt more like relationships formed between two people as people, rather than two people, one as a student and the other as someone running a tabling event.
Sola Scriptura simply cannot be found in the Fathers, as the many historians I cite (mostly Protestant) repeatedly affirm. All my research thus far has convinced me all the more that these scholars are absolutely correct. To state otherwise is (in my opinion) historical revisionism and anachronism. I have massively cited Protestant scholars in this regard, and I find very little that is in disagreement with the Catholic position. I have even shown how these historians note the distinction between material and formal sufficiency in various Fathers’ views. I see little or no conflict with Catholic beliefs, and much conflict with classic Protestant, present-day evangelical belief in sola Scriptura. I’ll take Protestant historians J. N. D. Kelly, Philip Schaff, and Jaroslav Pelikan over pseudo-scholars, historical revisionists, merely self-published William Webster and David T. King any day. If a Church Father states that the Church is necessary for interpretation and the standard of orthodoxy, and that Tradition is binding, then he does not believe in sola Scriptura. It’s as simple as that. One must take each Father’s thought in the context of his overall thought. If we only quote their thoughts about Scripture, then our only information will be about their view of Scripture. We have to also see what they say about Tradition and the Church as well, because sola Scriptura is a position which takes a particular stand concerning the relevant importance and authority of those two entities. Whether a Church Father actually holds one or the other position regarding sola Scriptura can only be determined by seeing what he also says about Tradition and the Church. What anti-Catholic Protestant polemicists constantly do is to find a statement that doesn’t immediately contradict what is entailed in sola Scriptura, and they then illogically assume that the person has no viewpoint on the authority of Tradition and the Church, based on the one passage alone. Again, I have shown that in every case of Fathers I have dealt with in great depth, that this assumption was fallacious. It’s a classic case of an isolated “proof text” thought to mean or assert what it does not assert. It’s a logical error, brought on by extreme eagerness to anachronistically read into the Fathers a latter-day Protestant perspective on authority. In my section on Irenaeus, I cited Jaroslav Pelikan criticizing precisely this mindset: Clearly it is an anachronism to superimpose upon the discussions of the second and third centuries categories derived from the controversies over the relation of Scripture and tradition in the 16th century, for ‘in the ante-Nicene Church . . . there was no notion ofsola Scriptura, but neither was there a doctrine of traditio sola.’ Yet this is constantly done; almost in every case. It is not only bad, inaccurate history, but also rhetorically vacuous and logically atrocious. To illustrate this sort of reasoning, consider the following analogies: A Church father might say something like, for example, “There is nothing greater than Holy Scripture.” The anti-Catholic then jumps on that and triumphantly exclaims that he believes in sola Scriptura. But this is wooden, hyper-literalistic interpretation. The Church Father can say this in the same sense that I could say all the following, and not be understood as contradicting myself: 1. “There is nothing greater than fresh-baked bread.” 2. “There is nothing greater than a fresh-baked apple pie, right out of the oven.” 3. “There is nothing greater than one’s wedding day.” 4. “There is nothing greater than the birth of your first child.” 5. “There is nothing greater than the feeling of getting right with God.” He can say it in the same way that the Apostle John wrote: “you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything . . .” (1 John 3:27; RSV). According to the anti-Catholic mode of patristic interpretation, John is obviously excluding Christian teachers, right? After all, that is the logic of the sentence; it is inescapable: “no need” means there is no need for teaching to be provided! The “anointing” teaches the believer “about everything,” therefore (quite obviously) there is nothing left to be taught; hence no need for teachers. Who could doubt it? My goal is to to see what the Church Fathers (as a whole or in the main and particularly) believed about the Bible and its relationship to Tradition, the Church, and apostolic succession. If they viewed the relationship as classic Protestantism did, and present-day “orthodox” or “conservative” Protestantism (evangelicalism) does, then they advocated sola Scriptura. If they didn’t do that, they did not hold to sola Scriptura. It’s as simple as that. If the anti-Catholic or even a more ecumenical, serious Protestant researcher demonstrates conclusively that 1, 2, or 10 Fathers believed in sola Scriptura, that still doesn’t affect Catholic doctrine or our historical “case” in the least, as we agree with Protestants that Fathers sometimes contradict each other (and Church dogma). Nor do we consider any one Father’s opinion as infallible or binding (unless it is identical with a proclamation that the Church made in Council or by infallible papal proclamation, but then - strictly speaking - that doesn’t prove that the Father possessed the gift of infallibility, only that he spoke truth in that instance). Not even St. Augustine is held in that high of a regard, nor a later giant figure such as St. Thomas Aquinas. What we claim is that the broad consensus of the Fathers is strong historical evidence for the truthfulness of particular Catholic doctrines. If someone showed that 50 Fathers accepted sola Scriptura (Webster’s ridiculous position), then that would pose a problem for our claims. But I contend that Webster, King, Engwer and other anti-Catholic polemicists haven’t even shown that one does so. Entire books are written about the Fathers’ supposed belief in sola Scriptura, when in fact they are merely expressing their belief in material sufficiency of Scripture, and its inspiration and sufficiency to refute heretics and false doctrine generally. It is easy to misleadingly present them as sola Scripturists if their statements elsewhere about apostolic Traditiwww.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/04/church-fathers-sola-scriptura.htmlon or succession and the binding authority of the Church (especially in council) are ignored.... Continued at: www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/04/church-fathers-sola-scriptura.html
Thanks for the resource! Do you also enjoy Chesterton?
I am so happy you did post this! Really nice filming, great auditory, and super content. I rarely subscribe, but I did for this (my third subscribe on KZread). Begin before the beginning....so helpful. I've been running on sloth, in my prayer life and my house upkeep. thanks for the habituation training examples.