The Catholic Brothers Steven & Daniel Alspach

In this installment of the First 500 Years series, the brothers take a journey through the life and thought of the church’s first major Heresiarch: Marcion of Pontus. Along the way, they propose fresh ways of understanding the origins of his doctrine and explain why he proved a formidable enemy for the earliest apologists as they began their struggle to preserve apostolic tradition.

Why did God become a man? We’re used to hearing what Christ’s incarnation/death/resurrection did for us, but we don’t often hear what His work did to the demonic powers. We’re used to answering the question solely with reference to matters of substitution, satisfaction, debts (of honor, wrath, or obedience?), so we can lose sight of the ancient Christian worldview and the entire cosmic drama at work between God and ‘the gods.’ In this episode, we flip the table—from metaphysical to apocalyptic— to see a whole other dimension of the atoning work of Christ, through the eyes of Satan himself.

We’ve all seen him in action—debating Protestants and Orthodox, writing incredible books, or podcasting on his own channel, Classical Christian Thought—but we rarely get to hear about his personal journey of faith. In this special episode, we sit down with our friend Erick Ybarra to explore his story and all of the reasons why, in the final analysis, he ended up in the arms of the Catholic Church. This is a fun, lively, and deep conversation that you will not want to miss!

0:05 Introduction
2:44 Steven’s new book
5:17 Erick’s story/upbringing
8:45 Baptized Catholic as a child
9:53 Teenage doubts
12:20 College encounter with a Baptist
14:08 Erick begins to investigate Christianity
16:19 He attends a Baptist/Calvinist church
18:55 He is (re)baptized and wipes Catholicism from his mind
23:46 Trauma and scandal at the Baptist church
25:10 Erick excommunicated and becomes a penitent
28:22 He begins to study early church disciplinary practices
29:25 Erick leaves the Baptist church
31:12 Studies Protestant options and becomes Anglican
33:15 questions about justification
37:05 Anglican theology begins to form his thought
40:25 Diving into Patristics
44:53 Doubts about Anglicanism, exploring Eastern Orthodoxy
51:50 Erick discovers Orthodox divisions as a catechumen
53:21 Begins to study Catholicism seriously
55:30 Catholic priest confronts Erick!
58:22 Erick and wife become Catholic, devotes time and energy to studying East-West divisions
1:00:06 Erick searches for a good Catholic parish……and STRUGGLES
1:01:00 Stumbles upon the Ordinariate
1:02:18 Three questions for Erick and open discussion
1:06:46 Starting Reason and Theology with Lofton and writing his Papacy book
1:11:46 A golden age of Catholic apologetics under a difficult pontificate
1:13:54 What is Pope Francis really up to?
1:15:24 Catholic confusion and internet divisions
1:20:40 Doctrine vs Pastoral Praxis. Is the Magisterium “working?”
1:24:38 Things Erick wishes he covered in his book on The Papacy
1:27:52 Papal Failure and how to understand it
1:30:00 Question from a listener of TCB
1:33:07 Erick’s challenge to Gavin Ortlund’s view of the Church
1:40:07 How to break out of intellectual deadlock.
1:44:10 Conclusion

In this episode we have a most interesting chat with Ben Bollinger, a theology blogger and a bright apologist for the Christian faith, whose journey began with atheism and progressed into Eastern Orthodoxy. However, in 2023, he made a shocking, final move into the Roman Catholic Church, and here we explore his intellectual and spiritual journey. This is a fascinating dialogue that you WILL NOT want to miss!

A Superstition? Funerary society? Guild? A philosophical school? What the heck is this “Christian” thing?

In this episode, we complete our discussion of the vitality of Roman Religion and then analyze various ways in which Roman writers politically and culturally tried to classify the novel Christian movement throughout the second century.
How Christians were politically classified by various Roman authorities have serious implications. It would determine whether or not they were free to debate in the public square or merely destined for ostracization and execution.

This is a fascinating topic that you don’t want to miss!

In Part One of this episode, we flip the table a bit and try to understand Rome’s relationship to her gods *from the inside out* so that we can paint a fuller picture of the religious landscape of Christianity’s rise in Late Antiquity.

Heretofore, many scholars have argued that early Christianity was able to spread so rapidly because the religion(s) of the Roman Empire had increasingly lost vitality and failed to fulfill emerging soteriological hopes of Late Antique peoples. But, is any of this true? Is this merely the residue of centuries of anti-pagan bias and propaganda? What was Roman religion *really* like; how captivating was it; and why did the fledgling Christian movement cause such concern for some of the brightest Roman minds of the second century?