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The Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church with Father Mario Arroyo

Father Mario Arroyo and David Capes have cohosted a radio show in Houston for 15 years.  It is called A Show of Faith on AM 1070 The Answer. 

Father Mario stopped by the Lanier Theological Library and Learning Center to talk with David Capes about the sacraments of the Catholic Church. To hear the podcast (22 minutes) click here.

Who is Mario Arroyo? 

Father Mario Arroyo has been the pastor of St. Cyril of Alexandria Catholic Church in Houston, TX.  He was born in Havanna, Cuba, and immigrated when he was boy to the USA during the Cuban revolution. 

This life-long Catholic grew up in Denver and had a dramatic, life-changing “conversion” at the age of 21. Since then, he has served God in the priesthood.

What are the sacraments? 

Father Mario describes a sacrament as an encounter with the real presence of God.  He emphasizes the notion of “common-union” with Christ.  He describes all the sacraments as God-initiated.

Every church has sacred practices they do.  Many Protestant churches recognize two: the Lord’s Supper (Communion or the Eucharist) and baptism.

Because some want to avoid the word “sacrament,” they use other words like “ordinances.” That’s because Jesus “ordered” his disciples to do these practices. 

So here are the seven sacraments with a one-line description. 

  1. Eucharist—an entering into a common-union with the Lord Jesus; the real presence of Christ is encountered in the bread and wine
  2. Baptism—not our choice of God, but God’s choice of us
  3. Reconciliation—Christ absolves people from their sins
  4. Confirmation—God firming up and fulfilling his children through the gift of the Spirit
  5. Anointing of the Sick—God’s power to carry people through difficult illnesses
  6. Holy Orders—God ordering certain people into his service as bishops, 
  7. Marriage—the couple gives this sacrament to each other, acting as a priest to the other, while the priest simply superintends the ceremony.

There are a lot of great bits of information in this podcast. Be sure to listen to the end and hear Father Mario’s nugget of wisdom. 

To hear the “A Show of Faith” Podcast  on BuzzSprout click here. For a transcript of this podcast, click here.

More resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics. Just click here.

What’s more, you can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library. Just click here.

To hear the podcast (22 minutes) click here.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls (Part Two) with Timothy Lim

To hear the podcast (22 minutes) click here.

Recently, David Capes was in Edinburgh, Scotland, and had the chance to sit down and talk with Dr. Timothy Lim about the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

This discovery was one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

Who Is Timothy Lim?

Timothy Lim is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh.  Born in Canada, Timothy and his family made their home in Scotland during his illustrious career. 

He is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He loves running, playing tennis, working out, AND he is good guitar player.

What Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Tell Us About the Shape of the Cannon?

One of the many contributions the Dead Sea Scrolls have made is that they give us some insight into the books that made up authoritative scripture.

We’d probably like to think of the Bible as containing the same books, in the same order, and using all the same words for all time.

In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate the fluidity of the biblical text at the time of the turn of the millennium from BC to AD, or if you prefer BCE to CE.

It may be good to remember that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of a Jewish community contemporaneous to the time of John the Baptizer, Jesus, Peter and Paul.

What Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Tell Us About Biblical Interpretation?

The people of the scrolls had a particular view of the world and that came out in the way they interpreted their biblical books.

Among the books recovered have been biblical commentaries that go by the title pesharim (Hebrew plural). Dr. Lim has done a great deal to illuminate this kind of commentary (pesher is the Hebrew singular). 

It is both a method or approach to Scripture and the results of that method. We find a number of places in the New Testament where writers employed a similar method (though not altogether the same).

To hear the podcast (22 minutes) click here.

Books by Dr. Timothy Lim

Among his many books are:

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2017)

The Formation of the Jewish Canon (Yale University Press, 2012)

The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (with John Collins, Oxford University Press, 2012)

For a transcript of this podcast, click here.

More resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics. Just click here.

What’s more, you can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library. Just click here.

Posted on

The Dead Sea Scrolls (Part One) with Timothy Lim

To hear the podcast (18 minutes) click here.

Recently, David Capes was in Edinburgh, Scotland, and had the chance to sit down and talk with Dr. Timothy Lim about the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

This discovery was one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

Who Is Timothy Lim?

Timothy Lim is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh.  Born in Canada, Timothy and his family made their home in Scotland during his illustrious career. 

He is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He loves running, playing tennis, working out, AND he is good guitar player.

What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

About seventy years ago, the first of eleven caves was found containing scrolls from the first century BC to the first century AD. 

This is about the time the Jesus movement started. Today, and this is controversial, a 12th cave appears to have been found. More about this on another podcast.

These scrolls are significant in many ways because they give us a window into that period like no other. 

In all, between 800-1000 manuscripts have been discovered.  About twenty-five of those are relatively intact. 

All the rest are fragments.  Scholars have been piecing them together and exploring their significance since the 1950s.

Qumran is the area where these scrolls were found. So, they are sometimes referred to as the Qumran scrolls. 

Both biblical (Old Testament) and non-biblical manuscripts were discovered there. There are many documents we never knew existed. 

Every book of the Hebrew Bible was found except for the book of Esther. There are theories about that. 

In part two of this podcast we explore more about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Books by Dr. Timothy Lim

Among his many books are:

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2017)

The Formation of the Jewish Canon (Yale University Press, 2012)

The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (with John Collins, Oxford University Press, 2012)

For a transcript of this podcast, click here.

To hear the podcast (18 minutes) click here.

More resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics. Just click here.

What’s more, you can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library. Just click here.

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Marriage Relations according to Aristotle and Paul with Lynn Cohick

In his teaching about family relations (e.g. Eph. 5:21–6:9), Paul is echoing descriptions of a household that had been formalized by Aristotle, but in so doing Paul turns Aristotle’s teaching on its head. Dr. Lynn Cohick is Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Director of Houston Theological Seminary at Houston Christian University. Among her many publications are The Letter to the Ephesians (NICNT) and (with Amy Brown Hughes) Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries.

To hear the podcast (10 minutes) click here.

“Exegetically Speaking” is a weekly podcast of the friends and faculty of Wheaton College, IL and The Lanier Theological Library. Hosted by Dr. David Capes, it features language experts who discuss the importance of learning the biblical languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—and show how reading the Bible in the original languages “pays off.” Each podcast lasts between seven and eleven minutes and covers a different topic for those who want to read the Bible for all it is worth.

If you’re interested in going deeper, learn more about Wheaton’s undergraduate degree in Classical Languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Latin) and our MA in Biblical Exegesis. 

You can hear Exegetically Speaking on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. If you have questions or comments, please contact us at exegetically.speaking@wheaton.edu. And keep listening. 

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Christ among the Messiahs with Matt Novenson

Matthew Novenson joined David Capes on The Stone Chapel Podcasts to talk about his important book, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford University Press).

The book has made a big contribution to the study of Christology in the earliest years of the Jesus movement.  Though it has been out ten years, it is worth sharing with a new audience. 

Who is Matthew Novenson? 

Matthew is originally from Tennessee.  He now serves as the Professor of Biblical Criticism and Biblical Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh. 

Christ among the Messiahs 

For many years some scholars have regarded the word “Christ” as just another name for Jesus in the earliest writings of the New Testament, namely, the letters of Paul.  But Matthew makes a convincing case that the word “Christ” in Paul means “Messiah.”   

This may seem to some only natural, but it is a momentous thing.  It involves a whole new reassessment of Paul’s language and his Jewishness.  

We find messiah language in various places like the Old Testament, Paul’s letters, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other second temple Jewish texts. 

Novenson often employs the word “honorific” as a noun to discuss Paul’s use of “Christ” in his letters.  It comes from the discipline of “classics,” namely, the study of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. 

Honorifics are like titles in a way but they were intended to magnify the name of the person. The most famous is Caesar “Augustus.” 

The idea that “Christos” as it referred to Jesus is not limited to name or title.  There is a third way, an honorific.

Novenson has done a great deal to shape the field of New Testament studies with this and other books.  

Other Books by Matt Novenson

Paul: Then and Now (Eerdmans)

The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users(Oxford UP)

For a transcript of this podcast, click here.

More resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics. Just click here.

To hear the podcast (22 min) click here.