G'day, g'day. Welcome to Pines with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fraed and today I'm joined around the bar table by Dr. Andrew Swafford to talk about the Biblical basis for the priesthood.

We cover a whole range of topics. But some of the things you might be interested in is, you know, what does a priest even mean?

Why doesn't the Catholic Church ordain women? How do we square our calling priests father with Christ saying, call no men on earth your father? What is apostolic succession? Why do we need another mediator? Right?

So like Christ is the mediator between us and God and now you've got a priest who's the mediator between this just seems unnecessary. And so we take tackles and Protestant objections as well.

We delve deep into the Old Testament. Dr. Andrew Swafford knows a great deal about that. So that was really fun. Also, when we do these videos, we often do a post show wrap up video for our patrons only. We did a really long one after this episode. It was all on whether or not infants should receive you, Christ.

And we take a look at what Thomas Aquinas has to say in the tertiary pause about this. It was about a 20 minute chat.

So if you're a patron, go check out the post show wrap up video. If you want a bunch of perks, including post show wrap up videos and you're not yet a patron, become a patron at patreon.com slash matfrad.

Let me just say this. We disagree with Thomas Aquinas on this issue and we think that that's okay. So I'm just going to leave it at that. You can go check that out.

Who is Andrew Swafford? Well, let me put my glasses on. No bloody tell you. Andrew Swafford is associate professor of theology at Benedictine College.

He's he's general editor and contributor to the great adventure Catholic Bible published by a centron press and host of the DVD series and author of the companion book.

Hebrews, the new and eternal covenant. We're going to talk about that today as well as author and host of Romans, the gospel of salvation.

Yadda yadda. There's a lot of here. He's a super established and what do you say? He's got lots of credentials. Credential guy.

He is member of the Society of Biblical Literature, Academy of Catholic theology and a senior fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical theology.

He lives with his wife Sarah, who's super cool, by the way, and their five children in Atchison, Kansas.

Before we jump into the show, I want to tell you about this strive 21.com is a 21 day detox from porn course that I created for you to check out.

We have over 19,000 men going through the course right now. It is a 21 day detox, as I say, from porn course.

So if you were a man who struggles with porn or lust in any way and you're tired of it, go check out strive to 1.com.

It is 100% free and you can be as anonymous as you want. All right, here is my episode with Dr. Andrew Swafford.

Get a Dr. Andrew Swafford. Thanks for being back on the show.

So blessed me back. Thank you. Are you wondering why we just didn't do this last time instead of flying you into Atlanta and getting you into an Uber and driving up?

This is not easy. When we filmed it last time, it was like just on the cusp of time.

And the airports were thin but still there and then all of a sudden things just kind of fell off the rails right afterward.

...