Does the church actually have the authority to speak for Jesus?

Swansona is next.

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding,

and defending your Catholic faith, and one of the things that we Catholics have to defend

is the idea that Jesus left a teaching church, a church with the authority to teach.

It's not just me and my Bible and Jesus, but there is a church that has the authority

to tell me how to behave, what to do in some cases, at least in general, what to do,

and how to interpret the scriptures, how to live them out in a way that is faithful to Jesus.

So we can defend all of that by turning the scripture itself.

There's certainly our scriptural defenses of that, but we don't end there.

There's also a common sense defense of why Jesus would do it this way.

Why God would establish a church that carries on with His authority to teach.

We ask Swansona to tell us about that, and here's what he said.

Swansona from the intellectual conservatism podcast, thanks for being with us.

Thank you.

It's our first time we get to speak with you as an associate of Catholic Answers, as an affiliate

of Catholic Answers, and it's a very exciting for us that we have you as a member of the family.

I'm looking forward to working with you on things.

Yeah, and I'm very honored to be here.

Well, we're going to decide that we start with a tough one for you,

and apologetically, it's interesting that a lot of times we have to defend what the Catholic church

is, in fact, hasn't rejected biblical teaching.

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