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Cleave to Antiquity and Matthew Barrett have recently left Reformed theology for more Apostolic expressions of Christianity. Joe explores why this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to explore two maybe seemingly unrelated conversions today, neither of which interestingly are to Catholicism, but I think you’ll see why I’m still excited about both of them, why I think they might be directionally correct and why I think they have some really important things to say about the future of a movement within Protestantism to try to shore up its historical bonafide. So the first of them is a YouTuber Cleve to antiquity. Pastor Ben, who until very recently was making a lot of pro Protestant but mostly just anti-Catholic and anti Orthodox content. It was less, here are some positive principles of Protestantism we all agree on, and much more just like here’s a scandal in the Catholic church. Here’s a controversial thing the Orthodox do. And then a funny thing happened as he was doing this.
CLIP:
If you’re going to consider becoming Eastern Orthodox, then you have to get comfortable with the fact that you’ll have to then think that every Christian you’ve ever met who was not Eastern Orthodox is going to hell
Several months later.
Good morning and welcome to Cleave to Antiquity. My name is Ben and if you’ve seen the thumbnail and you’ve seen the title, then you know that I’ve decided to become Orthodox
Joe:
Ben’s conversion. Announcing that he’s becoming Eastern Orthodox was shocking to say the least. And as I’m going to get into later, there is actually something we should all take away from that, which is don’t assume that because someone’s very hostile to Catholicism or orthodoxy, whatever you are, that that means that they’re not considering it. Sometimes people who are raging the most, it’s because they’re putting up an intellectual fight because they’re trying to work through their own objections. They don’t always want to show you that they don’t want to necessarily be that vulnerable, but that’s sometimes what’s happening. And so I’m encouraged by the fact that in a six video stretch, five of his videos a few weeks ago were just things about Catholicism. That much time and energy about like, oh, what about Catholicism? And maybe I’ve disproved it this time and then a week later maybe I’ve disproved it this time.
That’s good in a real way if it’s him working through his objections and God willing coming all the way home to Catholicism. But either way, him going from being Protestant to Orthodox is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. He will have valid sacraments and as we’re going to see, he has had to abandon a huge chunk of his own arguments for things like solo script Torah. More on him in a minute, but I want to introduce you to the second character, very different. Dr. Matthew Barrett Barrett is the author of In the five Solo series, he did the book on solo script Torah and he’s the editor of a book on justification called The Doctrine on which the church stands or falls. He is the editor of a systematic summary of Reformation Theology, which has a bunch of different contributors that you might’ve heard of before, and I think he has several other books.
Those are the ones I know of. But the most famous book that he has, at least from a Catholic perspective is his book, the Reformation as Renewal. And the whole project that he’s arguing for here is The Reformation is not a break with church history. It is a kind of renewal returning Christianity to the early church and returning Christianity even to the medieval church. So it’s a fascinating kind of claim. Dr. Gavin Orland called it the best new book on Protestantism, and both Barrett and Orland at the time were Baptists saying, look, as Baptists like this thing we’re doing isn’t this radical break with church history. It’s actually faithful to church history. Problem is Barrett has now gone the other direction. He has now announced that he’s becoming Anglican. He can no longer in good conscience be a Baptist for reasons that basically amount to, there’s such a radical break from church history required to be a Baptist.
We’ll get into him in greater depth in a moment as well. And it’s true that Barrett is still Protestant, at least sort of. There’s a reason though, father James Gad, the Anglican refers to Anglicanism as barely Protestant because there’s lots of different varieties of Anglicanism. You’ve got Episcopalianism, which is very liberal and looks much more like other forms of mainline Protestantism. But in this particular case, and Dr. Barrett is a member actually here in Kansas City of St. Aiden’s Church, which is a very traditional Anglican church of North America sort of church. And so that means a couple things. One, remember Barrett wrote the book on soul of scriptura and he is now part of a church that doesn’t affirm. So the script Torah, it affirms Primus scriptura that you have scripture first and foremost, but it has to be interpreted through the lens of church history, through creeds counsels, the church fathers and the church mothers.
It’s Anglican and you can’t just go with your own private interpretation of scripture. And if you look at the church, you might not be surprised to learn. This is often the place people go as Protestants on their way to becoming Catholic before they’re ready to just go all the way Catholic. They celebrate mass at Orienta, they receive communion, kneeling on the tongue. So even though we don’t think they have valid sacraments, stylistically, you’re getting used to a much more Catholic look and feel and style, and for many people, not for everyone, for many people this is a sort of stopping over before they become Catholic. I’m friends with at least two couples who were St Aidan’s parishioners who now go to our Catholic parish. So I want to suggest that this has something to say about what we might call the historical Protestant projects because the one thing that Ben from cleavage to antiquity and Dr. Matthew Barrett have in common is they both were in the business of trying to show that either non-denominational or Baptist or maybe broadly evangelical Protestantism is historically credible.
That if you could draw a through line from the apostles to the early Christians, to the medieval Christians to the Protestants that they were until very recently, and I think both of them have given up on that project as actually impossible. But to give you a sense of that project, the whole reason Ben chose the name Cleve to antiquity seems to be from this line of St. Vincent of Lauren, one of the early church fathers where he talks about what a Catholic Christian should do if faced with some novel heresy that in that case it is your care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty. So he’s looking for continuity with the yearly church. That’s what it is, to cleave to antiquity. And for a while he briefly thought that he could have that as a non-denominational pastor, and then it became very clear he was kind of looking around pretty recently he was putting up a video that suggested he might be on his lady becoming Lutheran, and then he analysis he’s going to become Eastern Orthodox.
That tells us something about how historically credible it is to be non-denominational that the people trying to do it, the people who are the apologists in the field trying to defend this like, no, no, here are these church fathers who support us soul script. Here’s all these guys who they would totally be on our team today that they can’t actually stand by their own argument. So a lot of Ben’s arguments I’ve never really bothered to answer and I don’t think they’re worth answering now because they couldn’t convince him. I don’t mean that in a mean way, dismissively, I’m happy that he’s converted. I would love to hear, I think he’s in the process of doing this. I’d love to hear him more explicitly repudiate why his earlier positions were wrong because I think he has led a lot of people astray who didn’t know church history very well and were convinced by him taking quotes out of context and things that we now see even from his own witness.
It’s not really credible. It’s not a very serious way to do church history. Barrett, on the other hand, I think does a much better job of doing the church history thing in maybe a more serious way. Reformation is renewal, I want to say it’s like a thousand pages long. He has done his work, but he is very much committed to this idea that Protestantism, and remember at the time he’s a Baptist and he’s training the next generation of Baptist preachers at the head of the doctoral program there. He thinks this is in keeping with church history as well. He’s very fond of a handful of quotes from Luther. So at the end of his book, he quotes Luther that thus we have proved that we are the true ancient church, one body and one communion of saints with the holy universal Christian Church. So his argument is Protestants, you shouldn’t run from the one holy Catholic and apostolic church.
You are that one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And he quotes Abraham Koper, who I believe is Dutch Reformed who said that a church that is unwilling to be Catholic is not a church and then he ends with this powerful line. What defines a true adherence to Protestantism to be Protestant is to be Catholic, but not Roman. And I think that that claim has become pretty untenable, even working out Barrett’s own kind of theology. I’ll get into that in a second here, but I want to give a couple more Luther quotes that he’s very fond of. There’s one from Against Hans verse that he’s quoted at least twice in the book and then is also quoted in one of the endorsements of the book in the beginning, it might appear a fourth time somewhere in the, but it gets brought up a lot and he’s arguing against Henry, I don’t remember where Henry was from, and Henry was a Catholic saying, Hey, you guys are creating this new novel heresy, this is bad.
Very much the thing St. Vincent warns against, to which Luther says they allege that we have fallen away from the holy church and set up a new church, but we are the true ancient Catholic church. You have fallen away from us. And then he quotes it again. They allege that we have fallen away from the holy church and set up a new church. We are the chant church. You have fallen away from us that this is kind of the argument. This doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but let’s consider one of the arguments for it. He argues that rather than accusing Luther of schism or of breaking with the church, we should instead look to Yala Pelican. Now, if you know anything about Yaroslav Pelican, you’ll see the great irony of this. He says, Pelican really upends this narrative of Luther as this radical break from church tradition and he says Martin Luther was the first Protestant and yet he was more Catholic than many of his Roman Catholic opponents.
Now that is a line from Pelican, but that is from I believe 1964 book that’s going to matter. I’ll explain why in a second far from a sideline issue. Pelican thinks his paradox lies at the very heart or the very center of Luther’s reformation, and Barrett says such a bold claim is the heartbeat of this book as well. So here’s the problem with that. As I say this is from, again, I think 1964 is when Pelican’s book on this came out at the time he was a Lutheran theologian. Pelican also as he tries to defend Lutheranism historically leaves and becomes Eastern Orthodox. And in fact, he later talked about that he was very gracious and tried not to get into I think what he viewed as interdenominational fights and the like, but he’s very clear that the reason that he couldn’t remain Lutheran, why he became Orthodox was at least in part because Luther radically subordinated tradition in favor of his own personal interpretation of scripture.
CLIP:
The co orination of tradition and scripture was called to account and tradition was drastically subordinated to the authority of Sola scriptura In 1519 at the Life 60 bait Luther’s opponent, Johan Eck spent his entire lecture quoting the church fathers, the councils, the Cannon law, the sentences of Peter Lombard and Luther in response began, and St. Paul and I will withstand them all.
Joe:
So as you can tell, Pelican does not continue to believe that Luther was just preserving catholicity and tradition, but rather views very clearly that he was a threat to it, that he challenged it, that he subordinated tradition Barrett nevertheless cites to Luther’s 10 reasons that he gives for why the Reformational lines with the Nicene Creed when it says we believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church and this is it going to become a very important test, he actually for buried himself, how much can a Baptist affirm the nice and cre not only on one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, but also for the belief on one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And so he’s citing to Luther who claims that, oh no, this is completely consistent with being a Protestant. One of the problems is that one of the things Luther cites to is, well, we agree on baptism and so as Barrett says, the apostle Paul assured the Ephesians that there’s one body, one faith, and one baptism.
The reformation can claim that unity with the same body on the basis of its authentic confession and obedient baptism. They might be saying, hold on a second, how does that square with being a Baptist? Because as you may or may not know Baptist deny from baptism. So if you are a Catholic or Lutheran or whatever and you were baptized as a baby and then you convert and become Baptist, they won’t recognize your one baptism. They will insist on you being rebaptized with a believer’s baptism because they don’t think your baptism as a child counted. This is how the original proponents of this view became known as Anabaptist re baptizers. That was the whole problem. They didn’t respect one lord, one faith, one baptism. So that doesn’t seem like a good argument in favor of the Reformation or certainly the Baptist wing of the Reformation actually being in historic continuity with early Christianity.
And Barrett seems to have concluded this himself as well, that his arguments don’t work for saving evangelicalism or Baptists at least as long as they’re not actually respecting baptism. He says a couple things. First I mentioned the creed and he in announcing that he was becoming Anglican said, are we consistent to cherry pick stealing away the doctrine of the creeds while rejecting the polity of the councils and the office of bishops so instrumental to implementing doctrinal accountability in the church? So let me explain what that means that this whole project Luthers on of saying, oh no, look, as reformers we’re consistent, one holy Catholic and Abic church, we agree with them on all of these different doctrines. Barrett’s point now is, well, look, this church clearly has bishops and you aren’t that church. You don’t have the same structure as that church. You might agree with them on some points of theology, you might agree with them on some doctrine, but is it really consistent to take their doctrine and pretend that makes you guys the same?
If you copy paste another country’s constitution, it doesn’t make you that country. It just means you’ve borrowed from somewhere else and this is what it seems like there it is suggesting Protestants have done with the creeds, certainly Protestants who don’t have bishops, which is going to be basically everyone except for Anglicans and a handful of Lutherans. In an interview he gave this month, he said, looking at early church history, especially the ecumenical councils, I had to ask why is it that the fathers believe that an Episcopal form of polity, that means having a bishop in your local church is simply being faithful to the apostolic tradition? I had to ask myself, this is back in his original announcement, why did the church fathers believe the New Testament naturally gave birth to bishops? Of which we have elaborate records, right? So we know that they had bishops.
They not only have bishops, they believe it is a matter of necessity to have bishops. It’s Saint Ignatius of Antioch points out a couple hundred years before then first council of Nsea that if you don’t have a bishop presbyters and a diaconate, you don’t have a church. That there’s no question that when they say one holy Catholic and embolic church, their meaning of church is something visible, structured and including bishops. And so if you say, oh yeah, we totally agree, only we’ve changed the words to now mean something totally different. You don’t agree like affirming a creed while changing the meaning of the words isn’t affirming the same creed. If a Mormon said, we can affirm this Trinitarian creed because we also believe in a godhead, we just don’t think it’s actually three persons of one divine substance, we just think it’s three different gods or two gods who are in common purpose.
You would say, okay, you’re just using the same words but you don’t mean the same thing. That’s not an agreement. Well, similarly, a Baptist who says, yeah, we can affirm the nice creed while changing the meaning of it doesn’t really work. I did a video on this at the time because the Southern Baptist Convention was debating whether they could adopt the ene creed and significantly they said they couldn’t, and this was one of the major points that Barrett realized he couldn’t remain part of this communion, that they were openly not able to affirm that they were part of the first council of EAs kind of understanding of orthodoxy. Part of that has to do with the authority of creeds within the SBC, but part of it is because I think people just recognized, yeah, we don’t believe the same things that the Christians in 3 25 believed, and that’s a problem for anyone trying to say the opposite.
The other issue that he had was of course on baptism because remember one of the reasons that reformers like Martin Luther claimed that this wasn’t this huge break was because they still believed one baptism. And so Barrett has to ask himself, was the entire church wrong to baptize the children of believers for a millennium and a half? Now, that might exaggerate the case slightly. There are places where they don’t baptize infants, but even the people who don’t baptize infants still believe baptism saves. I think it was much easier to show that even the people who waited to baptize didn’t wait because they believed that it had to be believers baptism. That is a complete historic novelty. They waited because they believed baptism forgives all sins, mortal and vial, and so you want save it for when you really need it. That was a bad pastoral approach because people would die without baptism and baptism confers other benefits, but even the people who delayed getting baptized did it for opposite reasons as what a Baptist would do today.
A Baptist today delays baptism because they don’t think baptism is really a sacrament that gives you any divine grace. The people who delayed baptism in the early church explicitly delayed it for the opposite reason because they weren’t sure if you could be forgiven mortal sin after baptism. So even though you do have somewhat of a dispute on when to get baptized, the two things to note are one, neither side sounds anything like Baptists and two, neither side believes that getting baptized as an infant is invalid or anything. It’s just a question of whether you want to use your get out of health free card in infancy or if you want to save it for when you really need it. I’m oversimplifying slightly there, but that’s the idea. So Baird has to ask, was the entire church wrong on this? Was believers baptism taught by the apostles only to disappear under the supervision of the greatest theologians of the church and then reappear for the first time in the 16th century?
That’s a great question. Are we to believe when St. Paul says when Lord, when faith from baptism, this is apparently something that Christians get. They understand baptism and then despite the writings of these brilliant theologians, not one of them knew this really basic doctrine and we had to wait for the reformers and only some of the reformers to restore it as Barrett puts it for someone serious, but catholicity, that pill was too big to swallow. Now he’s only looking here at two issues, bishops and baptism. Two issues that by the way I cover in my book, the early church was the Catholic church. If you’re interested in going deeper on what the Christians up to the year 200 thought about those doctrines, but as kind of his be noir, Owen Straten points out once Barrett starts making this argument, this is an argument against Protestantism itself.
Owen says, tucked into a single paragraph about baptism, this is an extremely important statement. This in a nutshell is a key Catholic argument against Protestantism. It is not a small or glancing charge. Before the ink dried on Luther’s famous thesis, Calvin’s Institutes in Zw Lee’s own, these Catholic theologians had mounted their most significant accusation against the reformers. Their doctrine was novel and right. If you’re Matthew Barrett and your whole point is the reformation isn’t a novelty, it is a retrieval and a renewal, then having to say, actually it’s a novelty actually they’re just inventing stuff in the 16th century that didn’t exist before. That’s a real problem. But if you’re going to take that problem seriously, that’s not going to just be a problem on baptism. That’s going to be a problem for a lot of Protestant doctrines. I’m going to stick to baptism because it’s worth just underscoring.
These guys both seem to take for granted that there’s a novelty here. Strahan doesn’t say actually believers baptism was widespread in the early church in the Middle ages. He doesn’t say any of that because it wasn’t Everett Ferguson in his book Baptism in the Early Church. I know I’ve quoted it before, but it’s worth quoting here again, looks at the first five centuries of Christianity and he says that there’s a remarkable agreement on what baptism does and specifically the person baptized receives forgiveness of sins. They also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ and it causes them to be regenerated or reborn from above. Like when Jesus says this is that you need to be born again of water in the spirit, that is what it means. You need to be baptized. The early Christians have a remarkable agreement on that in the 500 years that he looks at in his book, and they continue to have a remarkable agreement on that till the reformation, so that creates a real problem.
Remember as din says, the issue here in the Catholic charge is the doctrine is novel. Is it possible that all of the church fathers are wrong and you having reinterpreted the Bible have gotten it right? That’s at the heart of what this charge. This is the charge against the reformers. Then it’s the charge against people who are reinterpreting the sexual morality of the Bible and saying, actually it doesn’t really have anything negative to say on homosexuality. That means temple prostitution, all of those things. Is it possible that everybody, until you has gotten the Bible wrong and you are getting it right, and I think there’s a couple answers to this. Again, I want to stay focused on the issue of baptism, but maybe draw that out for the broader implications because Dr. Gavin Orland was asked about, yeah, it doesn’t seem like any of the early Christians agree with you or other Baptists on baptism and here’s how he responded to that question,
CLIP:
But Gavin, first I want to ask you this, what do you make of that challenge that the early church fathers wouldn’t be welcome as a pastor at First Baptist?
Yeah, yeah. These historical thought experiments are really fun to think about. If Augustine got in a time machine, what would he think about this or where would he fit in here? I think they’re really instructive. Think about, I actually think they’re impossible to answer with any certainty because part of what makes someone believe what they believe is their context and what influences them. So it’s interesting to think about, well, how soon after Augustine arrived, I mean would he have some dialogue, some theological dialogue that would change his views within the first 12 hours and well probably so I mean we’re affected by our context,
Joe:
So that’s one way to approach the church fathers to just say, well, all that stuff they believed that sounded really Catholic. That was just their cultural context and they would probably convert within 12 hours. If they met us today, met all of the evangelicals and non-denominational and Baptists, then within a day probably they would just become Protestant. Now, I don’t think that is a faithful reading of Augustine putting the cards on the table. I don’t think that is a good reading of Augustinian thought. I think that trivializes his thinking in the thinking of the other great church fathers. Now, to be sure there are areas I want to agree with Gavin on this part. There are areas where they surely are culturally conditioned some of their views on everything from science to men and women to slavery. A lot of early Christians are shaped by culture, but with something like their beliefs on baptism, on the major theological things, they’re not getting that from Roman culture or anything.
They’re getting that from their beliefs about scripture from apostolic tradition. A time machine going away from the apostles isn’t going to give them some new important information to help them understand tradition better, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any good reason to believe that the need is for the early Christians to become more like us. Rather, I think Barrett’s impulse is the right one. We should be trying to become more like them, and so in this charge, if the doctrine is novel, the other answer to this is to follow the advice of St. Vincent, which I mentioned before, which it gives birth to Cleve to antiquities name. What if some novel contagion seeks to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the church but the whole, then it will be his Again, the Catholic Christians care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any novelty, any fraud of novelty, but the way to make sure that you are not being unduly affected by your culture that I don’t know is very individualistic and promotes a lot of radical non sacramental views because it has a weird relationship to the body and gives rise to all of the distinctive features of evangelicalism and non-denominational in 21st century America.
Maybe those are the culturally conditioned things that need purification, not the apostolic tradition, not the things that these guys are saying they got from the apostles. And so the way we make sure we don’t fall into a novel contagion, the way we make sure we’re not unduly influenced by our own culture is by clinging to antiquity, and Vincent tells us how to do that. He says in the Catholic church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always by all. Now he’s going to qualify that obviously it doesn’t mean literally everyone, it doesn’t mean a hundred percent of people on earth always believe the same thing, but he is going to say that if we want to truly be Catholic, which is a project that I think cleaved, antiquity and Matthew Barrett are on, that the three ways to do that are universality and antiquity and consent by universality, he means we need to confess to one faith that is confessed around the world.
So you’re not going to be looking for an Eastern Orthodox church that’s just Eastern European. You’re not going to be looking at the Church of England, you’re going to be looking at a global church, second antiquity that we shouldn’t depart from. Those interpretations, which it’s clear were held openly by our holy ancestors and church fathers, and it’s always funny when church fathers mention other church fathers. It’s like when an old person talks about somebody else’s old and the third standard is consent because he says, if we find within antiquity, you go back to the early church and you find, okay, maybe there’s not everybody agrees. In those cases, you want to make sure that you hold to the determinations of all, or at least almost all the priests and doctors. So that’s his standard that if you follow those rules, you are going to end up being a faithful Orthodox Catholic Christian, and I think that is what Ben and Matthew Barrett are discovering that if you are going to follow that project faithfully, if you’re going to follow the idea of truly being Catholic, and if you want your form of Christianity to actually be in continuity with historic Christianity, that is going to lead you away from Evangelicalism Baptist, et cetera, towards something richer.
Some people are going to stop at Lutheran or Anglican or Eastern Orthodox I would suggest is ultimately going to be found in Catholicism. The other way you can see this not just in relation to the early church, but even in the more immediate question of can Protestants have a relationship with St. Thomas Aquinas? What is the connection? Because if you cut off the Middle Ages or the dark Ages, as Matthew Barrett points out to Gavin, this cuts you off from half of church history just by that very fact. If you say, oh, I agree with the early Christians, I don’t agree with the medieval ones, you’re still cutting out roughly 500 to 1500, you’re still cutting out half of church history, and so you’re still producing a form of Christianity that is pretty radically a historical.
CLIP:
What should the attitude of contemporary evangelicals be to someone like Thomas Aquinas and do you have a concern that sometimes today Protestants are too negative about some of these medieval theologians like Thomas?
Yeah, absolutely, Gavin, even when I teach the Reformation, I think it’s a mistake in many ways to just jump into the 16th century. If you do that well, it’s no wonder that we perpetuate these types of caricatures, and it’s not just about Thomas Aquinas, it’s about the whole Middle Ages. If we just jump right into the 16th century, we have no ability to differentiate between, I mean, the Middle Ages is, what is it, almost a thousand years. That’s half of church history, and yet you’ll hear Protestants just refer to the Reformation as well. Thank goodness the reformers did away with the Dark ages or the Middle Ages,
Joe:
Fascinatingly, the response to Barrett making claims like this wasn’t a bunch of Protestants saying, yes, that’s right. We are obviously in harmony with St. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval theologians. It was rather entire journals, not just journal articles, but issues of journals being written about how you can’t trust St. Thomas Aquinas. And so pro pastor, a Journal of Grace Bible Theological Seminary had an issue in 2022 called Thomas Aquinas, a helpful guide for Protestants and becomes very clear from the editor’s introduction that they’re worried about two evangelicals in particular being too fond of Aquinas or Thomas. People hate it when I say Aquinas because that’s not his real last name. It’s where he is from. It’s like saying of Nazareth for Jesus. So Jeff Moore in the editor’s introduction said several decades ago, a prominent evangelical scholar, John h Gertner, who it says in the footnote he’s talking about, it’s clear from context two argued that Thomas Aquinas was really a Protestant at heart, albeit in Catholic closing in more recent days, a notable Baptist scholar, and here the footnote makes explicit.
He means Matthew Barrett has argued that evangelicals should agree with 88% of Thomas’s most famous work, the Summa theologian and the guys who contributed to pro Pastor Journal, people like James White, Jeff Moore himself, Jeffrey Johnson and Owen Straton really don’t like this idea. They actually make a summary chart that very helpfully points out 20 areas that on watershed doctrines, evangelicals contradict St. Thomas Aquinas, and they view this as a problem with St. Thomas Aquinas. Again, not something where it’s like, well, maybe we should listen to this brilliant theologian who really famously gets a lot of things right and has some of the best arguments for God that people have seen. This guy is a genius. He’s brilliant, he seems very holy. Maybe we should listen to him, but instead we’re going to say, here’s these 20 areas where he and we disagree, so that’s a problem for him.
Okay, that’s a way to do it. Owen Strahan in his article said In generations past, many reformed theologians and pastors had little interaction with Aquinas and little sympathy for his broader program. Evangelical seminaries remained wary of him. That should be a red flag, I think. But in a footnote, he says, one exception was Southern Evangelical Seminary in its emphasis on evangelical tomism under the direction of Norman Geisler. This led that is that they weren’t wary. This led a number of young Baptists, including some who did not have much ground in historical theology. First to become curious about Thomas then to develop a strong interest in his theology, and finally to become Roman Catholic. By no means did all SES students become Catholic. Many, it seems did not, but a shocking number did by one informal count more than 30 students alongside leaders at the institution.
And then if you want more on that, my friend Doug Beaumont wrote a book on this phenomenon called Evangelical Exodus, evangelical Seminarians in their Paths to Rome, and Beaumont’s Point was really simple like, Hey, look, we have this case study, this evangelical seminary decides to start reading St. Thomas Aquinas originally on philosophy, and then students start to read some of the theology and they start to realize, wow, he actually makes a lot of sense, and then they become Catholic at this shocking rate. Now, that suggests a lot the idea that the problem there is, oh, you let the seminarians read too much theology is baffling. The problem is, oh, they didn’t have enough historical theology. They’re reading the most famous theologian of all time, quite possibly or maybe second to Augustine after the Apostolic age, the idea that the problem is that they’re not getting enough theology.
The problem really from the sound of it is you’re worried they got too much theology. They started to hear theological voices that made a lot of sense that weren’t the way you were trying to indoctrinate these seminarians. It is fascinating to see, but it shows that there’s a conscious move by these guys at least to say, no, no, we are not in keeping with St. Thomas Aquinas. We’re not in keeping with older forms of Christianity because if people read that stuff, they’re going to want to become Catholic. And Strahan, in his article that he wrote after Matthew Barrett became Anglican, he warned that M-B-T-S-A Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that he quoted, I’m not going to mention his name, I’m Facebook friends with him, but he didn’t, stren didn’t get permission to quote this student. He went on his Instagram and Facebook. That’s kind of weird. I don’t want to dox him.
It’s not doxing, whatever. I don’t want to use his name without his permission in this episode, but this seminarian who is now Catholic said that at Midwestern Baptist, they were reading St. Gregory of nais, St. Sierra of Alexandria and Athanasius St. Augustine, and then they were reading later authors like St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and he said, the more and more I read them, it was really hard for me to stay Protestant. At that point, I knew I couldn’t be Protestant anymore because if I were to stay Protestant, I would have to be in a very specific traditional group that is almost so small that it’s in the sense that its capitalistic. I don’t know if he had in mind something like St. Aiden’s, but I think this is a good critique. If your idea of remaining part of the big Catholic project is to find such a niche Anglican community that someone can guess just from the pictures, oh, you must be at St a’s.
That’s probably a red flag that is not actually that Catholic. I love the impulse. I really do. I love the impulse. I love wanting to be in communion with the Great Saints, but if you’re just doing a sort of Protestant, choose your own adventure within the Anglican communion, and you just happen to be like, well, this form of Anglicanism is going to embrace historic Christianity and other forms don’t have to, that’s still not the Catholic project. And so there is something kind of self-defeating about that. And so I think this former seminarian now Catholic rightly recognized that the better thing to do was just to go all the way and become Catholic, listen to what the early church fathers have to say, listen to what the medievals have to say, and it becomes so abundantly clear that historic Christianity is Catholic, that it doesn’t leave room for certainly remaining Baptist, and I don’t think Midwestern Baptist is done feeling the effects of this.
I go to church with at least one or two former Midwestern Baptist seminarians. I just had coffee with another one today who I don’t think has really announced that he’s on his way to becoming Catholic. It’s a phenomenon and it’s a phenomenon in their defense because they tried to take seriously church history and finding out what different claims were. For instance, a couple years ago I was invited to come speak. It was by a student group and it was by a student group who was doing interreligious dialogue. So I don’t know if they even regarded me as Christian, but they still were willing to come and hear me speak on why As Catholics, we don’t believe in solo scriptura and I applaud them for that. But that intellectual openness, that willingness to find out what non Baptists have to say is going to cost them a lot of Baptists because they’re going to be exposed to a much deeper and richer theological tradition that will pose some real challenges, and they’re going to see how out of step with church history, out of step with historic Christianity, a lot of modern forms of Protestantism are, and I think if that describes you or if that describes somebody, that the question we should ask is where do we go from here?
So I want to say a quick word for Catholics and then a word for Protestants, maybe grappling with some of these issues. So for Catholics, I would just say plant seeds, even if it doesn’t seem like it’s fruitful. On Monday, I was just at an event, a panel discussion with Monsignor Sweatland. Great. It was on friendship and evangelization, but he mentioned that evening that when he converted, he was a former Protestant, he was top of his class in, I want to say the Naval Academy. He was a Rhode scholar and at Oxford he converted with some great minds that he was kind of running the race with his godfather sponsor, actually his Robert George, many of you are going to be familiar with him, but the thing that was remarkable about his story is people didn’t know he was becoming Catholic until he announced that he didn’t announce the steps of his journey.
And in one of the biographies written by him actually in the National Catholic Reporter, it quotes Robert George who talk about there was this group of four people who would regularly have dinner with him. They were all active Catholics and they’d have a drink and talk theology and single malt scotch because they were in Scotland, or excuse me, they were in Oxford, they weren’t in Scotland, but they were closer. He said, intellectually we would end up at religion and Stewart, whether as devil’s advocate or out of sincere conviction, I to this day do not know was a fierce defender of the Lutheran Reformation and that this went on for months. And then one day he just announced that he’s decided to seek reception into the Catholic church. So I mentioned this for a couple of reasons. One, I know Ben of Ccle antiquity is getting a lot of grief right now because he’s been raising money to do Protestant apologetics and then announced as he’s becoming orthodox, and maybe that’s a bad move.
I think when you make it your business and you have a channel, I understand why people feel really misled by him not making his own journey more visible, but at the same time, I think we should respect the fact that people often are on a journey they don’t feel comfortable announcing to the world, and as a result, you may have somebody in your life who raises a thousand objections to Christianity, to Catholicism, to whatever it’s, and that’s their way of working through all of the hangups they might have. You’re helping them overcome their doubts even if it looks like they’re just playing devil’s advocate. That’s very much how Sweatland described his own journey to me, and I think you see it well recounted here, and I think there’s a lot of people who are on that journey, and I suspect that’s what was going on with Ben.
He’s having these debates arguing against orthodoxy because he’s trying to see if he can defend Protestantism somehow. So don’t despair if somebody feels like irrationally opposed to becoming Catholic, that might be them trying to get over all of their hangups. Now, for those of you who might be in that situation and aren’t ready to tell people or might just be saying, huh, seems like a lot of people when they try to defend the historicity of Protestantism, leave Protestantism. Where do we go from here? I think you’ve got three options. One is you can disconnect from church history entirely. You can just say, sure, we don’t care. The church fathers were wrong. If they lived here now maybe we could convert them. Don’t read St. Thomas Aquinas. He’s just going to be bad for your faith. Just break away from church history entirely. Second, you can subordinate the church fathers to your novel theology and be like, they’re good guys, but they didn’t have all the tools we have today where you find things that you can quote from them when it’s convenient, but you don’t have to grapple with them in a serious kind of way.
They’re just a nice, like if you can pull a good line from St. John Chris System or from San Augustine from Athanasius, wonderful, but you don’t have to really think about what they believed or be a part of the church they were a part of. I think you can do those things. The third way, and the one I’d recommend is reconnect with the church. Say, okay, I actually want to be a part of the Church of the Saints. I want to be a part of the Church of the Great Christians of old. I need to find that church. And I think it’s going to be very clear that where you find that church is the Catholic church. I also think if you go the other ways, you are going to reap the whirlwind. What I mean by that is you are planting the seeds for doctrinal chaos, even if you’re the most personally doctrinally Orthodox person that you know, and I would point to the gentleman that we heard from earlier for why Matthew Barrett in his recent interview said, there’s a beautiful catholicity going all the way back to the church fathers in which bishops and counselors are absolutely key to both protecting the church from heresy and nurturing the church with sound doctrine from within.
This, by the way, is why I don’t think he can remain Anglican Episcopalian in the long run because the Anglican communion doesn’t do this, but neither here nor there he is nevertheless, right? When he says councils and their bishops give us secret creeds, creeds that to this day define and keep proper boundaries around Christianity. When those go, in my experience, orthodoxy becomes anybody’s game and it becomes quite subjective, who is going to be Orthodox and who is not, and then he warns. Additionally, needless to say, it becomes quite political at that point that one of the reasons you get infighting and political divisions and all of this stuff is because there aren’t these objective guardrails of orthodoxy. If it comes down to your interpretation of the Bible against mine, that’s not going to go well. And so Barrett saw that’s not tenable, and so we need some standard by which we can say which things are binding dogmas everyone has to agree with and which things aren’t.
This, by the way, is a point that I made last year in a video called The One Question That Unravels Protestantism. I’m going to link to it at the end, and I want to be very clear my choice of terms there was significant. I’d say unraveled. I don’t mean defeats in the sense that every Protestant says, I’m personally convicted. I means unravels that you don’t have guardrails anymore. So even if you happen to fall within the theological Orthodox side, somebody else falls somewhere else. You’re both reading scripture. Neither of you can say the other one’s wrong. This is also the conviction that Ben of Cleve to antiquity came to. Now, bear in mind, Ben fought against this position for a long time, and he fought in favor of the idea that solo scriptural works just fine and you can have tradition. It just isn’t at the same level of scripture. And he came to realize that that doesn’t really work, and he explains that the reason doesn’t really work is you are still left individually drawing your own boundaries of orthodoxy. You’re defining for yourself essentially, which doctrines are essential.
CLIP:
You can define the bounds of your Protestant tradition, but what you can’t do under the Solas scriptura framework is define dogma authoritatively, and you cannot define what and what is not a Christian period.
So you’re saying these are the primaries of the faith. This puts you outside of Christianity. You can’t do that as a Protestant, and why can’t you do that as a Protestant? Because if you were to accept the Soul of s Scriptura framework scripture’s a soul infallible authority, this is the only infallible authority that means tradition, that means your interpretation of the Bible. That means so on and so forth. All of these things are fallible. So you mean to tell me that you have fallible dogma, you have fallible kind of arbitrary definitions of what is and isn’t a Christian, it’s subjective in between church traditions. Well, that just simply can’t be true, especially not if it’s a primary issue of the faith that separates Christians from non-Christians. So that’s one thing that I had to work through, and I realized ultimately at the end of the day from that perspective, Solas scriptura just cannot be tenable.
Joe:
Now, when I make points like that, people are just like, oh, you don’t understand Solas scriptura. This was the guy who until very recently, was out there doing debates, defending solas scriptura against Catholics and Orthodox, and so I think it’s fair to say no. This really is a limitation of so scriptura that if you get rid of bishops and creeds and their binding authority and you replace it with your personal interpretation of the Bible, you are not going to reliably arrive at doctrinal orthodoxy. You just aren’t, and you’re certainly not going to arrive at a place where everybody is able to find the truth or that there’s some clear dividing line between a good and a bad interpretation of scripture. That’s a problem, and it’s a very critical problem. Now, the final words, I would say actually to Ben and Dr. Barrett themselves, because I think they’re doing something courageous here, and I want to applaud that, but I want to echo the words of our brother in Christ, James White, who says they really should go all the way and become Catholic,
CLIP:
So for a while that’ll be enough. The newness of that remains new for a while, but read those stories even when they go to an Episcopalian church, an Anglican church, maybe a super high liturgy Lutheran church or something like that. Eventually they get hit with the authority question. Eventually they get hit with the, okay, you’re doing all this stuff, but you got all that stuff from us in the first place. So if you’re taking the great tradition seriously, and in this case you’re constantly promoting Roman Catholic writers and things like that, then why not go all the way?
Joe:
I think he’s absolutely right. If you take the great tradition seriously, if you think it’s important to be in harmony with 2000 years of Christians, you should become a Catholic. Now, John Henry Newman famously said, to be deep in history, is deceased to be Protestant, but when he wrote those words, he was still an Anglican. He was barely Protestant. He was part of what was called the Oxford Movement, which tried to find a way of harmonizing anglicanism with historic Christianity by drawing upon these ancient principles. But it didn’t work. It didn’t stop him, by the way, from getting a stained glass window in an Anglican church in San Francisco.
CLIP:
One of my favorite things about Grace Cathedral is a window that we have, which is dedicated to three friends, John Henry Newman, John Kiebel, and Edward Pucey. The three of them were founders of the Oxford Movement, a movement in the 1840s in England. And what I love most about the window is that ultimately John Henry Newman left the church and went to a different denomination, so we have a window dedicated to somebody who quit because his contribution to the faith was so powerful.
Joe:
Newman explains in his book, alogia Provi, TOA or Defense of My Life, why he couldn’t in good conscience remain Anglican when he was realizing how historic Christianity was Catholic. I will defer to him on that and instead suggests the guidance of another saint that if you want to take someone seriously like St. Thomas Aquinas, which I don’t know about Ben, but certainly it’s the case for Dr. Matthew Barrett, you should follow him into his church, the Catholic Church,
CLIP:
Especially if you are absolutely taken with and enamored by Thomas Aquinas. There’s only one place to be. There’s only one church to be a part of, and you may get there slowly. You may get there quickly, but you’re going to get there eventually
Joe:
From Brother White’s lips to our Lord’s ears through the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Henry Newman. My prayer for Ben, for Matthew Barrett, for anyone who may be in a similar situation is that through the intercession of these saints and many others like them, that you’ll come home to the Catholic Church and to be in the church that these great saints thrived and that you will be able to share your gifts and that same communion for the glory of God. You’ll be able to be part of that great tradition that you’ll be able to cleave to antiquity and live in the church that those great words were spoken. If you want to see my video on the one question that unravels Protestantism, you can find that right here. Either way, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.