REBUTTAL: “Why I Don’t Accept The Papacy” (MEGA EPISODE)

Joe is joined by Brayden Cook of The Catechumen to examine the arguments made by Testify Apologetics in his video “Why I Don’t Accept The Papacy.”

Transcript:

Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I am joined today by Catholic Answers newest apologist, Brayden Cook, to respond to a recent video the channel Testify made where the guy behind the testifier explains why he’s not Catholic. So Braden, you were the one who brought this video to my attention. What drew you to it and made you think that we ought to respond to it?
Brayden:
Yeah. Thank you for having me on again, Joe. Yeah, so these types of videos are becoming more popular on YouTube. And so because Testify has a relatively larger audience and this is kind of getting some more traction, it kind of draws a lot of people to this discussion. And what struck me about Testify’s presentation is he doesn’t come off as overtly anti-Catholic. In fact, he explicitly states the opposite, right? He wants to have this good relationship with Catholics, things like this. He just wants to explain his own position and given this trend for why I’m not Catholic, why I don’t accept the papacy, it makes sense that he would make this type of video. So I think that what struck me about this video in specific is his argument is extremely easy to understand the kind of claims that he’s making. He appeals to a specific type of the argument from silence, which we’ll get to.
But I think that it’s important for us to go through because sometimes these sorts of arguments can kind of trip you up. And we’ll kind of get into that. But what he does at the beginning of the video, the way that he frames it is comparing the evidence for the resurrection, which is kind of the core miracle claim of Christianity, the thing that ultimately makes these sorts of claims that we make as Christians credible. And he compares the very strong evidence for the resurrection to the evidence needed for the papacy.
CLIP:
Basically submit to the Pope or your soul’s in danger guys. Okay, well what’s the evidence for that? What would we expect if Rome is true? If God permanently set up an office for the continual salvation and unity of the church, we should be able to historically recognize that office. Vatican one says the Roman papacy is exactly such an office. Vatican I also describes its basic reality as known throughout the church’s history. Therefore, we should expect solid early evidence for the office’s existence, succession, jurisdiction and function.
Brayden:
Joe, is that something that we should be able to expect as Catholics?
Joe:
Yeah. So I think we want to do a couple things there. One is say, how high is the burden of proof? And two, what is the thing we’re actually trying to prove? So if you want to talk about where the burden of proof ought to be, I know this is something you’ve talked about in the past. I think that’s maybe a good way to frame things at the outset. By the way, this is something that comes up regularly in discussions with non-Christians where they’ll say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So you need to prove the Christian case or the resurrection 99% likely, something like this. And this is literally irrational because if you say something is 51% more likely than not to have happened, then you ought logically to believe that it happened. You can’t logically say there’s a 90% chance that thing happened and it probably didn’t happen.
Those two statements are just contradictory. Exactly. If you’re familiar with Moore’s paradox, I think it’ll rain this afternoon, but it probably won’t, that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t affirm those two things. So if the papacy is more than 50% likely, then logically, you should apportion your belief to say, okay, that’s probably true then.
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah. And Eric Ibarra in his book, The Papacy, he has a wonderful section on the kind of evidence we would expect, what evidence is sufficient. And he makes this good point. As human beings, almost all of our decisions are not based upon the sort of evidence that we would say is beyond all reasonable doubt. We make decisions most of the time based off of what is convincing and clear, not the kind of evidence that would say, oh, this is so likely that every other position would be absurd. And I think a lot of the time, this sort of evidence that is expected for the papacy by our interlocutors is that sort of unreasonable, unreasonably high, I guess, sort of evidence, unreasonably high probability that this is true rather than not.
Joe:
And I say that not because I don’t think that there’s a very high amount of evidence for the papacy. I think there is. Yeah,
Exactly. But just to say, if inside your mind you have the burden of proof set so high that no prosecutor could ever convict, that’s not a good place just mentally to be evaluating the evidence. But the other thing is, well, what is the evidence meant to be showing here in the first place? And he mentioned in the clip Vatican one’s claims. And I think he actually does a very good job about it, but because there’s confusion about this, there’s often a sort of caricature within Protestantism that Vatican one is making these really outlandish and ahistorical kind of claims in what was known throughout the ages about the papacy. And I though it might be helpful to look at one of the actual claims made. This is I think the most commonly referenced one and then look at the historical support for it. So this is from the document pastor attorneys and the quotation is this, “For no one can be in doubt, indeed it was known in every age that the holy and most blessed Peter prince and head of the apostles, the pillar of faith and the foundation of the Catholic church received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the savior and redeemer of the human race.
And that to this day and forever, he lives and presides and exercises judgment in his successors, the Bishops of the Holy Roman Sea, which he founded and consecrated with his blood.” And you’ll have Protestants who say, “I can’t believe that in 1870, they made this outrageous claim about church history.” And if you notice very carefully, you’ll see there’s a lot of quotation marks in the paragraph I just read there. Vatican one is quoting something. Well, what are they quoting? Well, they’re quoting the testimony of the papal legget, Philip, at the third ecumenical council, the Council of Ephesus, in which he says all of that explicitly. He says that most blessed Peter is prince, it’s actually Exark and head of the apostles that he’s pillar of faith, foundation of the Catholic church. He received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ. And that to him, to Peter, was given the power of Lucien and binding sins who down even today and forever both lives and judges in his successors.
But then he actually says more than Vatican one quotes him on because he goes on to say that Pope Celestine, according to due order, is his successor and holds his place. And that’s who sent the papalegates to the holy synod. And then he said that the Popes have both kept and are now keeping intact the episolic doctrine handed down to them from their most pious and humane grandfathers and fathers of holy memory down in the present time, et cetera. In other words, these really big sounding claims that people associate with the time of the reformation or the time of the first Vatican council in 1870, these are directly coming from the early church. And you might disagree with the church fathers on this, but you should know that yet this is what they were saying at the third Ecumenical Council. And when the papal legate gets up and says this, the council fathers, which remember Ephesus is in the east.
They don’t just say like, “What are you talking about? This is just a primacy of honor. We’ve never heard of this or we’re all equally successors of Peter.” None of that.
Brayden:
Yeah. Well, immediately after this, they ask the papal leggets to ratify the decrees.
Joe:
Yes. Which is pretty incredible because one of the core disputes between Catholics and Orthodox is
Do you need papal authority to ratify a decree? The council fathers at Ephesus clearly though the answer to that was yes, and it could be ratified through his representative, through his legget. And if you know the history of the Robber Council, when the legget does not affirm it, then the Ecumenical Council is not an ecumenical council. It doesn’t have any authority and it’s just rejected as a robber council. So it shows this incredible authority of the Popes at the time at least of the Council of Ephesus. But remember that language again where he says that this was known throughout all the ages. Now that can’t be something that had just been introduced a couple of years earlier because that would be obviously an absurd claim. So you have to go back well before the Council of Ephesus. So that is already going to put us really early on.
Council of Ephesus is what, 431? Yeah. So you’re well before 4:31. You have to at least be a lifetime before that because if somebody is old enough to say, “Well, I remember when there wasn’t this kind of idea of papal authority,” then his claim would fall apart. It has to be far enough back that no one knows of a time when this wasn’t true. That’s already going to put papal claims extremely early in history just based on what we find in this early evidence. So when you’re evaluating these claims, it’s important to know these things. One, what Vatican one claims about the early church is not some novelty in the 19th century or some novelty after the reformation. This is the same thing we’ve been claiming on down through the ages. And we can go back at least to the quotation in question there is from 431.
And I think as we’re going to see, you can go back much further in fact. But two, having said that, we’re not saying and Vatican one is not saying that the papacy has always looked exactly the same in every age. That’s simply not true. That dog won’t hunt. There is a legitimate development and I know development is something that some Protestants roll their eyes at, but just as you don’t see a fully articulated Trinitarian theology in say the year 100, neither do you see a fully fleshed out lived reality of the papacy in the same way that you see it later on. The example I give in my book Pope Peter is imagine something like Apple computers. Steve Jobs, he’s the head of Apple Computers, but when he is running it out of his garage, that’s going to look very different than when he is running it out of its world headquarters.
The office is the same, but the way the office looks is radically different. So I guess he talks a little bit about development in this, so that might be a natural place to pivot to next. So let’s look at his claims on development.
CLIP:
So if God made submission to Rome, this big of a deal, wouldn’t we expect much more obvious evidence from the get-go? I would think so. A Catholic might argue doctrine develops just like the Trinity, but I don’t think this whole doctrinal development theory really works. Yes, doctrines become clear in gay new terminology, but the papacy is an actual ongoing governing office, not just a theological philosophical idea that really needs to be hashed out like the trinity or the incarnation. Even before the title Pope, someone should exercise universal authority and other churches should recognize it.
Joe:
So I’m not 100% sure I understand the argument he’s making, and maybe you can explain this better, Braden. Yeah. But it seems to me that his trinity and papacy example would naturally cut the exact opposite direction because the trinity is unchanging for all eternity, built into the idea of the trinity. And so in principle, the trinity was knowable certainly in the first century. And so someone could have sat down and put all those pieces together. And as a matter of just historical fact, that happens a little more slowly where they’re making these true claims and then eventually they come up with the word trinity to describe the kind of collection of those true claims. It’s not like they had believed in some other theology and then replaced it with Trinitarianism. That’s not the argument here, but they have everything they need. Whereas the papacy precisely because it’s a lived office does look different from age to age in the same way that take something like the father’s role in the family or male headship or something like this, that is going to be enculturated differently in different ages, in different contexts, in different families.
And so you would expect that to look different from age to age. You wouldn’t expect the trinity to look different from age to age. So it seems like development would more naturally make sense in the context of the papacy than it does with the trinity. But he’s willing to give doctrinal development for the trinity, but not for the papacy. I’m not 100% sure I understand why that is.
Brayden:
And it’s so frustrating sometimes when we talk about development. And I don’t know if he necessarily thinks this, but a lot of Protestants think that we think development is, oh, Rome was just this local church. It has importance, but it’s just a local church with local jurisdiction. And then it developed and changed entirely into the head of the universal church with universal jurisdiction, able to give these sorts of universally binding degrees. It’s like it went from something and then it developed into something it was not prior. And so I like the point that you’re making is because this is a lived office that is occupied by different popes throughout the centuries, responding to different crises in the church, et cetera, this is precisely the kind of thing that you would expect to develop because we can talk about, okay, does the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, have this authority?
We can say yes. But in so far as the Pope exercises this authority, both in the form and in the circumstance, we would certainly expect that to be different as the ages go on. And so for example –
Joe:
It’s going to depend on the individual, the culture, even the technology. I mean, if I can give a concrete example of what you’re saying here, Traditions Castodes, in the re-script for that, one of the things that people were rankled by was that the Vatican was intervening even at the level of church bulletins advertising Latin mass. That would have been literally impossible for most of the history of the church simply because there was no way the Vatican could find out what was going to be in your bulletin before next Sunday prior to instantaneous global communication. And the principle there is one that we should remember that when it takes a month or as we’re going to see with First Clement, it takes years to get an answer from Rome, then obviously in practice, a lot of authority is going to be on the ground, but that is not a matter of principle.
That is just a matter of what are the technological limitations in the same way that a father who is say on military duty in another country, his fatherhood and his family is going to be lived out in a very different way than a dad who’s on the ground and is able to intervene much more in the day to day circumstances.
Brayden:
Yeah. Another good example too is the church’s use, not just the Popes, but the church’s use of things like canon law, decreators, ecumenical councils, while they are in part a product of their time, simply because it was modeled after Roman governmental structures doesn’t mean it just kind of popped up, developed itself from nothing. To have authority is different than choosing to exercise your authority in this particular format and in doing this particular thing. And so we can say, yeah, the Pope has universal authority or the church can gather or teach something universally binding on Christians, but the way in which they do that and when they do that is a matter of historical circumstance. So they might expect, yeah, so if the Pope has this authority, then we would expect him, every single Pope to act as an autocrat issuing decrees for each individual particular church and just willy-nilly left and right excommunicating people.
It’s like why would we expect that? To have authority doesn’t ensure that you’re going to exercise it in the highest capacity that you can. If you look through –
Joe:
Particularly when Jesus says not to do that, right? Yeah, exactly. Lording it over. No to lord your authority over your subjects like the Gentiles do. Yeah.
Brayden:
And then St. Peter repeats that in his letters, right? Don’t lord it over as he’s talking to the Presbyters, right?
Joe:
Yeah.
Brayden:
And so I think we need to kind of separate the, okay, that the Pope has authority and that we would expect him to exercise that authority. Those are two different claims. And we would only expect him to exercise the authority in so far as the circumstances ask for it. And so as we get into these examples, we’ll kind of see what we’re talking about here.
Joe:
Great. Well, let’s talk next about arguments from Silence. I think you’ve teed up well. Yes, we do believe, as he said, that someone can exercise universal authority and other churches do recognize it, but we don’t believe that that’s always going to be the way the Pope handles things, nor do we think that’s how the Pope always should handle things. There’s plenty of things that can be settled at the local level. But that’s going to open us up to this argument that, oh, well, if we don’t see the Pope acting in this place or we don’t see someone mentioning, oh, by the way, there’s a papacy, there must not be a papacy.
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah. His entire case is built off of this argument from silence, this strong argument from silence. And I think we have a clip of him explaining what a strong argument of silence would look like.
CLIP:
Now, I know what people are going to say. They’re going to go testify, “Oh my gosh, you hate the argument from silence. You talk bad about the argument from silence all the time. And what are you giving me here an argument from silence?” And I do hate the argument from silence, but according to philosopher Tim McGrew, there are three necessary conditions for a strong argument from silence. I don’t think that this is a mere weak argument from silence. So what are those three conditions? One, the event or fact would’ve almost certainly have come to the notice of the author or authors in question. The author or authors would’ve recorded or in some other clear fashion given evidence of the fact, had they noticed it, the work or works in which this was done would’ve survived to the present era and come to the notice of contemporary scholars.
And so does this pass the strong argument from silence criteria?
Joe:
Well, does it?
Brayden:
Yeah. The reason I ask that is because the argument from silence section is after all of the evidence that we’re about to go through, but I think it’s important to note his type of argument from silence or the kind of archetype of the argument from silence that he’s trying to employ. Because I think that we can agree that there are strong arguments from silence and there are very weak arguments from silence.
Joe:
Yes.
Brayden:
And the reason why sometimes people throw out, “Oh, that’s an argument from silence,” as if it’s some sort of formal logical fallacy. And a lot of times it can be extremely, extremely fallacious. And so the conditions for having a strong argument from silence, he pulls from this philosopher named McGrew, right? And I actually found a paper from him online just to see if he was representing him accurately. And he is. And I think the issue that we’re going to get into is, okay, here’s this strong form of the argument from silence. Is he applying that accurately in each of these instances? It’s not, okay, we would. It’s more likely than not. It’s probably, right? It’s not, I’d expect to see this. The form of argument from silence that he’s trying to employ is if this fact were true, so that if the papacy were true, it would be extremely surprising if this author in this work in this location failed to mention it, failed to mention this part of the papacy, whatever.
And so I forget if it was actually in that clip, but those weird letters and numbers,
Joe:
The
Brayden:
Logical form, the squiggly line one, that’s close to certainty. It would be absurd if this is true for this person not to mention it. Not like, “Oh, it’s likely, fairly likely. I would expect it.” It would be incredibly why would he not mention it here and now? The circumstances of the writing would almost require him to bring this up in this circumstance if it were true. That’s the type of argument that Testify is relying upon.
Joe:
Think about a movie to illustrate this point. I hate clunky exposition. So when you’re at the beginning of a movie, the director wants to introduce the characters. And so the guy’s like, “Oh, hey sis, it’s so nice to see you. It’s been two years since mom died.” No one talks like that. That is not how real life people talk. Well, similarly, there can be this. The bad argument from silence is, “Oh, these two Christians are talking and neither one of them brought up that the Bishop of Rome is the Pope.” And you’re like, “Yeah, that’s not surprising.” And it doesn’t mean they didn’t know he was the Pope. When Catholics greet each other, not like, “Hello, fellow Catholic. Did you know that Pope Leo is the successor of Peter?” The fact that I didn’t mention that in introducing you did not mean I didn’t know that fact.
It just meant it wasn’t relevant for the particular conversation we were having, even though the conversation in this case is literally about the papacy. So the problem with making the papal arguments from silence is that we agree with the first of the three. So if you look at McGrew’s list, we agree with premise one, but it’s the second part that in these particular cases, we would expect it, or it’d be almost certain that they would mention the papacy. As we’re going to see with the specific evidence as we take a deeper look at that, overwhelmingly, it’s just not surprising that the papacy isn’t mentioned. Or if you look at the way Testify analyzes the evidence, frequently the papacy is mentioned, but an individual author just doesn’t give you every single detail about the papacy.
I hear again, the comparison to the Trinity is worth mentioning because he argues, and I think correctly, that there’s good biblical evidence for the Trinity. But if someone just said, give me a single chapter and verse that proves the entire doctrine of the Trinity, that verse does not exist. That it is rather the synthesis of a lot of different strands of biblical evidence. So you could find someone, for example, Thomas saying Jesus, my Lord, my God to Jesus. Okay, that’s great. That doesn’t immediately prove the Trinity, but it is an important element of it. Well, similarly, as we’re going to see, a lot of the evidence for the papacy, you don’t have a single author in a single sentence giving you everything in the papal claim, but all of this is part of the papal claim and it makes sense in putting these strands together as papacy makes more sense than any of the eight competing theories, just as putting those strands together in the Bible as the trinity makes more sense than any competing theory.
Brayden:
Yeah. And something else that we don’t see in these early ages is a treatise on ecclesiology, right?
Joe:
Right.
Brayden:
And that absence isn’t conspicuous. It’s just like, why would we expect an exhaustive treatment on ecclesiology to be present in the second century or that sort of thing.
Joe:
Let me give one that I heard recently that I think really shows the weakness of arguments from silence applied to the first 200 years. Yeah. In the writings of St. Paul, he tells us almost nothing about the life of Jesus Christ. That is a weird fact that is undeniably true. He talks, for example, about Jesus being born of a woman and does not mention the virgin birth. He doesn’t mention the Sermon on the Mount. He doesn’t relate hardly any of Jesus’s actual teachings. Rarely does he just quote Jesus and say, “Jesus taught X, Y, Z.” He clearly knows that Jesus lived, died, rose again. But if you were to say, “What did Jesus do before he died?” Well, we know he instituted the Eucharist because Paul talks about that, but there’s actually surprisingly little information pre-Holy Week that we get in Paul’s writings. Now, is that material he would have known?
Of course. He knew about the life of Jesus Christ.This was his Lord and God. But it’s only mildly surprising that he doesn’t include it. It’s not a good argument from silence that you’d say, “Aha, Jesus must not have lived. This is the way…”
Brayden:
That’s a good analogy too, because it’s directly applicable. If we ask, “Oh, we can set up this general probability argument. If Jesus performed all of these miracles during his earthly ministry, then we would expect to see some evidence of that. But all of the earliest documents of the New Testament don’t mention a single miracle of Christ during his early ministry, that is the letters of Paul, right? We don’t get that until the gospel authors wrote down these narratives, right? So because Paul didn’t mention these miracles during Christ’s earthly life, we can reasonably infer that Paul didn’t know about them or that these didn’t really. This is the sort of argument that you will get from people who say that, oh, these miraculous accounts of Christ were kind of developed. They’re legendary accounts that were developed as the cult of Christ kind of sprouted in this early Roman world.
And there’s an obvious, as we have noted, there’s obvious problems with that argument. And so the same thing can be said about this early evidence for the papacy in the first couple centuries, right?
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re someone watching this and you’re saying, “Wow, that argument against Jesus’s life is a really terrible argument from silence,” then just recognize how similar it looks to the arguments being made against the papacy. Because as we’re going to see, there is very good early evidence for the Bishop of Rome, for the Bishop of Rome’s special authority in a papal type way, for the authority of Peter, et cetera. And every time the argument from Silence crowd just says, “Well, why don’t we find that 20 years earlier? Why don’t we find that in the one author prior to this guy?” And it is worth just saying, “That’s a bad argument.” Yeah, that’s not a good argument for Silence. We would say is not a strong argument.
Brayden:
Yeah. There is virtually no realistic circumstance in which this person would not have told me this in this book.
Joe:
And in fact –
Brayden:
That’s the level that he’s getting at.
Joe:
We can use the argument from silence framework in exactly the opposite direction because as soon as we find clear evidence, the clear evidence shows very much what the Council of Ephesus or what Philip at the Council of Ephesus recognized. Yeah, the Pope is the Pope and every church has a Bishop. And these are the things that Testify is denying or true in the early church. And so if the early church was set up with a different structure and then somebody came along and upended a structure that was set up by Jesus, that, as we’re going to see, is precisely the kind of thing you would expect someone to write about. And so the fact that no one writes about it at all, good, bad, or neutral, even to observe it happened, is actually quite surprising.
Brayden:
Philip Hughes says this, and it’s a wonderful quotation in his book on the history of the church. He says, “By the time of St. Ignatius Phantiach,” that is the end of the first century within 30 to 40 years of the death of St. Paul, the new system, the so-called monarchical episcopate is so universal that he takes it for granted as the basis of his exportations. I might add, he takes it for granted that this is necessary for a church to be a church, right? And he says, “This change took place with so little disturbance that it has left no trace at all in history. It passed with so general an agreement that one could only infer that it had behind it what alone could sanction so great a change, what alone could secure it so smooth a passage, the consciousness of all concern that this was part of the founder’s plan brought out in detail by the apostles he had commissioned.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that’s beautiful where it’s, okay, as soon as we find clear evidence and you take Ignatius, who’s believed to be a disciple of the apostle John, and he doesn’t just say, “I prefer here in Antioch, I’m the only guy who is Bishop.” He says there’s one bishop and that there are Presbyters and that they’re elders and that if you don’t have this structure of Bishop, Presbyters, elders, you’re not a real church. And if that is something that is not what the apostles taught, how did the students of the apostles think it was? Particularly when, remember, their lived experience as Christians wasn’t, they’re just picking up these letters and trying to build a church that reflects what the Bible says. The apostles are literally found in their churches and then putting them in authority. And so if they put some other authority structure and that was upended, you would expect the disciples of the apostles, number one, not to sanction that or number two, at least to defend why they should be able to rebel from the apostolic structure.
And we get nothing of that. There’s not a hint of that anywhere. A couple other quotes that I use in my book, Pope Peter, to that same effect – Sory,
Brayden:
Before you get to that –
Joe:
Oh, please.
Brayden:
So your book on the early church was the Catholic church has a great excerpt on this, but I was just going to say the only possible theory that I could think of where this would have just taken place, this sort of switch would have taken place without any disagreement or debate or anything like that is if the structure of the church is just kind of subjective. It doesn’t really matter how you organize your church, but if that were the case, then why in the world would we have St. Ignatius speaking about this in such a way that it is completely immutable? This type of structure is necessary for the church to be what the church is, right?
Joe:
Yes. And Clement says something very similar even before Ignatius, where he talks about how the father sent Jesus and Jesus sent the apostles and the apostles send the bishops and deacons. And Protestants will regularly point to that and say, “Aha, there must have only been a two-tiered structure of the church.” And we’ll get into that more when we get into the specific evidence, but it actually cuts the opposite direction because we’re seeing that the Christians of this period thought that the structure of the church was immutable. It was God-given not for them to change and adapt. And two, elsewhere in Clement’s writing, actually a couple paragraphs away, he compares it to the three-tiered structure of high priest priest Levi, and that makes it look like he actually has a three-tiered structure, just like sometimes the three-tiered Levitical structure is called priests and Levites, but it’s actually three tiers.
So he’s using a two-tiered shorthand for a three-tiered structure. That’s what the evidence seems to point to. Whether you think that’s right or not, you would have to explain why Christians thinking that this was an immutable divine structure would then have changed it in the roughly 11 years between First Clement and the writings of Ignatius.
Brayden:
Yeah. Sorry to cut you off, but – Oh
Joe:
No, no, not at all. I’m glad you did.
Brayden:
The only theory that I could come up with that I think would make this sort of change plausible just doesn’t work.
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you’re also right. I started to say Pope Peter, and this is actually from the early church was a Catholic church where I look at the history of bishops. And Father Maguckian, I believe he’s a Dominican priest, I may be mistaken about that, says, “The notion of a church choosing its church order is unheard of in the Christian tradition until the 16th century with the reformation in Switzerland and the choice between prospitable and Episcopal government is church dividing to this day.” Is it plausible to suggest that it would not have been equally divisive in the first decades of the church’s life and could have taken place without leaving any trace whatever, that this is the direction the argument from silence would naturally cut. If somebody came in and upended this divinely ordained Presbyterianism or divinely ordained congregationalism or divinely ordained Episcopalianism in favor of this Catholic structure, how did no one mention that?
How did no one object to that or defend it or comment on it? It is simply implausible given what we know when this is actually in real life in the 16th century, when the Swiss chose a new form of government, that was radically disruptive and there’s plenty of writing about it. We’re to believe that something similar happened 1500 years earlier and no one mentioned it, everyone was just happy with the change or found it unremarkable.
It’s completely implausible.
Brayden:
Yeah. It’s not even just implausible or not likely. The omission of any sort of debate or anything like that is extremely, extremely hard to explain. And that’s what makes this particular argument from silence very strong.
Joe:
You’d almost have to assume something like Men in Black style amnesia because it’s not like they’re silent on church structure. Ignatius talks about church structure quite a bit, but he doesn’t view it as a novelty. You’ll regularly hear people refer as if Ignatius is arguing for the monoepiscopacy. And as the quotation that you provided earlier from Philip Hughes points out, he doesn’t. It’s universal. He takes it for granted. He knows the people he’s writing to already have that structure of government. When he tells him to obey the bishop, it’s the same way you might tell your kids to obey the babysitter or to obey their parents. It doesn’t mean you’re inventing a new structure. You’re not trying to explain this, “Oh, there’s going to be a ne structure of authority you’ve never heard of before.” That’s it at all. The other source here that’s worth mentioning is Leon Morris in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, because he points out that we don’t find any of the kind of violent struggle you would expect if a divinely ordained congregationalism or Presbyterianism were overthrown.
On the other hand, these same threefold ministry that we’ve been talking about is seen as universal throughout the early church as soon as there is sufficient evidence to show us the nature of the ministry. So we simply don’t find anything of what we would expect to find. So if you’re going to use arguments from silence, just recognize all of the evidence in as much as it does exist points in the Catholic direction. And so if that is an abrupt change from what had happened right before, we would expect to see signs of that. And this is a basic. As arguments from silence go, we would assume agreement rather than assume disagreement. If somebody is very publicly declaring a certain thing, whether it’s about Christ or about the church or whatever, and their writings are being copied and preserved and nobody is speaking out and saying, “This is heresy, this is insane, this is a novelty,” that’s actually by itself pretty good evidence that what they’re saying is accepted.
It is widespread.
Brayden:
So going back to just the governmental structure, it could be something so simple as why were there not any churches with a Presbyterian or congregational church polity at this time?
Joe:
Right. If this was either A, permitted or B, created by our Lord or by the apostles, you would expect that at least some church would have chosen this.
Brayden:
Yeah. It reminds me, and I wish I would have given this to you for the slide, but there’s this famous quotation from Tertolian, the prescription against Heretics chapter 28. He says, “Is it likely that so many churches and they so great should have gone astray into one and the same faith?”
Joe:
Yeah, this is a point that I think Protestants would do well to consider, that when we talk about unity, unity is connected with the truth. And I’ve given this example before, so bear with me. But if you take a math test and you’ve got one class where the students have studied really hard and one class where they have not studied very hard, which of the two classes are you going to expect the test to look more similar? Well, you’d expect the ones who know what they’re doing to have the same or very similar kind of tests. And the ones who have no idea what they’re doing, they’re going to go wrong, but they’re going to go wrong in different ways. One’s going to put seven, one’s going to put 24, whatever. Those kind of extreme different directions are a sign that they’re not right. And so within Protestantism, it looks way more different than Catholicism.
Internally, Catholicism has much more of a coherent sense of, yeah, this is what Catholics believe or faithful practicing Catholics, they all believe pretty similar stuff. If you compare faithful practicing Catholics to faithful practicing Orthodox, it’s looking pretty similar. But then you say, “Well, what about faithful practicing Protestant?” It doesn’t look very similar. And so the idea is one that is, I think, worth considering. Well, apply that here to the early church. If the apostles had set up a particular form of government, the idea that all of the churches that they founded, every local church deviated, but they all happen to deviate in the exact same direction is not a good theory. That is not at the outset of a very good understanding of human beings. It is not consistent with what we see from people like Tratulian. It’s not consistent with the nature of error, that error is diffuse, it is divided, it is denominational, if you want to put it that way.
Yeah.
Brayden:
When everyone gets the same question wrong on the test, they don’t all have the same answer. Exactly. It’s almost like the person who gave them the test did something wrong.
Joe:
Right. If everyone thought that the answer was 40 and it was meant to be 20 – They’re cheating.
Brayden:
They’re cheating.
Joe:
It’s like, “What is happening here?” Then you have to say, “Was the question badly worded? Was this class taught poorly?” What happened that they all came out with the same answer and it wasn’t the answer you though that they should have
Brayden:
Done? The question certainly couldn’t have been ambiguous enough to allow for any other error. Right.
Joe:
Okay. Well, if you’re game for it, let’s take a look at some of the specific evidence kind of in order. Yeah, let’s do it. We teed that up for quite a
Brayden:
Long time,
Joe:
But
Brayden:
It’s important.
Joe:
Let’s look at the biblical evidence that he presents and then some of the patriciic evidence. And I know we are going much longer on this, but one of the things to bear in mind and thankful to everyone listening so far, is that it’s much easier to just make these claims and is to show why these claims aren’t true. But let’s start with Matthew 16:18, the famous, upon this rock, I’ll build my church passage. He argues this isn’t as strong as Catholics make it out to be. And do you want to kind of explain why he argues that and what you’d say in response?
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah. So Matthew 16:18 through 19 is basically our go-to passage. So it makes sense that Protestants will focus on this passage. So on the screen right here, you’ll see one of the primary reasons he says this isn’t as strong is arguing from the keys. And so he quotes St. Augustine who says, “Peter alone deserved to represent the entire church. It was not one man who received the keys, but the entire church considered as one.” And so the implication is our position requires that Peter alone receives the keys and the church doesn’t. There’s a few things that we can say about this passage. One is I believe, and some might disagree with me, this particular place, St. Augustine is commenting on Matthew 16:18. He’s not excluding a historical interpretation wherein Peter actually does receive the keys uniquely because there’s a primary meaning of the passage of Matthew 16:18 where it’s entirely explicit.
Jesus is speaking singularly to Peter. He addresses Peter. He gives him a new name. He even says, Peter, son of Jonah, right? He’s addressing Peter. All of the Greek verbs are singular. I give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And so we can think of this historical, or I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. There’s this historical meaning that cannot be diminished by any sort of symbolic analogical meanings. And the historic meaning is Jesus is promising to give the keys singularly, uniquely to Peter.
But there’s also a sense in which Peter here, he’s not only speaking on behalf of the apostles, because you remember in the passage, Christ asked the apostles, who do you say that I am? And Peter answers. Peter alone answers. You are the Christ, son of a living God. But he’s also representing the entire church. And I think that is important to kind of sit out on for a second. Why does St. Augustine say that Peter alone deserved to represent the entire church if he doesn’t occupy a place in the church where he can do that? I think that’s an important thing
Joe:
To know. Yeah. If I can summarize the point you just made. Augustine thinks Peter can speak and act on behalf of the entire church.
The idea that one man can speak and act on behalf of the entire church is much more consistent with the Catholic model than it is with some other model of the church. It seems to me that saying, well, it’s not just one man, but the entire church considered as one cuts exactly against. We would say yes, absolutely. When Leo acts, we’re not just looking at Robert Prevost, we’re looking at the Catholic church in action. And that is exactly the Catholic model of the papacy. And so to use that as a proof that, oh, Catholics are over arguing Matthew 16, I just don’t think it works there. All right. Anything else you’d add on Augustine’s take on Matthew 16 or on Matthew 16 more broadly?
Brayden:
I don’t think so,
Joe:
Honestly. Okay. Let’s move on to some of the other New Testament evidence that he points out. He says, Peter’s a major leader. The New Testament never says his authority passes to Rome’s bishops. So the first question there is on succession. I’m going to put a pin in that for a second. He says, Peter doesn’t govern the apostles like a Vatican one pope. Paul rebukes him and the Jerusalem council acts together. So is there an example at the time of say the first Vatican council of the church coming together at a council? I think the question is almost self-explanatory. The idea that a council is going to disprove the Pope is, again, it’s like, no, we have councils and a council isn’t just a bunch of people get in a room and listen to the Pope talk. They also add their own thoughts on the matter.
So he says James plays more of a role in the final decision. Let’s take a closer look at the Council of Jerusalem. Council of Jerusalem is on the question of whether those who have not been circumcised can be saved. And do we see Peter individually giving an answer to that question prior to Acts 15? Yes. Back in Acts 10, he opens the doors of salvation to Cornelius, who is an uncircumcised Gentile, and then he defends this in Acts 11. And this is still questioned after that in Acts 15, because people believe, well, they must need to get circumcised now. But it isn’t as if Peter had to wait to open the doors of salvation to the Gentiles and tell the Council of Jerusalem. That simply is read Acts. That is not what happened. What Acts 15 is doing is confirming a direction already signaled by Peter at divine prompting.
And so the idea that the Council of Jerusalem is going to mitigate against Peter’s authority, I think just doesn’t make any sense. It’s worth asking Protestants who believe this is a good argument. How do you think this works? If God tells Peter to go and baptize Cornelius, is your argument he has to wait for a council to do it? Because that’s not what happens biblically. And so if the council is supporting what Peter is doing and then also giving disciplinary rules about which parts of the mosaic law they do need to hold to, which parts they don’t, what in that is inconsistent with the papacy at all? I mean, the church meets at council, the Council of Trent, First Vatican Council, Second Vatican Council. These things don’t mitigate against papal authority. The fact that sometimes it makes more sense to settle a question at council, neither is inconsistent with the Catholic model nor means that it was impossible for it to be settled in an individual fashion.
If you have a family meeting or you talk over with your wife the best way to handle a question of discipline with your kids, that doesn’t mean you didn’t have the parental authority to just tell them this is what the punishment is going to be for what you did or whatever. It just means that you knew it made more sense in this context to do it in a dialogue, to do a more dyadic approach to use the therapeutic language. That’s not inconsistent with the papal model at all. I’m surprised people use Council of Jerusalem in this way because it’s like they expect that every council the Pope is just throwing his authority around and saying, “Here’s exactly how we’re going to do it.” But then why have a council at all if that’s your understanding of the papacy?
Brayden:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think something that both sides can concede is the Council of Jerusalem is. It’s one of those cases where you have a ton of divinely inspired leggets, divine legots, that is those who give revelation during the first century present. And even though the apostolic college has a head, that doesn’t mean that when gathered in council, the other divine legots who all receive revelation are incapable of giving their judgments. And so it’s just kind of one of those funny things. It’s like in the apostolic time period, there are other people who are speaking on behalf of God. So it’s very different. That doesn’t mean that Peter couldn’t exercise his authority as the head. It’s just that that looks very different.
Joe:
Yeah. As Vatican two says, the bishops are not the vicars of the Pope. Right. And that’s not some new thing. So again, it’s like, okay, well, given that, if your model is, oh, well, this can’t be a valid instance of the papacy because the Pope isn’t just bossing everyone around and the bishops aren’t just saying yes sir and snapping to attention, you have a cartoonish understanding of the papacy.
Brayden:
Exactly. Yeah.
Joe:
Okay. What about the claim? The New Testament says a ton about all kinds of different church leadership offices, but zilch about an ongoing Roman office over every Christian. And notice how many caveats he has in there. I would say first of all, does the New Testament say a ton about all kinds of different church leadership offices? I don’t think that’s actually true. There are a lot of references. So like Ephesians four, but even there it’s like our apostles and teachers and prophets, are those offices in the church? There are references, but there’s not actually a ton said at all. I mean, you still have within the world of Protestantism disputes about whether the Office of Bishop and the Office of Presbytery is the same office or different, and they can’t prove it from scripture alone because New Testament doesn’t say a ton about a lot of different church offices.
So if you’re looking to find a blueprint of the church in the Bible, it doesn’t exist. And the reason it doesn’t exist is because the church is older than the New Testament. And so there was no need to create a blueprint to build up the church because the apostles had already done so. And what did the Apostles church look like? Well, you can listen to the people who knew the apostles and they’ll tell you. Yeah. But they don’t tell you in the pages of the New Testament. I mean, that is something that everyone should just acknowledge that if you are saying, “Well, this says there should be teachers, this says there should be prophets, this says there should be apostles.” But also this other part talks about bishop and this other part talks about Presbyterian and this other part talks about deacons. How are you putting those pieces together?
Which of those are charismatic gifts? Which of those are unique to the first century? Which of those are ongoing offices? And you’re going to find it’s not just the papacy you struggle to prove there, it’s everything. Where is the passage that says we’re going to have deacons in every age? It doesn’t exist.
Brayden:
Right.
Joe:
Yeah,
Brayden:
Exactly.
Joe:
The idea that there’s a succession of office, that’s not just a challenge for showing Peter’s office. It’s actually a challenge for showing every office. Which office are we ever told in the New Testament carries on to future generations? We’re not. And so that whole way of framing the question, I think actually badly misunderstands it. I would say if Jesus set up a church where one guy is able to speak and act on behalf of the entire church, then that seems like a pretty good idea that that was how he wanted things set up. And we should at least assume, barring other evidence, that that’s the way things are still going to be set up today. Does that immediately prove it? It doesn’t, but it at least means the presumption would be in the favor of continuity in favor of discontinuity.
Brayden:
Yeah. So also given Catholicism, let’s say we assume Catholicism for a second, why would we expect the New Testament to specifically reference an ongoing office of the papacy? We wouldn’t necessarily expect that. Could we pause it like, “Oh, maybe Paul would mention something like that in his epistles.” Okay, but why would we necessarily expect it? The absence of which is just kind of absurd, right? Because we don’t hold to sola scriptura. You said earlier, this is a good point to make, Jesus founded the church, the apostles instituted and ordained people to particular offices within the church prior to the writing of any singular New Testament document. So there’s already a function established and an office established prior to any of these documents. So given those things, why would we expect? Why would we necessarily have to expect. And remember, the reason I’m bringing that up is because that’s the type of argument from silence that he’s working with.
Under
Joe:
Catholicism – And it’s silent in all directions. It isn’t as if the New Testament says, “Here’s how every local church is going to be governed.” If that passage existed, you would have much more unanimity within Protestants.
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Joe:
And so every direction, you could apply the argument from silence, well, oh, if your structure of church was true, we’d see it explicitly laid out. That equally applies to every form of structure of the church. People are grasping at a few verses to say, “Maybe it is this.” But if we’re being honest about the evidence, you do not have a robust demonstration of any of the different models, which seems to me best suggests that the structure of the church was known and practiced at the time and there was no need to write on it. Because if you think about why the New Testament authors write on particular topics, it’s usually because there’s a controversy. And so if the structure of the church was uncontroversial, then we should go and say, “Well, what did that structure of the church look like according to the other people who lived at the time?” “Oh, it looks like the three-tiered model.
“Okay, great. That gives us everything we need to know.
Brayden:
Yeah. That’s the problem too, is they have to make this sort of historical reconstruction based upon the documents of the New Testament alone, because they think that the structure of the church went through a radical change, right?
Joe:
Right.
Brayden:
And so they’re making these reconstructions based solely on the New Testament and not upon the earliest Christian evidence that we have. And we can make a stronger argument from silence contrast sola scriptura, because we can ask if God truly intended for scripture to be the sole infallible rule to govern Christian life practice and doctrine, would he not. Is it absurd to think that he would not give that level of detail of instruction in his word? I think that it’s extremely, extremely implausible to say that God intended solo scriptura and also there’s no ecclesiological manual in the New Testament.
Joe:
Right. A case in point, this has been the single most dividing issue within Protestant. The different denominations don’t exist primarily along theological lines, but along ecclesiological lines or lines of polity. And so that was a very foreseeable consequence that because this is not something that is spelled out and because every church has to answer the question, you can’t just be neutral on what the structure of the church ought to look like because you actually need a structure. Yeah, exactly. Someone needs to make a decision and it doesn’t tell us in the New Testament how that ought to work. That makes much more sense if solo scripture is false.
Brayden:
If God intended something specific, this divinely instituted church structure, why didn’t he make it explicit in the documents in the New Testament? And then on the flip side, it’s like, okay, maybe we can just argue it’s subjective. God didn’t really intend this, that, or the other. And then you have to deal with the historical question of why people thought that the monoepiscopacy was an immutable church structure polity, right?
Joe:
Right. Okay. Let’s move on to First Clement because this is other good. We talked about the early Christians being good witnesses to this, and he acknowledges that we have this first century evidence of Rome stepping in and settling a controversy in Corinth. But he argues, “Well, it doesn’t prove that it’s the Bishop of Rome. It just says the church at Rome.” Irenea says, “The church in Rome sent the letter.” Now, this is again, I was saying before, the fact that not every aspect of the papacy is proved every time, that’s fine. A piece of evidence doesn’t have to prove everything. It can prove something. And one of the things this proves is Roman authority at the time of the apostles, while the apostle John seems to still be alive. Then he says it discusses succession, but only mentions bishops and presbyters in the plural. Yes, it actually is bishops and deacons, not bishops and presbyters, but it elsewhere talks about high priest priest Levi in a way that seems to be parallel.
Then as I said before, it shows that the Christians in 96 believed that the structure of the church was immutable because it was God-given. It was not theirs. It was not something where it was a bottom up decision how to structure the church, but the father sent Christ, Christ sent the apostles, the apostles sent the bishops and the deacons. Then the question becomes, what does that look like? How many bishops per local church? There is no answer to that in Clement unless you recognize the connection between high priest and bishop. But at the best we can say, this does show the immutability of the church structure. It does show us Roman authority. There are still going to be things that it doesn’t prove one way or the other.
Brayden:
Exactly. And this is a consistent theme that you’ll see in these quotations.
Joe:
Right.
Brayden:
He concedes, “Well, Rome thought that its specific council had to be obeyed as a command from the Lord,” or whatever First Clement says. It’s like this is basically coming from God through us, but it doesn’t say this thing over here.
Joe:
Right. Losing side argues in a murder trial. Yeah. You’re like, “Well, I know his fingerprints were on the scene, but there was no blood on the fingerprints. But then over here, I know there’s blood, but his fingerprints aren’t there.” And you’re like, “Okay.”
Brayden:
Yeah.
Joe:
So right, if you’re looking at just one piece of evidence and ignoring everything else, then sure. But once you look at the totality and you’re conceding left, right, and otherwise, it does start to stack up. The evidence is all pointing in one direction. So sure. He doesn’t just say, “I, the successor of Peter, the vicar of Christ, the Pope, say the following in my private Capacity as. No. Again, not surprising. It’s not a good argument from silence to say there are some things he doesn’t mention about the papacy.
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah. This is the same thing as saying like, “Oh, Saint Ignatius called Jesus God, but he didn’t call the Holy Spirit God.”
Joe:
So therefore.
Brayden:
Therefore, he didn’t believe in the Trinity. You can’t expect every single piece of this doctrine to be present in every document. Every time someone
Joe:
Speaks
Brayden:
About it. We’re allowed to make a cumulative case because that’s what everyone does with theology. And another question I think, I should have mentioned this earlier, is we can build this cumulative case to prove every proposition for the papacy.
Joe:
But
Brayden:
An even simpler question that we can ask is whose theory best matches this evidence?
Joe:
Exactly. Because if you’re a Protestant, do you think Rome has any authority over Corinth?
Brayden:
Exactly. If you’re a congregationalist, you don’t think anyone has power over the local church in any case, except for the
Joe:
Local pastor. When the congregation tries to depose the elders, you would have to say-That’s a function of the church.
Brayden:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And they would say it’s overstepping the boundaries for any sort. It doesn’t matter if it’s Clement, the Bishop of Rome going over to Corinth, or even the. Let’s concede for a second, monoepiscopsy in Corinth. Let’s say there’s this bishop overseeing the diocese. For the bishop to go and command a local church to do something, they would say that even that in and of itself is overstepping the boundaries. So the fact that Clement writes a letter to Corinth, which is nowhere near Rome and demands obedience to this council.
Joe:
It’s much closer to Patmos where the Apostle John is. Exactly. And they’ve written to Rome to settle this dispute.
Brayden:
Yeah, exactly.
Joe:
Whether you think that’s the Bishop of Rome or all the Christians in the city, we can look at the structure of the church of Rome and say, well, how did that look?
Brayden:
Well, we even say this nowadays. Rome said this,
Joe:
Right? We don’t mean the ordinary Catholics on the street in the city. We mean the governing structure.
Brayden:
Yeah. Clement who wrote the letter is speaking on behalf of the church of Rome because Clement is the Bishop of Rome. It’s very, very easy to understand. And so this doesn’t meet the criteria for his argument from silence because it’s not absurd that Clement doesn’t name himself. It’s not absurd that Clement doesn’t give this exhaustive structure for how, okay, Bishop
Joe:
Priest – Matthew doesn’t name himself, does not announce himself as an apostle in the gospel.
Brayden:
Exactly.
Joe:
So the idea that everyone has to say, “Here’s my rank and title before they say hello,” that’s not plausible as an argument from silence. Okay. I want to make sure we can move on to Ignatius because Ignatius is a big one and we’ve talked about him a lot. He talks constantly about this three-tiered structure being necessary to be a church, but Testifies says he never mentions a bishop in his letter to Rome. That’s odd if there was a pope. The Roman church presides in love, but what that all means is never made clear. So again, you have a recognition of Roman authority. He doesn’t give all the contours of it. I guess that’s fine. But then I guess two things to answer there. First, is it true he doesn’t mention a bishop in the letter to Rome? It’s not. He mentions himself as the Bishop of Antioch or the Bishop of Syria actually.
And he assumes and is actually very clear that without him, Jesus Christ will be their only bishop. So this only makes sense if he knows that they know there’s only one bishop per city or per church per diocese. The monoepiscophy has to be taken for granted for his letter to make sense. He doesn’t mention Presbyters in the letter at all. He doesn’t mention deacons in the letter at all. Ironically, Bishop is the only of the three office that he mentions, and yet Protestants will say, “Well, therefore, that was the only one that didn’t exist in Rome.” As an argument from Silas makes literally no sense to say he doesn’t mention presbyters or deacons, so they must have had them. He does mention Bishop, they must not have had a Bishop. He doesn’t mention who the Bishop in Rome is. He doesn’t mention who the Presbyters or the deacons are in Rome either, but all of that is very easily explained in several different ways.
First, all of the other instances of his letters, he’s talking to churches where he knows the people personally. So he’s often greeting them by name, people who he’s encountered on his way to Rome. Second, the genre of this letter is different. He’s asking them not to intervene to stop his martyrdom. The fact that he doesn’t have a digression about the papacy is not surprising or unusual in any way. Third, the position of the church of Rome is such that he might have just felt the humility to not try to boss around a church that he recognized as superior to his own. And fourth, this is the heart of the Roman Empire. So the idea that he doesn’t name names of people who could then be rounded up and killed is not surprising in any way. He doesn’t talk about church structure in the letter. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know that there’s a church structure.
So as arguments from silence, these are incredibly weak. Now consider the following case. Ignatius says you’re not a church unless you have the three-tiered structure. He says the church of Rome is a church and in fact seems to treat it as the church RX lots, the model church. What’s the best explanation for that evidence quite simply that he knows they have the same three-tiered structure as everybody else? I’ve given this example before, but if you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, you wouldn’t say the model family is one of two guys with an adopted kid. That doesn’t follow at all. So the fact that you say like, “Oh, the Smiths are a model family,” that already tells you if you know from other contexts that a model family to this person or a family at all is going to be mom, dad, kids, well then you already know that he doesn’t have to repeat by family, I still mean what I meant last time.
Well, likewise, he doesn’t have to explain what he means by church because he’s already told us what he means by church. So it’s wild to just read Romans or his letter to the Romans in a way that just ignores every other part of Ignatius’ though and pit him against himself in this very implausible kind of way.
Brayden:
Yeah. And another thing just to point out, I guess two things. One, notice again how this doesn’t meet his criteria. His criteria isn’t, it would be odd if he doesn’t mention it. And we’ve already demonstrated why it’s not odd
Joe:
At all. He doesn’t mention
Brayden:
A Bishop. But that’s not the standard. The standard is it’s absolutely absurd given the reason this author writes, given the things that he’s talking about, that he would not mention the papacy in some capacity. And this gets nowhere near that. It’s not even odd that he leaves those things out.
Joe:
Yeah. Well said. Well said. Second
Brayden:
Thing is he mentions this line in Ignatius that the Roman church presides in love. Well, that’s not clear as to what that might mean, so it doesn’t really matter. If you take it to mean, okay, this doesn’t mean a universal presidency of Rome, this just means that the Roman government presides over Rome. That would be an odd thing to say. Does that make sense? If you’re writing to the Church of Rome and saying, “Yeah, your leaders preside over the people at Rome,” what would the purpose of that
Joe:
Show be? It doesn’t mean the church presides. It doesn’t really make any sense because he doesn’t say the bishop presides over the church in Rome. Exactly. He argues that the Church of Rome presides
In Agape. And some of the scholarly analysis of this is that the example that he’s using there is he’s comparing the presidency of the church of Rome over the global church, similar to the presidency of the presider over the love feast or Agape feast, which is how he describes the Eucharistic celebration. That matches his own language on the way he uses Agape in the Eucharistic context that just as we can talk about in a particular mass, the priest has a presiding role. Well, in the global church, Rome has a presiding role. Now, can we prove that’s how he meant it? No, but what’s more consistent, that kind of language. I mean, if you don’t think Rome has a special authority over all Christians, why do we now have two sources before 1:10 who seem to think that Rome has some kind of special authority?
Brayden:
Right. Yeah.
Joe:
Okay. Let’s move on to Hermes because I haven’t talked as much about Hermes and I want to make sure that I can give an explanation for this because I think this is an example of how not to do an argument from silence. He says, “Clement sends writings to other cities, Grabta instructs the widows and orphans. Hermes reads them in Rome with the Presbyters who preside over the church.” Now you’ll notice in the citation there, it is citation to vision two. That is going to be an important detail. So Clement looks important, but Rome’s leadership still looks shared. Where’s the Pope? Number one, this is almost certainly not the same Clement as First Clement, because again, the dating of First Clement is 96. Some are going to put it earlier, like 68, but either way, first century solidly. And as we’re going to see, the dating of Shepherd of Hermes is 140.
So there’s no reason to believe. Clement is not a very uncommon name. There’s no reason to believe there’s only one guy named Clement in Rome. Peter Lempe tries to argue that this must be the same Clement, and it strikes me as just going against all of the historical evidence we know about dating to suggest that this is the same guy. Oh, there’s a guy named Clement who wrote from Rome. Oh, there’s another guy who wrote from Rome. Now, notice even in. If you want to argue this is the same Clement, that completely undercuts his argument that Clement maybe didn’t write first Clement, that the church of Rome wrote.
But I think it’s just bad to even suggest that this is the same Clement because we have good evidence that it’s 50 years later. So probably not the same guy, particularly given that we know Clement is dead by this point, because we know the dating of the life of Clement from sources like Uranus. But either way, the argument that, oh, the Church of Rome must not have had a Bishop or a Pope because there’s a reference to Presbyters presiding over the church, that would be a convincing argument maybe if that was the only line in the text. But this is where these arguments from silence are really bad. When you cherry pick a sentence and say, “Well, this sentence doesn’t mention the Pope or something.” It’s just not a good way to do patristics. It’s not a good way of doing evidence in general. So if I may, let me just run through.
First, Dan Batovici has, he’s written extensively on the Shepherd of Hermes, and he points out how this is. You look at all the evidence in Shepherd of Hermes and you can’t make a good argument against Amanopiscopsy from it. He says you have to be very careful in trying to do that. He acknowledges there are two times where Episcopali bishops appears in the plural, but one of these is in reference to the eschatological church and it’s all in a vision. So remember I said it’s important to reference the citations to vision two. It’s because this is not a treatise on the governance of the church. He doesn’t have any focused attention on what the local church looks like at all, because this is a series of eschatological visions.This is like taking the book of Revelation and expecting it to give you a treatise on the papacy.
That’s just not the genre that we’re in. The book is set up as a series of visions, then a series of commandments, and then a series of similar tunes. And so none of it deals with the governance structure of the local church. There are references to people who have certain offices in the church, and so we can sort of say, “Okay, well, there must be something here. There are bishops, there are presbyters, there are deacons, they’re all mentioned.” But that doesn’t tell us how many bishops per church. It doesn’t tell us whether presbyters and bishops are the same, although they don’t seem to be, they’re mentioned separately. There you go. So yes, there are presbyters presiding in the church. There are also bishops presiding in the church, and they don’t seem to be the same thing. How many bishops per church? Shepherd Hermes doesn’t tell us.
Batavici says, “I would then suggest that the shepherd of Hermes can only be used in argument for building the case for the lack of monopiscosy in the first half of the second century with great caution.” The text does not say that there are churches with more than one bishop. It simply does not say anything on this matter. And although this silence allows for speculation, the discussion of this matter should perhaps remain in the realm of speculation. This is not evidence against, this is just another argument from silence. And then he looks at where the word Presbiteros, elder in this second vision, which is what testified had mentioned. After the book had been completed, it is read by Hermes in his city with the Presbyteroy who lead the church. And the next vision, when invited to sit down, Hermes would rather not do it before the Presbyteroy.
The first instance might perhaps suggest some degree of involvement in liturgy or teaching from them, but then again, they’re only mentioned as being present and this can equally be said of the whole present community. So again, we’re trying to over argue from a single kind of sentence, a single kind of line. And what’s more, there’s actually more details even within Shepherd of Hermes itself that they don’t just have a two-tiered structure in Rome. Because in vision three, the very next vision, he talks about the square white stones fitted exactly into each other are apostles, bishops, teachers and deacons who’ve lived in godly purity and have acted as bishops and teachers and deacons chasely and reverently to the elect of God. So between the order of bishop and between the order of deacon, he has this other order that he calls teachers that would seem to be presbyters.
It may be, it may not be, but one thing you can’t say is that he only has presbyters and deacons because that is clearly not the case. He has four tiers if you include apostles, three tiers if you don’t include apostles, he doesn’t have a two tiered structure of the church. That’s all just the internal evidence. We have powerful external evidence from the moratorium fragment because in the moratorian fragment, it talks about why a shepherd of Hermes isn’t regarded as canonical scripture. The author says, “Well, Hermes wrote the shepherd quite lately in our time in the city of Rome when on the throne of the church of the city of Rome, the Bishop Pius, his brother was seated.” That he speaks of there being a single Bishop of Rome, literally Hermes’ brother, that he wasn’t unaware of this. Okay, he doesn’t address his vision to his brother or something, but not surprising.
So you’d have to say one of a few things. One, that Hermes was somehow unaware that his brother was the Bishop of Rome. Two, his brother wasn’t the Bishop of Rome, but by the time of the moratorium fragment, maybe 20 years later, they’ve all completely forgotten that there didn’t used to be a Bishop of Rome and now we’re convinced that there was and somehow have even decided who that Bishop of Rome was. A completely implausible sort of.
And he’s
Brayden:
About to bring up the Moratorian fragment in the video
Joe:
Too. He is, he is. But I just wanted to point out, the Moratorian fragment explicitly talks about how at the time of Hermes, number one, you’re 50 years after First Clement, and number two, there is clearly a Bishop of Rome at this time, and we even know who it is and we even know his relation to Hermes. But let’s talk about the Moratorian fragment because Testify mentions that. He acknowledges that this passage exists and that he has this chair or some translations say Throne that is obviously a reference to his single Episcopal office. So that seems to be a pretty devastating admission, but he says the text calls him Rome’s local bishop.
Brayden:
Yes,
Joe:
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, not head of the universal church. Nothing about Peter, universal jurisdiction, infallibility or obedience to Rome. But again, that is a simply implausible argument from silence. The point of the moratorium fragment isn’t a treatise on the papacy. The point of the moratorium fragment is which books belong in the Bible? And he’s saying Shepherd of Hermes doesn’t count because it was written during the pontificate of Pius first. So first, I’d say the fact that they’re using the dating of the Bishop of Rome to date when events in the past happened is incredibly convincing for the Catholic cause. But two, it’s simply not surprising that he doesn’t tell us every other detail about the papacy. This is again where you’re just like, okay, this would be like someone taking every verse about the Trinity and just saying, well, it doesn’t tell us every other thing about the Trinity.
You can do this all day, but that is not how we analyze evidence. It’s not a good way to look at the historical data.
Brayden:
Yeah. So he had been arguing like, “Oh, well, it doesn’t mention Bishop of Rome by name, doesn’t mention a Bishop of Rome in all of these earlier documents.”
Joe:
But here we know who the Bishop is by name from the moratorium.
Brayden:
Now we shift. Now it’s like, “Oh, we do know it’s the Bishop of Rome. The text explicitly calls him the Bishop of Rome, but he doesn’t call him the universal pastor of the church with universal jurisdiction and infallibility.” Might as well be like, “But
Joe:
He didn’t quote Vatican one.” Yeah.
Brayden:
And it’s just like that is not how you employ this argument from silence. We would have to prove it would be absurd for the Miratorian fragment to not mention these things.
Joe:
Right.
Brayden:
There’s no argument that could be made to demonstrate why it would have to if the papasy was true or whatever.
Joe:
Right, because we’ve already seen before this that Rome is this very important church. The question that he had then was, “Well, what do we know about the structure?” Well, we know about structure.
Brayden:
Yeah. And not only this –
Joe:
Pias was the single bishop on the throne.
Brayden:
Yeah. And not only that, because you mentioned like, okay, maybe everyone collectively got amnesia and invented like, “Oh, Pius was occupying the chair.” At the same time that the Miratorian fragment was written, St. Irenaeus writes against heresies.
Joe:
Yes.
Brayden:
And he doesn’t just mention –
Joe:
Slightly later. But actually, sorry, if I may, before we get there, there’s one final point on the Shepherd of Hermes. Yeah, go
Brayden:
Ahead.
Joe:
That Daniel Vecchio had mentioned recently. And I wanted to mention that because I though it was a really good argument I hadn’t heard anyone else make. And another point in the Shepherd of Hermes, this is commandment 11, this is after the visions under the commandments. Hermes has this line. First, the man who seems to have the spirit exalts himself and wishes to have the first seat and is bold and imputed and talkative and lives in the midst of many luxuries and many other delusions and takes reward for his prophecies. And if he does not receive rewards, he does not prophesy. And the point that he made is there’s clearly a first seat. There’s clearly someone with a position of authority of some kind because this ambitious guy is desiring that seat. That only supports the claim that there is a monoepiscopsy at this point. Now, by itself, does it prove it?
No. You’re dealing with an argument from silence there unless you take the other evidence like the moratorium fragment, but there does seem clearly to be a position of authority within the local church. Yeah. Okay. Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure I’ve never talked deeply about Hermes and wanted to give that in a fuller case. Let’s turn to more familiar territory with Iranaeus.
Brayden:
Yeah. This is particularly important because St. Iranaeus makes it seem like it is extremely easy for any church to reckon up this list of Roman succession
Joe:
Going
Brayden:
Back to Bieder. And so this is 180. Remind me again when the Miratorian fragment was written, late
Joe:
Second century? Probably about 160. I think there’s some controversy about the exact dating. He does refer to the Pontificate of Pius as very recently in our own time. So we know that’s in the 140s, so he can’t be much later than that, although we’re only guessing. It’s very hard to date these things with any precision.
Brayden:
Yeah. And so as we get later in these sources, it’s like, “Okay, no Bishop of Rome. Why don’t they mention Bishop of Rome?” Then it’s like, “Well, Bishop of Rome, but no universal authority.” Now we’re to St. Irenaeus and it’s like every church must submit to Rome on account of its preeminent authority. So it’s like, okay, you got what you were asking for basically, but it doesn’t mention these other things. And it’s just like, okay, we’re just trying to nail down jello, it seems like. What sort of evidence do you need to at least admit like, okay, this is starting to sound like the Catholic
Joe:
Language doesn’t sound like there’s an evolution. It doesn’t sound like there’s a change. From now on, you’re going to have. I would give this example. Imagine you’re far away from something and it’s a little blurry and you get closer and it comes into a little more focus, then you get closer yet, and you start to see more and more of the details. When you’re reading the church fathers, that is often how everything is. You’ve got, what are the 38 volumes between the anti-Nician fathers and Nicien and post Nician father series of just early church, you’ve got. I may be getting that number wrong. I want to say there’s like 38 volumes of patristic texts, but the church fathers that we’ve looked at so far are all from volume one. They’re all super early on and there’s not a ton of writings in that section. There are not a ton of Christians alive on planet earth at the time.
Not that many of them are probably literate and writing and taking the time to write things down in the first place and having the kind of theological authority and authority within the church where people are going to care about what they have to say, and then the writings are preserved. So unsurprisingly, we don’t have tons of documents from this period.
Brayden:
And many of the documents that we do have are preserved only by Eusebius, right? There’s fragments in Usebias and things like this.
Joe:
So the fact that this is one of the reasons why these arguments from silence don’t work because we don’t have many documents at all from about the first hundred years. And in the documents that we have, there are all sorts of things that are kind of surprising that they don’t mention. They don’t mention until Irenaeus the four gospels. They don’t mention before Irenaeus frequently, even when they are seemingly quoting scripture, they don’t tell us what it is they’re quoting. We can often say, “Well, we know that’s the gospel of Matthew or whatever.” But they don’t just say, “In the gospel of Matthew, it says…” So if you are familiar with the evidence, then you should know it’s not super extensive. These are often short documents and they’re not doing these very detailed nuanced treatises, but the more you get into the super detailed nuance treatises, and Iranaeus is a super detailed nuance treatise writer, then you start to see this stuff in greater detail.
But that’s kind of like saying, “Well, look, we don’t see that much of John’s theology in one John, second John, and third John, but we do in the gospel of John, which is much longer.” Yeah, of course. That makes perfect sense that the same theology is in place in all of the Jonah literature, and you don’t get it in as much detail in those short documents. So that’s all I say. As you’re evaluating this evidence, the best way to look at it is just we don’t see any breach. We don’t see any abrupt shift in the theology. We just see the theology becoming clearer and more nuanced as we get to longer writers.
Brayden:
Yeah. It’s not surprising, right?
Joe:
Yeah.
Brayden:
Why would we expect. It’s kind of like, okay, this guy’s a theologian or this guy’s a priest or a bishop. Therefore, we would expect him to have a systematic treatment of every important doctrine. It’s like, no. We don’t expect that of theologians or priests today. So not only is it not surprising that they wouldn’t have written on a lot of things, it’s not surprising that we don’t have that many documents from that century just in general, right?
Joe:
Right. Okay. I want to look at the objections he has to the alleged limitations of Irinas. He acknowledges, I should say, in his defense, testifies, says this is Rome’s strongest, earliest evidence. In terms of pre 200 evidence, this is, I would say, even games that match. And because of the line that you referenced earlier, Irnaeus says explicitly, “It is a matter of necessity that every church agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority.” And in this same section, he talks about how there is a single bishop of the church. So you can’t be like, “Oh, well, it just says the church.” It doesn’t say the bishop, but he tells us who the bishop of the church is. The bishop is the one who’s capable of acting in the person of the church, right? Yeah. And so his objections are, number one, Peter and Paul founded Rome together and the apostles gave leadership to Linus.
This tells us who followed whom, not that they ruled every Christian. Well, that’s just not really true. I mean, he says it’s a matter of necessity that we all agree with that church. And you can put that to a simple test. If it’s a matter of necessity that everyone agree with Rome, what denomination or what church should every Christian be part of? Well, the Roman Catholic Church. And so that’s literally all you need for the papal claim to be true. You don’t have to mention everything else. You can just say, “Submit to Rome,” and you’ve captured everything necessary for the Papal claim because that includes saying yes to all those other details. Second, Irneu says the Roman church sent first Clement, not Clement acting as Supreme Pope. Again, I don’t think that helps the case at all. The only person ever ascribed as the author of that letter is Clement, and he is described as Bishop at the time that it is sent.
So whether you think Clement wrote it personally or whether he had someone else write it, this doesn’t help the case. He then says, Rome is one major example. Irnaus also appeals to Polycarp, Smyrna and Ephesus, but he points out that there’s apostolic succession in those other churches. The only church he says everyone has to agree with is the Church of Rome. Then he just says, Roman privacy by AD 180, Yarp. I don’t know what Yarp means, but yeah, there clearly is. Vatican one jurisdiction in the first century? Nah. What does he mean by Vatican one jurisdiction? Because everything Irneus says is what Vatican one is saying was true throughout the ages. It’s
Brayden:
Like, really? Every church everywhere has to agree with Rome because
Joe:
It has more authority. Rome is the successor of Peter. Trees is the successor of Peter and Paul. I don’t know why people think that’s an argument against the papacy rather than further supporting the papacy, but it’s like,
Brayden:
Yes,
Joe:
It’s called the apostolic sea.
Brayden:
Yeah. Well, this doesn’t support every other thing from Vatican I, so it doesn’t really help you. It’s like, no. Okay. We have already established, okay, we need to make a cumulative case. And again, we can just ask the simple question as you did. Which church today can wholeheartedly make this affirmation?
Joe:
Right. What’s the only church that thinks Iraneus is right about this?
Brayden:
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s say all the fathers continue to hold this principle. What church has continuity with that principle? It’s a Catholic church, right? So this is how evidence works in our favor. We don’t even really have to establish every part of Vatican I from Irenaeus. We could just show our theory is the only one that makes sense of this evidence.
Joe:
Right. Again, imagine a trial. The eyewitness may not testify to every detail of what you believe to have happened, but if only one version of events matches the eyewitness testimony, then that’s the one that you should believe in.
Brayden:
Yeah. And we can also ask the question too, and we talked about this a little before, what sort of motivation would Iraneus have if he were making this up as a Greek Eastern writer.
Joe:
Right. He’s from Smyrna. He is from an ancient church that is of apostolic origin and is not in the West. And by this point, he’s bishop in France, but he doesn’t trace. Testify mentions that he references polycarpon Smyrna. He doesn’t give the succession of bishops there. The only one he gives is Rome and he tells us why he gives only Rome, because it has more authority than his own church of Smyrna did.
Brayden:
Yeah,
Joe:
Exactly. Which is in law, we would call that a statement against party interest or an admission against party interest. When you’re admitting the fact that it’s inconvenient, that is treated more seriously because you have less of a motive to lie. All right. But I want to get into one final bit of evidence that he raises and tie this back to the Peter and Paul controversy before, because one of his arguments for Peter not being Pope is that Paul withstands him face to face in Galatians two. And then here in 190, Pope Victor tried to cut off the Asian churches over Easter, and then the other bishops rebuke him for this. He says they rejected his action, but that doesn’t say that. It says they sharply rebuked him. Irenaeus agreed with him all about Easter, but convinced him not to cut off the entire churches. In other words, Victor wanted everyone to celebrate Easter on the same day.
The churches in modern day Turkey didn’t because they were following an order that appears to have been set up by the apostle John. So first of all, Victor believes he’s got the ability to set aside a liturgical practice established by an apostle in 190. That is already a huge red flag that, okay, at least Rome seems to be Roman Catholic.
Second, nobody tells him he can’t. They tell him he shouldn’t. They tell him it’s imprudent, which it is imprudent. And so the idea seems to be if the papacy is true, no one will ever openly disagree with the Pope. And you could just literally watch the news or follow Catholic Twitter or any number of things to realize how absurd that argument is.
I mean, you’ve got cardinals who were openly saying Pope Francis is doing things badly, and that didn’t mean they didn’t think he was the Pope. You’ve got kids who talk back to their parents. You’ve got employees who tell their boss, “This plan you have is not a good plan.” You’ve got the psalmist or the prophet Jonah talking back to God and bemoaning the things God himself has done. So the idea that withstanding someone and standing up and saying, “I think you’re using your authority in a bad way means that you don’t think that authority exists.” That argument just strikes me as flimsy. Now, if they said, “You don’t have the authority to do this,” that’d be a really interesting bit of evidence. No one says that, which is actually a pretty interesting bit of evidence in the opposite direction. They acknowledge that he can excommunicate, but this is a silly thing to excommunicate over and we would agree on both halves.
Brayden:
Yeah. Here’s the thing too. If the papacy is true, that does not mean that the pope couldn’t be rebuked by anyone.
Joe:
Correct. We have an entire theology called filial correction about how you rebuke a superior and when and under what context. And this is, I would say, amply demonstrated by even the language of Galatians two. When Paul says that he withstood Peter face to face, that is not the kind of language that you use for rebuking someone who is beneath you or on your level. I stood up to the Corinthian who is involved with his mother-in-law. He doesn’t ever talk like that. Obviously, as an apostle, he can boss this guy around and tell him to stop being a perch. And so that happens regularly. You withstand someone that you regard as in a position of authority that you’re having to actually be a little bit bold here. And so even in rebuking him, you get a sense that Peter is recognized as a special figure by Paul.
And so similarly, if some other bishop in 190 had tried to just declare half of the church excommunicated, I think everyone else would just be like, “You’ve lost your mind.”
Brayden:
Exactly.
Joe:
You can’t do that. The bishop of Tulus is like, “Yeah, Turkey’s out.” You don’t get to do that. The fact that Rome is treated as seriously as it is in doing this tells us pretty obviously that it and it alone has the kind of authority to do that. So even when you see the authority being abused, it still shows us that the authority exists.
Brayden:
And it wasn’t even a small minority either. I mean, a ton of people were practicing Easter in this way. We also have examples in church history during which time no Protestant will contest the existence of the papacy where this happens. So an example, John the 22nd, privately denied the beatific vision would be given to those in heaven prior to the resurrection. So it’s a very niche theological dispute and he was privately corrected by bishops and theologians.
Joe:
Yeah. The theologians of the University of Paris quickly. And to his defense, he realized that he had screwed up and he’d walked it back. You also find any number of times where it’s not a theological issue, it’s just an issue of governance. The issue with Victor here isn’t that he’s wrong about the dating of Easter, he’s right. And the first council of Nicaea ultimately agrees with him and mandates everyone go this direction. The issue is just a question of kind of the discipline or the prudence of doing this. And on that score,
You can find plenty of times throughout history where somebody thinks the Pope is being rash or imprudent and sometimes they’re right. So this is again, just this time where I think he’s arguing against a version of the papacy that doesn’t exist and never did exist, that exists kind of in a Protestant imagination. The actual relationship ordinary Catholics have with the Pope is more dynamic because yes, we recognize the Pope is the leader, but we also realistically recognize some leaders are better than others. Dante famously has popes in hell and not in heaven in the divine comedy. So that’s right in the middle of the Middle Ages, there’s a recognition that we don’t have to think everything they do is right. We don’t have to think everything they do is wise. And so in as much as Pope Victor shows the history of that, that matches better on Catholic grounds than on the grounds of a religion that says he didn’t have the authority to do it in the first place.
Okay. Final slide. He says, “Which story fits the evidence better? If Vatican one were true, you’d think early sources about bishop successions and church disputes would show Rome’s unique authority.” And as we’ve seen, literally all of those things exist in just the material he covers. Irnaeus talks about bishop successions and church disputes and Rome’s unique authority in the context of that. And then he says, “Instead we often find shared leadership and resistance to Roman Bishop. Find me a church that has shared leadership.” Here’s the test I like to give people. In the writings of Ignatius, he names who the bishop is, who the Presbyters are, who the deacons are in some of his letters. So we can actually say, for example, that Onesimus is the Bishop of Ephesus. We know that Polycarp is the Bishop of Smyrna. In Irneus’ letter, he lists every bishop of Rome from the time of Peter and Paul down to Elitherius.
Where do we find a single church where they have church records and said, “We used to have these co-ruling presbyters by the name of A, B, and C.” Find me one church anywhere that has that model, because allegedly we often find shared leadership. Where? If you mean there are presbyters in the city, that’s true on both models. If you mean the presbyters are like bishop presbyters and there’s co-ruling bishops, name them because we can name them in the other direction and show that they didn’t exist. And so then he concludes that this makes more sense if Rome’s power grew gradually over time. I would say it makes more sense if the same thing was true throughout this entire era and just becomes increasingly in focus. And so you can find it harder and harder to deny people claims as the different authors become more explicit about it, but that none of them ever treat this as some novelty.
None of them treat this as an evolution or a deviation or a change. All right. Exactly. What would you say in closing to kind of sum things up?
Brayden:
Okay. One, I think that his general use of the argument from silence was. His general case about the argument from silence is fair, but insofar as he applies these things to the particulars, it didn’t meet the bar of evidence that that type of argument from silence requires. And so that’s the first thing I would say. And I think that we all just need to be on the lookout for employing these types of arguments from silence, because it’d be very easy for us to kind of despair when someone asks the question, “Well, why did this author not mention X in this place?” And so we have to really keep that in mind because sometimes it can be very slippery. And two, we need to be careful to not expect every single proposition of a doctrine to be present in a piece of evidence. And that goes for everything, not just the papacy, but everything.
Oftentimes these are cumulative cases. We don’t need to overburden an author or a work for it to demonstrate everything that we’re trying to prove. I think those are the two things that I would get as just kind of lessons going forward from this video. Yeah. I don’t think I –
Joe:
Yeah. I would say maybe if I may, in closing, I want you to just think about this, not just from the approach of weighing the evidence historically, but doing so with a specifically Christian lens. Assume the following. Number one, Jesus seems to care about the church and about the structure of the church. I mean, clearly the early Christians though that he did. Number two, he is powerful enough to make sure that his message isn’t going to just be erratically lost or the meaning of it will just be lost erratically. He sends his Holy Spirit and so on. And three, the apostles were not just sharing the documents that would later become the New Testament, they were also preaching orally and physically establishing the church in local communities and appointing who they wanted as leaders of the church. If all of those things are true, and we can say as a matter of historical fact that as soon as there is clear evidence, we find the universal local church has the same three tiered structure everywhere across not only the Roman Empire, but even outside the Roman Empire in places that are pretty isolated from one another.
And two, there is this clear universal sense that Rome has some kind of special authority. How do we best explain that? And it seems to me that it’s best explained that Christ was successful. Because if you say that it was supposed to be Presbyterianism, supposed to be congregationalism, it was supposed to be Episcopalianism, it was supposed to be even orthodoxy, you really have to say everybody or at least many, many people seem to have gotten it dramatically wildly wrong and nobody corrected them. And you’re getting these things wrong at equina councils, you’re getting these things wrong and influential early church documents and nobody’s correcting any of these grave errors as they’re deviating from the plan of our Lord. That seems implausible on purely Christian grounds because you would seemingly have to say that Christ’s message was corrupted and he was powerless or unwilling to stop that from happening.
So I think the better argument from a Christian perspective is Christ succeeded and we see the success in the church that emerges as soon as we find clear evidence.
Brayden:
Not only was Christ competent in founding the church, competent in finding competent men to rule the church, but he also gave us the Holy Spirit just to make sure if there was incompetent people who were just going to mess everything up, he sent the spirit to ensure that the truth would always remain in the church. And I think that’s an act of mercy on God’s part and something that as Catholics gives us a lot of assurance that we’re on the right path. So yeah.
Joe:
Well said. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you everyone else for watching this reply. For Shamus Popourri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you. Peace.