Audio only:
Joe and Brayden from The Catechumen review Redeemed Zoomer’s “critique” of St. Frances de Sales.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’m excited to share a really good argument from one of my favorite saints responding to a popular YouTuber. I mean, obviously that’s not what he was originally doing, but along the way, I’m joined by one Mr. Braden Cook. Brayton, would you like to introduce yourself and then we’ll get into the tweet, the book, and the response?
Brayden:
Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me on, Joe. Yeah, I’m Brayden. I’m the host of The Catecumen, which is dedicated to Catholic and Protestant dialogue, as well as defending the Catholic faith. And I’m very excited because St. Francis de Sales is also one of my favorite saints. And the Catholic Controversy is a wonderful book. If you haven’t read it, you should definitely pick it up. And he also has great devotional works. So you got to Roses Among Thorns, Introduction to Devout Life and things like that. So I’m very excited.
Joe:
Yeah. He also has the Treatise and the love of God. I mean, a lot of saints are famous either for their deep theology or for their kind of pastoral counsel, their spiritual advice and all of that. St. Francis Sales is really known for all of the above. And I don’t know a lot of other saints that check as many boxes as he does, where he does apologetics, he does spirituality, he does deep theology, he does all of these things. But while I am deeply impressed with St. Francis de Sales, he is easily my favorite post-apostolic saint. Oh yeah. That is not a sentiment shared by everyone I discovered recently, including by Redeem Zoomer, who many of you are going to be familiar with. So why don’t you read Redeem Zoomer’s tweet, or I think this is actually Instagram, sorry. And then we can sort of unpack it together because I think he has an interesting take on who Francis de Sales is and what he believes.
Brayden:
Yeah. I don’t know when this posted. I guess it was fairly recently.
Joe:
Yeah. I got people sending the screenshot to me. I never even saw the original thing, but I got it from enough people that it must have existed. You’ll see why people were sending it to me soon.
Brayden:
Yes. So he just read the Catholic Controversy by St. Francis to Sales. He says Saint Francis to Sails. Famous for converting Calvinists back to Catholicism in the 1600s, which that might be why he’s so salty. Sorry, Redeem Zoomer. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting his arguments to be this bad. He’s straw man’s Calvinist so much he makes Joe Heschmeyer look charitable and nuanced, which I find that funny because he was defending you against people who were like, oh, Joe wrecked that guy in the debate. I haven’t even watched the debate, but he had high praises for you, Joe, in that solo scripture debate that you just did. So his arguments are literally, one, you have no authority. Two, you deny the visible church. Three, where was Lutherans before Luther? Four, we have miracles you don’t. Five, you guys think the church died.
Six, the Bible isn’t good enough. It’s clear he was either a moron or a liar.
Joe:
So this is even by … Redeem Zoomer seems to enjoy making these really controversial takes that virtually no one agrees with. I don’t know if he’s idiosyncratic in his thinking. I love that he’s reading deep stuff. I wish he had a little more maybe caution when he makes these kind of bold proclamations because they don’t typically age well. I won’t defend my own charity or nuance. I’m happy to just defend St. Francis de Sales. I want to focus particularly, because I know you’ve done some really good work on this, which is one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you about this. On the argument that he very charitably and nuancedly lays out as, where was Lutherans before Luther?
Brayden:
So
Joe:
True.
But before that, I want to address the absolutely outrageous claim that he was either a moron or a liar because literally you can go to Google right now and without any other context, just type in the gentleman saint. Think about the realm of saints who are like famously nice people to begin with. Overwhelmingly, there’s some saltier people in there, but he’s known as a gentleman saint. So this was the, I mean, this is the AI generated automatic response, but you just type in the gentleman’s saint. Here’s what I got. St. Francis de Sales, 1567 to 1622, is known as the gentleman saint for his immense patience, meekness and gentle approach to spiritual direction, embodied in his motto, which is the Latin for gentle and firm. As French bishop of Geneva, doctor of the church and patron of writers, he championed practical holiness for laypeople, famously noting that a spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar.
He’s not this straw manning, idiot, jerk, whatever. To say that I resemble him in charity is honestly a compliment I do not deserve. I would probably say he’s also more nuanced. He has really sophisticated arguments. As we’re going to see, Redeem Zoomer either does not understand or is just not charitably interpreting his arguments on where were Lutherans before Luther and why that matters. He has a sort of smug one-liner, but DeSales makes a sophisticated argument I’ve heard no one else make. Like I say, this is a brilliant theologian, but let’s add one more thing because this is something that Zoomer actually points out, which is that he was incredibly effective at converting Calvinists in the heart of Calvinist country, namely Geneva. This is where originally John Calvin, but then his successor, Theodor Beza, was. And so as Lorenzo Garcia points out, this is, I believe it’s actually a theener thesis at Columbia University.
But nevertheless, I mean, another person in their 20s to combat Redeem Zoomer’s views, I suppose, but he actually has a bunch of sources and citations, and he’s just doing basic biography here. So he says that the appointment of Francis as successor to the Bishop Rick of the Diocese of Geneva in 1597 accompanied his prodigious efforts to evangelist Protestants as a missionary in what’s called the Chable, I’m sure I’m nailing that pronunciation, the Chable region between 1594 and 1599, the population of the Chiblet was majority Calvin. So Geneva, if you’re not familiar, is right on the edge of the French Swiss border. So this region, which is where, by the way, FrancisSails is from, it’s really the heart of Calvinism. Southeastern France, Western Switzerland, this is where Calvinism has this real stronghold. So most of the people had become Calvinist by this point. And Theodore Beza is John Calvin’s successor, as I said.
France de Sales tries unsuccessfully to meet with him multiple times. And so he is going around trying to debate Calvinism when they refuse to debate him and they order the Calvinists not to even listen to him. Francis DeSales writes a series of pamphlets like tracks that he can slide under people’s doors because they’ve been legally barred from associating with him and talking with him. And so this is someone who is incredibly charitable. I mean, this is a guy who literally, at various points, he and another priest were preaching. And because the people were also told they couldn’t offer them quarter, in the middle of winter, they are sleeping in trees tied to the trees so they don’t fall out and tied to the trees so that wolves don’t kill them because they’re in the woods. And this is the guy who is literally risking his life to reach Calvinists while the Calvinists are just refusing to engage with him or talk with him at all.
And the results are incredible. Regem Zummer talks about him doing this in the 1600s. Even before then, by 1597, there were an estimated 14 to 15,000 Calvinists who had converted in the area. And even today, there are more Catholics than Calvinists even in Geneva now. I mean, he massively undid a lot of the Calvinist’s stronghold, him with a few other missionaries and other supporters. I mean, I’m not saying all of this was individually Francis de Sales, but I want you to just think about this. Redeem Zoomer’s argument is, oh, he doesn’t understand true Calvinism. He’s arguing with Calvin’s personal successor. He’s arguing with the Calvinists of Geneva, and he’s making arguments that are convincing enough to them that they recognize that he has defeated their theological views and they’re converting back to Catholicism. So there’s this kind of, that’s not really Calvinism argument that certain Calvinists make where every time you show, “Hey, look, here’s this problem with Calvinism.” It’s just, “Oh, well, you must not understand Calvinism.” We have every evidence to believe this brilliant theologian and apologist understood Calvinism.
He himself and his youth, like young 20s, struggled with the idea that he might be reprobate. He has a treatise on the love of God. He gets into a lot of the underlying theology that was controversial within Calvinism then as now. It’s absurd to say he is either uncharitable or that he doesn’t understand Calvinism and he’s just unnuanced. The evidence simply does not support that kind of conclusion. Because as I say, if you want to read a wonderful book, The Catholic Controversy, it’s dated a little bit in terms of the language. It’s 16th century, so some people are going to find it difficult as a read. The actual arguments are brilliant. So one of them, the where was Lutherans before Luther won. What Francis Sales actually says is, but as for your church, it is called Everywhere Huganot, Calvinist, heretical, pretended, Protestant, new, or Sacramentarian.
Your church was not before these names, and these names were not before your church because they’re proper to it, meaning that Protestants aren’t called like the church, they’re not called the Catholic church. But also there was no such word as Protestant. The Calvinist, it was not a term anyone had ever heard of in the first 1500 years of the church. This is a very basic, very obvious point. What does this mean then? Well, he says, nobody calls you Catholics. You scarcely dare to do so yourselves. Because right, you’ll find people who will be like, “Oh, I’m Catholic, just not Roman Catholic.” And it was silly that it’s silly now, and only those people do it. If you ask a normal person, Christian or non-Christian, “Hey, where’s the Catholic church?” No one’s going to be like, “Well, I think that must be the Prosbyterian church because they’re the real Catholic.” No one misunderstands what the term Catholic means, except the people very devoted to not understanding what the term Catholic means.
And so then he says, “The name of religion is common to the church of the Jews and of the Christians and the old law and in the new. The name of Catholic is proper to the church of our Lord.” That you go back to the writings of Ignatius and he’s referring to the Catholic church. He doesn’t refer to the Protestant church, doesn’t refer to the Calvinist church, obviously. So the fact that you can’t credibly be identified as that church by anyone other than yourself should be a big red flag. That’s a simple, clear, straightforward point, but it has some implications. And one of the implications that Francis DeSales draws out that I have not seen anyone else do as effectively is the implication for authority because I know you’re going to talk about one of the dimensions to this, what a radical break the early Protestants were from the church that came before them for 1,500 years.
And I’ll let you do all of that part. But the bit about authority, and I’ve tried to use a version of this argument before, but I need to just make an episode on maybe this is that, maybe this is that episode. Desales talks about this principle that you have to have authority to preach. And so we see this very clearly laid out in Romans 10 where St. Paul says, “And how can men preach unless they are sent?” That’s verse 15. But it’s not just there. This idea that you have to be sent is illustrated really beautifully in Acts 15. Now, I’m going to give just a little bit of a walkthrough of Acts 15, and I just want to highlight the difference between the two sides, the Catholic side represented by Paul and Barnabas and the Judaizer side represented by people who’d come down from Jerusalem.
And I want you to be mindful of the language because the chapter begins by saying, “Some men came down from Judea.” Notice they’re not sent down, they just came down and they’re teaching the brethren, unless you’re circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. And so Paul and Barnabas debate them, and then Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem. So there’s a very obvious parallel there in the first two verses. Some men came down, Paul and Barnabas were appointed to go up. Now you might be saying, “Well, I think you’re making too much of that. Read on. ” And the next verse, it says, “So being sent on their way by the church, why does Luke stress this over and over again? Because these guys don’t have authority to be preaching their false doctrine because they were not sent by the church.
Paul and Barnabas, who a lot of Protestants imagine, Paul and Barnabas is these kind of wild cowboys who don’t care about the institutional church and just do their own thing. No, they are sent by the church. So then in the next verse, when they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church. But then some believers who belong to the party of the Pharisees rose up. So again, you have the churches giving approval to Paul and Barnabas. They’re sending them, they’re approving of their message, and then the Judaizers just rise up on their own pretended authority. This is a recurrent theme throughout, especially Acts 15. You then have the Council of Jerusalem, very obviously the church stepping in in an authoritative way, and they send a letter making clear that the Judaizer heresy is a heresy and saying, I’m jumping all the way down to verse 24 here.
“Since we’ve heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us in assembly to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul maneuvers their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and silence. “So he goes on. I mean, it’s just so incredibly clear that in order to preach and teach, you need the approval and sending of the church. You can’t just make yourself pastor. You can’t just make yourself shepherd of the sheep. And this is also clear in places like Hebrews eight where it talks about the high priesthood and says,” And one does not take this honor upon himself, but he’s called by God just as Aaron was. “Now, think about the high priesthood. This is going to be a helpful way of understanding the way authority works.
It either works directly or it works through the body. So God calls Aaron directly, the voice of God, Aaron is called. But then from that point on, the sinding happens in what’s called in a mediated way, immediate authority, that the people of God from a top down perspective then call the high priest. So Aaron then has successors. Those successors are not individually called with some kind of voice of God moment they don’t claim to be, but the calling is still from what’s essentially apostolic succession, but not apostolic. You have this priestly lineage. You have a priestly line, but his origins are in this direct calling by God. So if someone is going to say that they have the authority to preach, Francis’ point is that you have to either be called by God directly or called by those who were called by God directly. And so that’s going to be the foundation of the idea of apostolic succession.
And the idea that everyone who is sent is either sent directly by God, and then he points out they can prove it with miracles. If you’re claiming God called me as his prophet, you should be able to show signs and wonders demonstrating, you should be able to prophesy, you should be able to perform healings, you should be able to do all these things, or we know you were called by God because someone who we already know was called by God called you.
Francis says,” Finally, that which is less is blessed by the better, “as St. Paul says, and he’s referring to Abraham Melchizedek there, and then he uses that to say,” The people then cannot send the pastors. The pastors are greater than the people. The mission is not given without blessing. For after this magnificent mission, the people remain sheep and the shepherd remains shepherd. “And this is an obvious point, but one that a lot of people miss. No one in the early church is congregationalist. No one in the early church has a view that the shepherd is chosen by the sheep. That’s simply not how it works. The people don’t choose the apostles. Christ, the king chooses the apostles. They then choose a successor from Mathias. They then are the ones who appoint bishops and elders, elders, deacons. They’re the ones doing all of that. There is this top down authority.
And this is founded in this theology that the greater isn’t blessed by the lesser. So you don’t choose the people who God has put in authority to lead you or else you’re in control of them. And this is a functional pastoral problem that we see even today. If the people choose and can replace the pastor, the pastor’s ability to actually lead is limited because if he says something controversial, they can be like, ” Actually, we’re going to replace you. “And so the relationship of shepherd and sheep gets totally inverted. Brendan, I know I’m going super long here, just by the way, but you jump in anytime you want.
Brayden:
I could add
Joe:
Because- Yeah,
Brayden:
Please. It reminds me when St. Paul constantly talks about this gift given to Timothy through the laying on of hands, right? Yes.
Joe:
And
Brayden:
So in one Timothy chapter four, he’s telling Timothy,” Command and teach these things. Don’t let anyone look down on you, whatever. Going down, until I come to vote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and to teaching, do not neglect your gift, which was given to you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. “That’s right. And so these responsibilities and rights of preaching and teaching the doctrine to the church is given to Timothy through the laying on of hands by the elders. And so that shows immediate, immediate mission. And you were talking earlier about, oh, your church doesn’t have miracles, but our church has miracles. And the reason why we say that is because when God gives an immediate mission such as to a prophet or the apostles, he accompanies that mission with motives of credibility so that not everyone can just claim,” Yeah, well, God told me to go do this.
“He literally told me in a vision and a dream to go do this. So how do I know that? Well, he accompanies that new immediate mission where God directly ordained someone to do something with miracles so that everyone knows,” Oh, well, this guy comes from God. “And so that’s the reason for we have miracles you don’t, because if you’d expect that if God was going to do something new that would require that the Protestants to break from receiving immediate mission, which is through the line of successors, then God would ordain that and give miracles to that new immediate mission.
Joe:
Yeah. Well said. Exactly. I appreciate you unpacking the why you need the miracles and everything. Because if Luther is called to basically found the reorganized church of Christ, like if there’s a great apostasy and he’s the prophet sent to build the new Christianity, this is the Joseph Smith thing. It’s not enough that Joseph Smith says,” Trust me, I totally saw a vision. “He should be able to perform clear miracles. So similarly, if Martin Luther, if your understanding of Lutheranism and Protestantism more broadly is the church fell into total apostasy, the visible church had no more authority, then you’re going to need apostolic level miracles at least because you’re claiming there’s this bold new covenant. Returning to France to sales, he says it’s necessary that the sheep should receive the shepherd from elsewhere, meaning they don’t just call by their own authority. Even in Act six, I’d point out when the people choose the seven deacons, they don’t become deacons when the people choose them.
They have to receive the lay on of hands from the apostles. So still authority is given in a top down way, not bottom up. And so FrancisSell says,” The people are not able to give legitimate mission or commission to what he calls these new ambassadors, meaning the Protestant reformers. “But I say further that even if they could, they did not. It isn’t as if Martin Luther and John Calvin were chosen by the people and they said,” These guys just stood up on their own authority and started preaching new doctrines. “And then he makes a very clever point. He says,” Well, for this people was of the true church or not. If it was of the true church, why did Luther take it there from? “In other words, if Luther’s congregation, if the church in which Luther grew up was the true church of Christ, then why did you break from the church?
Would it really have called him in order to be taken out of its place and out of the church? On the other hand, you could say,” Well, no, the church Luther grew up in wasn’t the true church. “He says,” Okay, if it were not of the true church, how could it have the right of mission and a vocation? Outside the true church, there can be no such authority. “Because you can’t say,” Yeah, Luther grew up in an apostate church and an apostate Catholic church, and he still has authority because the apostates ordained him and gave him a mission to preach. “You are actually cutting off your own authority if you attack the Catholic church because his authority to be a priest is only rooted in the authority of the Catholic church to ordain priests. And so if you say the Catholic church can’t ordain priests, this whole theology of priesthood is nonsensical and false and everything else, okay, then Luther has no authority either from the Catholic church or from anyone else.
He is simply sent by himself. It’s a very clever argument. As he says, if we say this people was not Catholic, what was it then? It was not Lutheran, for we all know that when Luther began to preach in Germany, there were no Lutherans, and it was he who was their origin. Since such a people did not belong to the true church, how could it give mission for true preaching? So this is why the no Lutherans before Luther point is really sound because it not only shows you’re introducing a wild novelty, I think a lot of people have made that argument, but he makes a very biblically tight argument that, and by the way, you actually need to be able to show that you’re coming from the true church with authority to be able to be a preacher. And if you are going to point to Luther’s authority from the church, you have to, one, say that the church has the ability to give and also revoke that authority, and then you’re stuck in a catch 22.
Either the church never had the ability to send him at all, in which case he’s not actually sent, or the church did send him and then retracted that authority when he began to preach false doctrine, in which case he’s not actually sent. So it’s a clever, it’s a subtle argument. And so to just be told like, ” Oh yeah, here’s this silly one line mimetic response. “You’re not taking this smart, nuanced argument charitably or seriously, and you just don’t understand the argument, I guess.
Brayden:
Right.
Joe:
Yeah.
Brayden:
And it’s also clever too because they would say that the true marks of the church are right preaching and right administration of the sacraments. And so even at that level, taking aside the Catholic marks of the church and the Lutheran or Calvinist marks of the church, it’s like, okay, the church that you came from, you would not say had right preaching or right administration of the sacraments. So then how could they have the right of sending you, et cetera? So it works both ways. It’s very clever.
Joe:
Now you’ve made the point before that the where were Lutherans before Luther point isn’t silly at all. It’s something on its face and in fact is a thoroughly Christian argument and to just laugh it off puts you actually at odds with the earliest Christians who took this argument extremely seriously and regularly proved people were heretics by means of it. You want to kind of take over from here?
Brayden:
I presented these slides in a video called the Catholic Church is the one true church, so very, very subtle titling there. And it was a response to Gavin Ortland initially. And I just want to point this out. St. John Henry Newman says this. When he’s speaking about the marks, and so a Catholic is a mark of the church. It’s also a proper name of the church that we belong to. And he’s speaking about these marks as signs, right?That’s what marks are supposed to be. They’re not just like theological conclusions that we believe about the church. They’re also supposed to mark the church out as the true church, as opposed to other bodies, right? And so this is what St. John Henry Newman says. It is plain that if the church is to be an available guy to pour as well as rich, unlearned, as well as learned, its notes and tokens must be very simple, obvious, and intelligible.
They must not depend on education or be brought out by obstruct reasoning, but must at once affect the imagination and interest the feelings. They must bear with them a sort of internal evidence which supersedes further discussion and makes the truth self-evident. It’s one of my favorite quotations from him because it’s talking about really the merciful character of God. He’s not here to call only the wise, only the rich, only the educated, right? He’s here to call everyone. And so because of this, he attaches these motives of credibility, which are to guide any human being towards the church from whatever background or way of life they come from. And so that’s why these four primary marks, one Holy Catholic, apostolic, and making them an evidence, a sign of the true church is so important in this theology. And so this next slide is just the same quotation from St. Francis of Sales where we’re kind of honing in on Redeem Zoomer, he basically summarized this by saying, “Oh, well, there were no Lutherans before Luther.” Only the Lutherans came after and it was kind of like a jab, right?
But as I went over in that video that I talked about earlier, this actually is a very ancient argument from many fathers of the church dating back to the mid-second century. And the fundamental basis is like, it’s not, “Oh, you have the wrong name, therefore you’re wrong.” That’s not the argument. The argument is the name is a sign, a sign of what? A sign of your ancient character or of your novel attributes, right? And so the reason why they would point out these names is not because, oh, you’re not called Catholic, therefore you’re wrong. It’s you are called by men or by novel doctrines, which is a sign for us to look back to your foundation. And so I have a ton of quotes here. I don’t know if you want me to read them all or just like kind of go through
Joe:
Them. I mean, if you want to reel these sections from it, I think you’ve done a really good job of cathering the evidence showing that this is done over and over again.
Brayden:
It
Joe:
Really
Brayden:
Is.
Joe:
And maybe we shouldn’t just like scoff at it.
Brayden:
Yeah. And this just demonstrates as we go through these slides that St. Francis of Sales wasn’t just like, “Oh, you know what? Here’s a new argument that no one’s ever thought of before.” The church has always, even, there’s two parts of arguing against schismatics and heretics in the early church. It’s one, okay, your movement was founded at a time after the apostles, so how can it be the religion of the apostles, right? And two, it’s actually just taking down their … It’s by going through sacred scripture, sacred tradition, a theological argument. So it’s like argument from historicity and argument from theological reasoning. So St. Justin Martyr says this in the mid second century, “For what things he predicted would take place in his name, these we do see being actually accomplished in our sight, for he said, many shall come in my name, clothed outwardly in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves and there shall be schisms and heresies.” These heresies are called by us after the name of the men from whom each doctrine and opinion had its origin.
Some are called Marcians, some Valentians, some … I’m not going to be able to pronounce some of these. Some Basilitians and some Saturnilians and others by other names, each called after the originator of the individual opinion, just as each one of those who consider themselves philosophers, as I said before, thinks he must bear the name of the philosophy which he follows from the name of the Father of the particular doctrine. So what’s the argument here? The originators of the doctrine or movement, their names are singled out and attached to the groups which also began at a later time from the apostles. And that’s why these naming conventions are so important. Later on, St. Irines also in the second century makes the same point. Since therefore we have such proofs that is not necessary to seek the truths among others, which it is easy to obtain from the church since the apostles like a rich man depositing his money in a bank, launched in Her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth so that you can obtain the truth from the church so that
Joe:
Every man- I like this point. He doesn’t just say pick up the Bible, which doesn’t exist yet in a finalized form. Doesn’t just say pick up the Bible, read it for yourself and see where that takes you.
Brayden:
Exactly. He
Joe:
Tells him to look to the deposit of faith, deposited in the church and who can tell you all things pertaining to the truth.
Brayden:
This is the point that St. Francis DeSales and St. Robert Bellarmaine make over and over again. The method by which we come to the truth faith isn’t by figuring out what the true faith is and then finding a church that agrees. It’s by finding the true church who is able to, because she preserves the truth by her very nature, teach you the truth about the faith. It’s very backwards. And so we know, and St. Irines has other quotes as well speaking about how the church always retains this truth. So that every man whosoever will can draw from her the water of life, that is the truth. For she’s the entrance to life. All others are thieves and robbers. On this account, are we bound to avoid them? But to make choice of the things pertaining to the church with the utmost diligence and to lay hold of the tradition of the truth.
Thus, by means of that ancient tradition of the apostles, which is preserved in the church, they do not suffer their mind to conceive anything of the doctrine suggested by the portentious language of these teachers, among whom neither church nor doctrine has ever been established. For prior to Valentias, those who follow Valentius had no existence, nor did those from Marcian exist before Marcian, et cetera.
Any being previous to the initiators and inventors of their perversity. So basically, same argument as St. Francis DeSales and Saint Ciprian or St. Clement of Alexandria.
Joe:
And St. Justin Martin. These are guys from the 100s.
Brayden:
Yes. There’s so much. Literally, they use the same argument. Going throughout all of the centuries, I guess I’m going the wrong way. Sorry. I was like, that’s why I got confused. St. Cyprien, Lactantious, St. John Chris Austin, St. Augustine. All of these people, in nearly every century going from the first century, they use the same argument.
Joe:
Yeah. And it makes sense because I think it follows not only the argument from authority we’ve already talked about, but also the argument from Revelation. I’ve made this point before. I’ll keep making it. That what it is to reveal something is it’s an unveiling, that’s what it means. Apocalypse and revelation are just the Greek and Latin terms for unveiling. If God is unveiling the truth and ultimately unveiling himself, it follows that he is making it known to us, not just making it potentially Noah Bold to us. Because if you say, God revealed himself, but nobody noticed, nobody heard it, nobody saw it. It’s the tree falling in the forest. Does it make a sound? Well, part of what we mean by sound is that it is heard. And so there were sound waves produced, no one actually heard them, so is it actually hurt? Well, similarly, if God revealed himself and he meant everyone to be Lutheran or he meant everyone to be Calvinist, then how did it take 1,500 years for anyone to notice that?
Particularly if you believe in the perfect clarity of scripture, it does really kind of defy belief about not only the nature of the clarity of scripture, but also the nature of God is powerful enough to reveal himself. That it’s not just that, oh, there were dimensions to this that hadn’t been fully unpacked yet. Fine. That is always going to be the case. You can always go deeper and deeper. But if you’re going to say, actually, Christianity got it wrong. They got the sacraments wrong. They got what it means to be the church wrong. Their worship was wrong. Their teachings on a thousand different doctrines are wrong. And exactly which teachings you think are wrong might differ if you’re Lutheran or Calvinist or Anna Baptist or any of the other groups that come later. But there’s this general agreement that, hey, look, there was this clear consensus.
It was the explicit teaching of the church. It’s the overwhelming teaching of the Fathers, et cetera, and they’re all wrong. At a certain point, you’re not just attacking the visible church, you’re not just attacking the early church. You are seemingly attacking the idea that God has successfully revealed himself. If I give a talk, it might be the case that people don’t understand every point that I’m making or somebody gets one point and somebody gets another point. But if everyone came out of the talk thinking I was saying one thing and actually I was saying something else, maybe some of that is owed to their ignorance and wickedness and whatever, but at a certain point you’re just saying I’m a bad teacher. If I cannot explain things in a way people can understand them, that reflects badly on me. Well, likewise, if your argument is not only the wicked, because I can understand if you say the wicked didn’t understand, they didn’t believe in Jesus, sure, we’re good there.
But if you say the people trying faithfully to follow Jesus couldn’t figure out what he taught, that is pretty damning of Jesus’ teaching. So the corollary, the flip side of that, is that if Jesus teaches well, and if the Holy Spirit preserves the word and meaning of this teaching well, then we shouldn’t be looking for some radically new teaching that breaks from the past. So when you can find Marcion or Valencias or Martin Luther or John Calvin or Joseph Smith breaking with the past in this radical way, this discredits them. If they can’t say, “Here’s down through the ages, the people who held my teaching, my beliefs,” then they’re just showing themselves to be novel and we’re explicitly and repeatedly warned in the New Testament about those preaching novelties. And so if pressed on this … Okay, last point. I know I’m going long on this.
The question here is about the interpretation of scripture. And so you should be able to show that your interpretation of scripture is consistent with how it’s been read through the ages. And if your only appeal to historicity is, oh, this is totally what Paul meant, it’s a circular appeal. It’s like saying, “Well, I know my interpretation of the Constitution is right because it agrees with the Constitution.” The whole question is whether your interpretation is right. Show me someone else who interpreted it that way, whether it’s the Constitution of the Bible or whatever, or else you’ve got this radical revisionist sort of approach and it doesn’t. It’s an unChristian way to read the Bible.
Brayden:
Yeah. And they’ll appeal to, because when we point out, look, if God intended for sacred scripture to be the soul and fallible rule of faith or the soul deposit of Revelation or whatever, then you would expect it to be able to produce this unity for which Christ prayed for. And we point out the disunity among Protestants who hold to soul scripture and we say, “Look, God didn’t intend us. Not only that, we had unity prior to the Protestant movement, et cetera.” And they’ll say, and to a degree we can agree with this, that when a passage of scripture is misinterpreted, a lot of the defect is in the person who misinterpreted it. And we can say this, especially to those doctrines which make up the creed, right? There’s a hierarchy of truths, right? And the core of the hierarchy of truths are more explicit in scripture.
They would say a similar thing, but to what extent it kind of reminds me of, I believe it was Turtullium, how convenient is it that the people that you say are an error, everyone’s misinterpreting sacred scripture, everyone’s misinterpreting the tradition from the apostles. Everyone’s an error, they’re not guided by the Holy Spirit. How convenient is it that they all erred into a unity, right? A unity and doctrine, right? I wish I had that
Joe:
Quotation from Terton. Yeah. I think Fresno deSails makes this point as well. Again, showing how deeply he reflects the spirituality and thought of the early church and how much that isn’t the case within Protestantism, that he makes the point that if everyone believes the truth, they all believe the same thing. If everyone believes error, they probably believe different things because when people … Take a math test. Everyone who aced the test has the same answers. The people who failed the test probably don’t all have the same answers as one another. So truth unites, to take a phrase. And so you should find one set of teachings, one church, not multiple denominations teaching different things. And so that is actually a very clear, simple case. The oneness of the church points to the truth of the church, because if people were just misunderstanding scripture, they’re all airing.
It beggars belief that everyone’s going to misunderstand in the same way. I mean, you can do a version of this argument when it comes to the structure of the church. There’s a popular claim that … And you’ll find scholars who claim this, but it’s a very poorly sourced claim in terms of historical evidence that, oh yeah, the early churches were all set up by a plurality of elders and there was no bishop, but our earliest documented evidence, we don’t know the names of any plural elders ruling over a church. We know the names of a lot of individual bishops ruling over the church and every local diocese. And so to say this is not the way Jesus founded it, you’d have to believe Jesus and the apostles founded the church one way, and they all broke away from how they were founded and all broke away in the exact same direction by like 107, because St. Ignatius of Antioch can say, without the trifold structure of bishop, elder, deacon, you don’t have a church.
So somehow by 107, they’ve all broken away, all in the same direction, and are convinced that you have to agree with this trifled structure. It’s just one of those times where it’s like, obviously the right answer is going to be the unified one. The Protestants, when they reject that divinely given structure, they don’t all agree on one structure. So they have a plurality of different contradictory structures for how they think the church should run. The reason Calvinist Presbyterians and Calvinist Baptists aren’t united isn’t about theology, it’s about the structure of the church. And so the people who fail the test fail it in different ways. They end up with different structures of how the church is run. Whereas people who ace the test agree, they match up. You look at every Catholic diocese, you look at every Orthodox diocese, you look at every Oriental Orthodox diocese, and there’s a common structure that we see that looks like these are the people who actually understand what the church is meant to look like.
So it’s those kind of things. The uniformity points to something real. And when you have all of these different movements that pop up because of a great thinker who’s teaching false doctrine, whether in the early church or in the reformation or today, that’s a huge red flag that the early Christians recognized. I saw a bread and you had on there a great quote from Sin Augustine. Could you-
Brayden:
Yes, I do.
Joe:
… read that?
Brayden:
And while I find it. Yeah. And it’s unity and Catholicity taken together.
Joe:
Yes, well said.
Brayden:
Because you can have unity like the Donatus. And then Saint Augustine and his works against the dontesis actually makes this point. It’s like, well, yeah, you might have unity, but you’re not Catholic. You’re just confined to an area of Africa.You might be able to argue for unity in your body, but then that excludes you from Catholicity. And then if you kind of broaden the way in which you understand Catholicity and the way that Protestants have to, then they also forfeit unity unless you broaden that. Oh, unity in the absolute essentials. And who defines it? Yeah.
Joe:
Well, I like to think you pointed out because I think this is a response many Protestants are going to have is, well, look, we’ve had … They’re not going to put it this way, but it’s like we’ve had so many schisms. We now have this very tight-knit group of people who agree with us on all of these different things and we get along with each other great. And it’s like, well, of course you do, because you’re not Catholic, because you’re not trying to represent the entire church, or you imagine your little sect, your little group, your little whatever, is the one true church, but no one from the outside, your Newman quote there was very helpful, the ignorant man, the learned man, the outsider, basically looking to find out, okay, where’s this church, Jesus founded? They’re not going to say, “Oh, I bet it’s this reform of a reform of a reform of a reform here in some little community in Idaho or Timbuktu or wherever.” That’s not what the true church is ever going to look like.
And I think that’s a good reminder, not only for Protestants, but also you can have this same impulse within Catholicism, people who break away from the church by saying, “Oh, well, that’s not the real Catholic church. The real Catholic church is like 12 of my friends and I who agree with each other.” And it’s like, that’s not how this thing works.
Brayden:
And we meet for a Bible study on Sundays at my house, just like the early church did it. It’s so funny. I actually still have it. I read this book in high school, Pagan Christianity. I was going to do a video about it,
Joe:
But then- Is that Frank Barna?
Brayden:
Frank … Yes, it is. Yeah. Or Frank Viola and George Barna. Is it two
Joe:
Authors here? Yeah, no, it is two authors that combine their names into one. Yeah.
Brayden:
It is Frank Barna. Yeah. And he’s like, “Well, you look at Acts and they were meeting in churches.” So that’s what we got to do.
Joe:
Meeting
Brayden:
Homes. Yeah, it’s meeting the houses. Excuse me. It’s like, okay, it’s almost like the New Testament wasn’t written or intended to be a manual for ecclesiology or a systematic theology because it’s like I was in my ecclesiology class at Oklahoma Baptist University and when bringing up Saint Ignatius in 107, they had to argue that it was St. Ignatius who established the mono episcopate.
Joe:
Which is crazy given that he’s greeting existing bishops that are clearly the one bishop of the church.
Brayden:
It’s not a polemic. He’s not defending it theologically. He’s assuming it and he’s writing to bishops by name.
Joe:
It’s just like it’s already established. Telling the people to obey their bishop does not mean you’re inventing the idea of a bishop. If you tell your, “Hey, remember kids, listen to your parents, you’re not inventing the idea of parenthood there.” You’re not saying, “I’ve got this new structure. I’m going to call it the two parent family. I want you to try it. ” He doesn’t do that with one bishop. He takes for granted that every true church has one bishop per diocese or one bishop per local church. The word diocese is a little anachronistic there. Yeah, that’s well said. This is an absolute aside, but Oklahoma Baptist, I’ve been told they have a golden calf statue on campus. It might be a buffalo.
Brayden:
It’s a buffalo.That was the mascot is the buffalo.
Joe:
I thought it was just hilarious because I was driving by. I did a three-day Linton retreat there recently driving by this engraved image of a buffalo. I thought there’s a deep irony there. I pointed that out and somebody said, “Oh, they’ve got a golden one on campus.” I thought that is such a hilarious … To be clear, I’m not accusing them of any wrongdoing with that. I think engraved images are perfectly fine.
Brayden:
Let’s just get
Joe:
That over.
Brayden:
It’s fine as long as they’re not religious because then that’s not what. As long as it’s like a buffalo. If it’s a buffalo, it’s not a second commandment violation. So there we go.
Joe:
Yeah. Anyway, sorry. I just thought it was too funny not to at least ask you about it.
Brayden:
Yeah. My lips are sealed as to whether there were any religious services involving that golden buffalo. But yeah, going back to what you were saying before, St. Francis de Sales kind of referencing this quote from St. Augustine, the name itself of Catholic also keeps me in our bosom. So he’s listening all these reasons that he’s Catholic and he’s like, “Which not without reason, amid so many heresies, the church has thus retained.” So the church, even though there’s all these heretical and schismatic movements, has retained the name Catholic so that though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. When a Presbyterian and a prospective Christian meet on the road and the converts like, “Hey, where’s the Catholic church?” He’s not going to be like, “Oh, it’s a few streets down.
It’s called the Presbyterian Church.” It’s like, “What?” They might quote the creed, they might say one holy Catholic Apostolic, but not only is the proper name of Catholic, which all of the fathers that we just quoted, even going back to St. Ignatius, they all treated Catholic not as an adjective, not merely a mark, but as a proper name for the church. Not only is it a proper name for the church, but it’s also, the fact of the matter is, we’ll get to this later, the understanding of what those marks mean as applied to a visible society to mark her out for all other people to see. In the 16th century, when they tried retaining these marks in the creed, they tried retaining them and applying them to their own movements, they had to redefine what each one meant, right? They couldn’t understand unity, Catholicity, Apostolicity, and holiness in an institutional sense, in a visible, empirical sense.
They had to understand it and apply it if they were going to retain this idea of an invisible church, had to apply it in a different sense that all of the Fathers did. And so that’s why they will say, “Oh, well, I’m a reformed Catholic.” I’m the true Catholic church here. I mean Vegelical Catholic.
Yeah, Evangelical Catholic, right? And it’s funny, I got reminded of the video that we did together with my Lutheran friend and
We brought up the way that they recite the nicing creed. I believe in one holy Christian apostolic church, right? They even changed the name, but in their confessions, it was like, “Yeah, we’re the Catholic church. We just don’t mean it in the sense that the originators of the creed meant it. ” We affirm the creed, we just redefine a few of the words. We redefine one Holy Catholic Apostolic. Just like I’m friends with many Baptists and they say, “Yeah, I affirm the nicing creed, but one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, we don’t mean it the way that you guys mean it. ”
Joe:
Which literally defeats the point of a creed, just to be clear.
Brayden:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It demonstrates- When
Joe:
Someone said, “Oh, sure, I believe in Jesus. I’ve got a friend named Jesus.” You’d be like, “You’re clearly using the same word, but meaning something you know does not mean what anyone…” You’re playing games with language at a certain point.
Brayden:
Yeah. It’s like modernists will say, “Oh, I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” Just a spiritual resurrection, not a bodily resurrection. Yes, exactly. So I affirm the creed. It’s like, no, everyone will say, no, you don’t affirm the creed because that’s not the way that the fathers of the creeds of Nicia and Consantinopel intended the creed to be taken. The words mean things. And when you go into the explanation of these terms in the fathers, they are applying them to the visible society, a society which is bound together by the bonds of faith, of authority and the practice of the same rights. And so it’s funny because it’s like you say that you want to be called Catholic, but this old saying from St. Augustine holds true, you
Joe:
Wouldn’t point- Yeah. All heretics wish to be called Catholics. If when somebody heard the term the church, they thought of your little Bible study or your group, whatever, that’d be amazing. And I get why there’s an appeal. But the fact that you know, and Catholics know and non-Christians know, the church equals the Catholic church, the Catholic church equals the thing you call the Roman Catholic church. I mean, literally I did this just a moment ago. I looked up Roman Catholic Church Wiki. I thought they’re obviously not coming from having a dog in the fight. And if you type in Roman … Or actually, sorry, I typed in Roman Catholic Wiki, top result, Catholic church. It says the Catholic church, Eclesia Catholica, commonly called the Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian church and goes on from there. So even there, just like, yeah, the Catholic church is obviously the thing headquartered in the Vatican.
And then it talks about even the term, and this is what I was actually looking to see if they would discuss. Roman church historically meant literally the church in Rome, like the Diocese of Rome, and was used often in saying, “Well, the Diocese of Rome says this in response to heretical movements.” And so we’re fine with using Roman Catholic in that sense, but then it points out later that the term Roman Catholic church has been applied to the whole church in the English language since the Protestant reformation in the late 16th century. This is not a mistake. The English, particularly the Anglicans wanted to claim, “Well, really there’s three Catholic churches, the Orthodox, the real Catholics, and then the Anglicans.” And this doesn’t really work. So they wanted to be like, “Oh, you’re just like the Roman Catholic church.” And that’s historically nonsensical. When you’ve got a bunch of Catholics, say Byzantine Catholics in the East to look very different or you’ve got Catholics in Spain or Africa to be like, “Oh, you guys are all Roman is like the Amish calling everyone who’s not Amish English.” It just is a weird misuse of language.
Brayden:
It’s so funny too, because the names that they give us don’t stick. They only stick in polemical circumstances, right? Romanist, papis.
Joe:
You’ll
Brayden:
Only hear that if you’re like some theology nerd online on Twitter or whatever. You’re not going to be like, “Yo, where’s the Romanist church?” And people are going to be like, “What are you talking? Where’s the papist church?” No one knows, but the names that we give them are on every sign in front of their church.
Joe:
Right. They’ll say, “We’re the Lutherans. We on that. ”
Brayden:
Yeah. So infinite aura, sorry, we’re the main character, we give you names and they stick and you give us names and we’re like, “No, we’re the Catholic church. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Joe:
And no one outside of, as you say, no one outside of your group of people who don’t want to be Catholic and are mad about the Catholic church, actually being the Catholic church uses terms like Romanist papis. You’ll never see a person of any self-awareness and dignity referring to Catholics as Romanist and papis. It’s trying to find a newspaper article where we get called that. It is just a pejorative and it’s a pejorative from people who are sacrificing their own seriousness because they can’t concede what the world already knows, which is that if any stranger approaches you and wants to know where the Catholic church is, you know they mean the Catholic church. You know they don’t mean your body and you’re just being like, “No, you’re the papist.” And the funniest part about it is nobody does this with Eastern Orthodoxy. Nobody’s like, “No, you guys aren’t the Orthodox church.
We are Orthodox. We’ve got right belief.” No, it’s just the one church you can’t call by its name because it shows the truth of the matter is the Catholic church. And there’s something honestly beautiful about that. Even when somebody insists on saying Roman Catholic instead of Catholic, that’s fine, whatever. It’s not an accurate use of language. I’ve even done it myself just to try to be clear that I’m not using whatever weird interpretation of Catholic you have. But when somebody says Romanist or Papist, I’m not upset by it, but it immediately exposes them as not a serious person. It exposes them as someone who just cannot charitably engage with Catholicism for whatever reason. Either they’re ignorant or they are just so closed off to it. It exposes them. It’s not actually insulting to us. I mean, I call my channel shamous popuri. I clearly find it funny when people engage in this kind of behavior, but I think it’s telling.
And I think it’s telling that the heretics in the early church tried to do the same thing.
Brayden:
Exactly. And so St. Augustine made that remark in the fifth century, or maybe it was the latter part of the fourth century. St. Ziprian, basically on the other half, it’s like when you’re in a city, when you’re sodoing in cities, inquire not simply where the Lord’s house is, for the other sex of the profane also attempt to call their own den’s houses of the Lord, nor merely where the church is, but where is the Catholic church for this is the peculiar name or the proper name of this holy church, the mother of us all. Sorry, that just reminded me of that because I feel like this quotation with St. Augustine works very, very well together. It’s not merely the church or the Lord’s house or whatever. It’s like the Catholic church. This is a particular name. And that’s why it’s so, I don’t know, marvelous that we’ve retained this name.
We’ve always retained this name.
Joe:
And
Brayden:
We’ve retained this name for so long that the fathers of the second, third, fourth, fifth and ongoing centuries are like, yeah, we’re called the Catholic Church.That’s a sign in and of itself. And people who aren’t Catholic, they’re called by person’s names. Oh,
Joe:
I believe that quote was actually serial of Jerusalem. I may be wrong about that. Could go back to- Oh, no. No, that’s all right. But it’s important because he’s commenting, he is a little bit later, he’s mid 300s. You’ve got a little ciprian of Carthage.
Brayden:
Oh yeah, yeah, I think I did. Yeah.
Joe:
Yeah. But it’s the Catechic electors by St. Sarah of Jerusalem. Sorry about that. Nitpick here. No, thank you for that. I appreciate that. He’s explicitly telling us what the church means in the creed by one holy Catholic at Apostolic Church. And so showing Catholic doesn’t just mean all Christians everywhere, wherever they may believe or like the later Protestant redefinitions of the Creed, he’s telling us this is precisely so you won’t wander into a self-proclaimed Christian church that’s teaching heretical doctrine. You can avoid them by knowing the ones that are called Catholic churches. I mean, it’s a little anachronistic to say the sign outside the church, but basically, yeah, you can tell from the sign outside the church whether this is a real church or not.
Brayden:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. It’s called Catholic because it extends over all the world, right? Yeah. Thank you for that correction there because I was like, oh no.
Joe:
Absolutely. I hate
Brayden:
When I do that. It’s probably because I’m bulk making these slides. So sometimes I miss changing a name. It is
Joe:
Actually pretty funny. Easy to take to make, especially in PowerPoint where you copy slide and then you change the quote and forget to change the citation. I’ve done it before.
Brayden:
I might have to rerecord that section of my video or actually this will do. Mike, I’ll send you a replacement slide.
Joe:
There we
Brayden:
Go. There we go. But Gavin Ortland and many Protestants actually bring up a quotation from St. John Chrisostom, Homily 33, and I actually didn’t put it in here, but he’s basically talking about like, how do you figure out between these heretical movements? Well, if you argue against the scriptures, do you recall that?
Joe:
Whoever sounded you recalling.quote recently, but it’s funny if you take just that part.
No doubt this is in our favor for if we told you to be persuaded by arguments, you might well be perplexed, but if we bid you believe the scriptures, and these are simple and true, the decision is easy for you. If any agree with the scriptures, he is the Christian. If any fight against them, he is far from this rule. And now notice that is a perfectly good standard for the kind of conflicts he’s talking about. So if you’re engaged in some theological debate or whatever and someone’s saying, “Ah, well, the Bible’s wrong about X.” Okay, that’s a big red flag not to listen to them because they are pitting themselves against the Bible. But what he’s not addressing is two different Christians interpret the Bible differently because the question, there’s a Heather who says, “I wish to become a Christian, but I know not to whom to join.
There’s much fighting infaction among you, much confusion, which doctrine might achhoose.” And then he says, “What then if the other came and said that the scripture has this and you that it has something different and you interpret the scriptures diversely, dragging their sense each his own way.” And you then I ask, “Have you no understanding, no judgment? And how should I be able to decide since he, I who do not even know how to judge of your doctrines? I wish to become a learner and you’re making me immediately a teacher.” If he say this, what say you are we to answer him? How should we persuade him? Let’s ask whether all this be not mere pretest and sutterfuge, Let us ask him whether he has decided against Sahith and that they are wrong. The facts he will assuredly affirm for of course, if he has not so decided, he would not have come to inquire about our matters.
Let us ask the grounds on which he has decided for to be sure he has not settled the matter out of hand. Clearly he will say, “Because their gods are creatures and not the uncreated God.” Good. If he find this in the other parties, but among us the contrary, what argument need we? We all confess to Christ is God, but let us see who fight against his truth and who not. Now, we affirming him to be God, speak of him things worthy of God, that he has power, he’s not a slave, that he’s free, that he does of himself, whereas the other says the reverse. So in this case, yes, both sides are claiming to be interpreting scripture, but on the ground that they all confess, Christ is God, you should be able to tell the people who say, “Yeah, but he’s actually a dimmi-God, in Arianism, don’t actually believe what they claim.
They don’t actually believe Christ is God in the full sense.” And so the mere fact that you know to ask, “Does this track reveals that you already kind of know that it doesn’t track?” That’s his argument. I think to take that to suggest all disputes over all points of theology, including much more subtle ones rather than is Christ actually God, can be resolved by just an unbaptized person saying, “I’m going to figure it all out and then find the right church.” That’s not what St. John Christisten suggesting, not how this works, but you in this same homily have, I think, some other relevant information.
Brayden:
It is so funny because when I was making this video, I gathered all those quotations that we saw earlier about we have the name Catholic, they have names of men. And then I decided to respond to this quotation from Gavin Hortland. And so I read the whole homily and I found this quotation after this section that Joe just read, St. John Chris Austin mentions an even planer way of knowing the truth among false.
Joe:
And just to make sure, for those who are just listening, he calls it an even plainer way.
Brayden:
Yes, but
To mention something even planer is how he starts this quotation. Those have certain persons for whom they are called, openly showing the name of the heresy arc himself and each heresy in like manner. With us, no man has given us a name, but the faith itself. And he goes on, the others say you say the same thing about us. How? For are we separated from the church? Have we are heresy arcs? Are we called after men, Marcian, manicis, areas, et cetera, all of these names. Whereas if we likewise do receive an Appalachian from any man, we do not take them that they have been the authors of some heresy, but men that presided over us and governed the church. We have no masters upon the earth, God forbid. We have one master that is in heaven. And those also says he say the name, but there stands the name set over them accusing them and stopping their mouths.
So he says, he goes … And this is what the fathers do. They give theological reasoning.
They hear out their arguments. They refute them by sacred scripture and sacred tradition. They prove the Catholic position and they say either before or after. And either way, the plainest way that we can demonstrate that your movement is the schismatic or heretical novel one is the fact that you’re not called Catholic, you’re called Aryans or you’re called Marcianites or you’re called Donatis or Dosatist or whatever. It’s like they accompany the theological reasoning with, well, we’re called Catholic and you’re not. And that’s a sign that your movement has come after the time of the apostles. It was established after the time of the apostles. And if it was established after the time of the apostles and you can’t demonstrate any sort of lineage going back to Saint Irines, you can’t demonstrate that the people before you taught this thing and handed it on to you, then your faith can’t be the faith of the apostles, which is exactly what you’re claiming.
So that is typically how these theological reasonings go. They will always bring up the name of their movements, which demonstrate their founders and their foundation after the time of the apostles.
Joe:
St. Jerome puts it very strongly as St. Jerome’s want to do in his dialogue against elucidians. I don’t have a slide, but I’ll just quote it. He says, “We ought to remain in that church, which was founded by the apostles and continues to this day.” If you ever hear of any that are called Christians taking their name, not from the Lord Jesus Christ, but from some other, for instance, Marcianites, Valencians, men of the mountain or of the plain, you may be sure that you have there, not the church of Christ, but the synagogue of antichrist for the fact that they took their rise after the foundation of the church is proof that they are those who’s coming the apostle foretold. Because remember, St. Paul talks about those who would come in, like wolves would come in to pray upon the flock in later times. So there’s a chronology there.
The true church is early and the wolves, like the true shepherds are early, and then later on, wolves are coming. So when we can point out that you’re the later on guys, that identifies you as a wolf. Then he says, and let them, the heretics not flatter themselves if they think they have scripture authority for their assertions since the devil himself quoted scripture and the essence of scriptures is not the letter, but the meaning. So you’re going to find people with a new interpretation of scripture claiming their right not because they’re 2,000 years old or it’s a couple centuries old in his case, but not because they go back to the apostles, but because they’ve interpreted scripture. They’ve got scripture on their side and he says, watch out for that. That’s not how that works. The devil could do that. He could say, “Oh, look, right here in scripture, if you throw yourself off the temple, the angels will protect you.
He’s misinterpreted scripture, but he can point to passages in scripture.” And so that is not how you find the true church. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying, I don’t think it’s a Catholic church’s position that all of these later groups are automatically the synagogue of the antichrist, but I give that to just give one more very clear bit of evidence that where were Lutherans before Luther is 100% the argument the early Christians would’ve used against the reformation because the argument they used against every other heretical movement that arose teaching some new interpretation of scripture, particularly if it was named after some guy and was clearly a break with the church founded by the apostles. Braden, any final thoughts before we wrap up here?
Brayden:
Well, thank you for having me on. That’s one final thought. I also just want to point out that in all these quotations and elsewhere, I’ve demonstrated, there’s a video I did on the infallibility of the economical councils, according to the fathers, the fathers thought that the faith was infallibly preserved in the church. And that you go to the church to get the true faith, like Tancios said that. And so the fact of the matter is God has given these marks, given these signs, the proper name of Catholic church, one holy Catholic, apostolic, all of these motives of credibility so that we can find the church because he has also preserved the true faith in the church. That’s why this is so important, right? And it’s a marvelous example of God’s mercy in that, especially through the ages where not everyone had access to sacred scripture, that he didn’t just leave it up to us to figure out what the apostles had left for us.
He actually established means for the unity in the true faith and the Catholicity of that true faith of that unity being spread throughout the entire world. It’s a demonstration of God’s mercy and universal salvific will. So yeah, I’ll leave you with that. And if you’re interested in those quotations for the indallibility of ecumenical councils or really just the judgment of the universal church, I have a video of that on my channel.
Joe:
Beautiful. And sorry, remind me again, what was the name of that video?
Brayden:
I believe it is ecumenical councils are infallible. Okay. Yeah, I’ll send it to you. I’ll send it to you.
Joe:
Beautiful. We can link it below in the description.
Brayden:
Yeah, I appreciate that, man.
Joe:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you all for joining us for this conversation. I hope it was helpful for you in unpacking what does Christianity mean by the church? How did the earliest Christians understand that term? What were the marks they believed God gave by which we could know the church? I hope your Easter season is going well. Shamus Popuri. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.