Audio only:
Wes Huff’s video “6 reasons why I’m not Roman Catholic” has started quite the conversation! Here’s Joe’s response to Wes (lovingly, of course).
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and on Thursday, Wes Huff released a video called Six Reasons Why I’m No Roman Catholic. Now, I am grateful to him for making the video for a few different reasons. First, despite our theological differences, I think West does a lot of good and I think that he’s a man of goodwill who has a desire to serve the Lord. Second, as he points out, he’s never really done a video directly addressing Catholic Protestant issues except on the canon of scripture, a video I’ve responded to previously. So it’s nice to hear his thinking laid out in a more nuanced and straightforward manner. And third, in my own subjective opinion, Wes’s video is one of the best why I’m not Catholic type videos. And for a really specific reason, he’s engaging with Catholic teaching in a thoughtful and a charitable way.
His video is a good model for how to disagree charitably. I suspect there are going to be a lot of reaction videos to Wes’s video from other Catholics. Sean Hiller has already done a point by point response. I’m going to link that in the description and I know that my friend and Catholic answers colleague, Trent Horn, is planning on responding at some point. Now, having been on the other side of things, having made videos which produce a lot of replies, I know that can feel overwhelming at times. Now I suspect I speak for a lot, maybe most Catholics, insane, we really do appreciate Wes’ kind, thoughtful, charitable engagement. And so my own hope and prayer is that Catholics, both in videos and in comments, will respond with that same Christian spirit. Now, ultimately, Wes points to two major reasons for being what he calls a convictional Protestant.
CLIP:
But I wanted to take the time and stipulate why I’m a Protestant, why I am not a Roman Catholic in particular, because I get a lot of comments that say things like, Wes, I can’t believe with all of your study of scripture and church history, you still remain Protestant. And so I wanted to lay out the reasons why that is. The short answer is that it’s because of my study of scripture and church history that I am a convictional Protestant, but there’s obviously things that need to be teased out there.
Joe:
He then lays out his major reasons for not being Catholic. As I said, the video is called Six Reasons why I’m not Roman Catholic, but he actually appears to offer eight reasons. Two of those are connected enough that they might be seven. In any case, whether’s six, seven, or eight, after offering his reasons, he closes by again appealing both to scripture and to church history.
CLIP:
All these things. And ultimately, via my reading of scripture, via my study of church history is why I remain an am convictionally Protestant and believe that to be true.
Joe:
Now it sounds like Wes is suggesting that both scripture and the testimony of the earliest Christians is on his side. So I want to use those both as standards. What do we actually find in scripture and what do we actually find from the earliest Christians on the six, seven, eight different issues that Wes raises? Now, I suspect that West would agree with me that any of those issues could make for a great full length episode just on its own. So I’m going to be offering more of a basic sketch of the biblical and historical basis for the Catholic view on each of these issues. And since many of them are topics I’ve discussed elsewhere in much greater depth, I’m also going to be linking to various things in the description below and I’ll kind of flag that as we go. Finally, if you want to know more about any of these topics, just let me know.
And if you enjoy in- depth apologetics like this, remember, I’m only able to do this kind of thing full-time because of support of people like you. So if you’d like to support this apostolate, you can donate over at shimlesjo.com. Now with that said, let’s turn to the very first reason Wes offers the suficiency of scripture. Now, this is related to the Protestant doctrine of solo scriptura. Arguably, it’s part of the doctrine. Now, I recently debated solo scriptura with Pastor Doug Wilson. So if you want a much fuller exposition of each side’s views on that subject, I’ll link to that.
CLIP:
So if we’re talking about the sufficiency of scripture, in other words, and I’ve said this elsewhere, scripture is onto logically unique. So though it contains both divine and human authorship, scripture remains the speech of God. Nothing else we possess as a rule is akin to scripture. Likewise, scripture functions unrivaled in its authority. Nothing we possess as a rule does that, but both in what it does and in what it is, scripture is unique and that uniqueness provides the basis for its sufficiency. Scripture intends to communicate to the body of Christ both the primary and infallible means for faith and practice. So what scripture intends to communicate when properly understood contextually and exogetically it does.
Joe:
I want to point out at the outset that as Dr. Gavin Ortland has pointed out, different Protestant traditions mean slightly different things when they use this phrase sufficiency of scripture.
CLIP:
What is being targeted here is the idea of the sufficiency of scripture, which is a related but distinct Protestant doctrine that is teased out differently in different Protestant traditions. Sometimes more modestly in the Anglican tradition, Article six of the 39 articles basically says the Bible is sufficient for salvation. It’s a very modest claim. Luther as an individual asserted that doctrines that are not substantiated by scripture can be held as opinion but should not be required as dogma. That was a take he had. The tradition that in the Protestant circles that generally has the most ambitious articulation of the sufficiency of scripture would be the reformed tradition, though even here it’s very carefully nuanced. So in the Westminster confession of faith, note what I put in purple here, the whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man salvation, faith in life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced by scripture.
Joe:
Because sufficiency of scripture is not a doctrine taught in the Bible, different Protestant traditions have invented their own versions of it and I’m not 100% sure which version West subscribes to. And I don’t say any of that to be glib. The basic idea of sufficiency of scripture is typically that whatever you need to know, the doctrines you need to know for faith, for practice, those are going to be found in scripture. As West says, scripture intends to communicate to the body of Christ both the primary and infallible means for faith and practice. But if this is true, then you would think that a doctrine like sufficiency of scripture would itself be taught in scripture. It’s a pretty important doctrine. But Wes doesn’t actually claim that scripture does this. It doesn’t. Instead, he claims that the sufficiency of scripture can be deduced from scripture’s unique ontological properties.
Now I don’t think that works. Let me try to explain why. Catholics and Protestants agree with one another. Each book of the Bible is divinely inspired and each book is without error. So each individual book of scripture possesses equalities of divine inspiration. It has God as its author and inerrancy. It is without error. But none of the individual books of scripture have sufficiency as an ontological property. Remember that the books of the Bible originally circulated as individual books. Maybe you’ve only encountered the Torah, the first five books. Is the Tor inspired? Yes. Is it inerrant? Yes. Is it sufficient?
No. There’s much more to the story that you need and that’s true of any of the books. If you pick up St. Paul’s letter to the Romans by itself, you won’t know anything about the virgin birth. If you pick up the book of Esther, you won’t know anything about the Trinity. Each of the books is inspired. Each of the books is inerrant. None of the books is sufficient and none of the books even claims to be sufficient. Now it’s true that in speaking of the Old Testament, St. Paul says to Timothy that scripture is profitable that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. But the fact that something is profitable towards a goal doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing you need for that goal. Paul clearly doesn’t think that the Old Testament scriptures are all Timothy needed. He’s giving New Testament scripture as well as oral teaching, for example.
So scripture wasn’t sufficient during the time of the Old Testament and it wasn’t sufficient during the time of the New Testament. You couldn’t simply decide, for example, to ignore Jesus’s teaching or the revelation being presented by the apostles in favor of your own reading of the Torah. So if the individual books don’t possess the quality of sufficiency on their own, maybe they possess that quality altogether. So if you have the whole canon of scripture, the whole list, maybe when you take them all together, they then possess sufficiency. Well, if that’s your argument, then it seems that to be able to argue for the sufficiency of scripture, you must first be able to identify the full and entire canon of scripture. And one of the biggest problems for that is precisely that you don’t find the canon of scripture or any way to get to the canon of scripture within scripture.
Nothing is explicit, nothing is implicit pointing you to the full and exact list of which books you should have. There’s no inspired table of contents, is the often used shorthand for this. However we get to knowing which books are in the Bible, that’s coming from tradition outside of scripture itself. So it seems like this is a very obvious area where we need tradition to be able to have a good guide for faith and morals, namely knowing which books do and don’t belong in our Bible. So the knowledge of which books are and are not authored by God is number one, information that must be divinely revealed. Only God can reveal whether he did or didn’t author a book. And number two, this is not something he has revealed in scripture. We’ve found at least one issue where God has revealed information not within scripture that Christians still need to know.
So ironically, if you reject the infallibility of tradition, if you reject that there’s anything outside of scripture, you’re sufficient with scripture alone, you end up with this position of not knowing which books belong in the Bible. Now we see this very clearly in the life of Martin Luther. He removes seven books from the Old Testament. He tries to cut out four books from the New Testament. We also see this in the life of Wes Hoff, who argues that we have too much of the gospel of Mark, that we should cut out the last part of the gospel of Mark and also that the passage about the woman cotton adultery is not actually inspired scripture and he wouldn’t preach on either of these texts.
CLIP:
Woman caught an adultery. Where did that come from if it’s not in the earliest manuscripts?
Yeah. I think there’s very early evidence for that story being an authentic Jesus story that’s in circulation.
Okay.
While I do not think it is an inspired piece of scripture that John wrote, I actually think that there’s a lot of evidence for that being something that Jesus would’ve actually done. I know some people who have an understanding of inspiration that includes scribal editions and I don’t agree with it. I think that actually makes more sense for the Old Testament than it does for the New Testament, but I’m okay with it. I still think it testifies to the character of Jesus. I wouldn’t preach through it.
Okay. I
Would actually-
Would you preach through the 11 verse of Mark though?
No, I don’t think I would. I think in both cases I would have a conversation with my congregation about textual criticism.
Joe:
Okay. Now I have no way to measure this, but it at least seems to me very anecdotally that there are a growing number of conservative Protestants who agree with West on this issue. They’re willing to cut parts of the New Testament out of their Bibles, or at least they’re no longer going to preach on them. They’re going to quietly kind of relegate them to Jesus stories that might be true, but aren’t divinely inspired.
So this highlights, I think, a very clear problem with this idea of sufficiency of scripture from a biblical perspective. It’s not ontologically true of the books of the Bible. It’s not taught in the Bible. It’s not ontologically true of the canon of scripture and you can’t get the canon from within scripture. And in fact, we have the obvious counter example that St. Paul treats scripture and tradition as equally authoritative, saying that we must hold to the traditions, which you were taught by us either by word of mouth or by letter. Okay. And if we can’t trust that tradition or the church is infallible, then this leaves us with another problem. How do we know which interpretation of scripture to trust? You can find countless different Protestant denominations and traditions claiming to believe in solo scriptura, claiming to believe in the sufficiency of scripture, and yet arguing for what are ultimately contradictory interpretations of the Bible West acknowledges this.
CLIP:
Scripture being sufficient and is sufficient due to its divine origin. And that doesn’t mean then that you won’t have individuals who disagree with what it means or how it should be understood. That is why the discipline of interpretation and the study of the original languages has been a core emphasis by so many threat Christian history and it is not God’s fault that we fallibly understand or misunderstand his infallible words and likewise does not negate that due to the origin being divine, scripture is therefore insufficient to communicate properly without an infallible interpreter.
Joe:
But nobody’s arguing that God’s failed here. The argument is instead that an infallible interpreter is one of the means God gives us because it’s helpful in avoiding the kinds of problems that Protestantism has found itself facing unnecessarily for the last five centuries. Let’s talk about this very concretely and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine you’ve got a newly converted Christian, we’ll call him John, person of average intelligence and he’s also a busy father of a new baby and he wants to know as a new Christian and as a new father, should he get his baby baptized. Now, if he can trust the Catholic church, he has a clear answer to that. The Catholic church clearly says yes, children are born with original sin. Baptism is the means by which we become children of God, so the church and the parents would deny a child the priceless gift of becoming a child of God were they not to convert baptism shortly after birth.
That answer is straightforward. It’s clear you have an infallible interpreter, you’re good to go. But what if you can’t trust that interpreter? How’s dad meant to figure this question out from Wes’s point of view? Remember, the Westminster confession in the Calvinist or reformed tradition teaches that parents are to baptize their babies and that is the great sin to contemp or neglect this ordinance. But baptists teach that you actually shouldn’t baptize your babies because only those who do actually possess repentance towards God, faith and obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ can properly receive baptism. The Anabaptist even rebaptized Christians who’d been baptized as babies. So both sides of this dispute teach that scripture is sufficient. Both sides are teaching diametrically opposed doctrines and both sides are even accusing one another of sinning for interpreting scriptures differently and engaging in the opposite practice on infant baptism. So is John going to send by having his baby baptized or is John going to send by not having his baby baptized?
It seems to be a pretty important issue. Jesus in Mark 16:16 teaches that he who believes in his baptized will be saved. Should John take that as an instruction on the subdific necessity of baptism or is Wes right that that verse was never really meant to be scripture in the first place? I don’t think it’s helpful or realistic to go tell John, “Well, you should go learn hermeneutics and learn biblical Greek and maybe you can figure out which side is right.” So if your approach to scripture isn’t capable of reliably solving these kind of real world situations that ordinary Christians face regularly, I think it’s cold comfort to say that in some technical sense scripture is sufficient, we just can’t figure out what the answer is. Now I want to contrast this to show that’s not actually how early Christians handled disputes when they disagreed about doctrine.
Nobody was giving the kind of answer that West gives. I’ll give just one example here. Turtullian, writing around the year 200 says what we’re supposed to do when confronting heretics and surprisingly perhaps he says that our appeal therefore must not be made to the scriptures, nor must controversy be admitted on points in which victory will either be impossible or uncertain or not certain enough. Turtrian’s point is that you might interpret scripture one way and another group of heretics might interpret it another way and if you decide to just debate your interpretation versus their interpretations, it’s not clear you’re going to win that debate. They might be better debaters than you. And so he proposes a much simpler argument to use to defeat heretics every time ask them instead with whom lies that very faith to which the scriptures belong. From what and through whom and when and to whom has been handed down that rule by which men become Christians.
For wherever it shall be manifested the true Christian rule and faith shall be, there will likewise be the true scriptures and expositions thereof and all the Christian traditions. Now I know a lot of Protestants today find it really obnoxious when we Catholics make this argument. Where did you get your Bible? Oh, you get it from the church. Then why don’t you trust the church’s interpretation of the Bible and church’s traditions? But that’s the exact argument Tertullian is making into 200. That’s the exact argument that the early Christians used against heretics. And that’s consistent with the Bible’s own usage. For example, when St. Paul refers to the church as the pillar and foundation of truth and points to the churches where to look to know how to behave. All right, let’s turn to the second argument Wes raises on the sufficiency of faith. I want to actually couple this with his eighth argument on justification because they’re very closely connected.
I’m not exactly sure the distinction he’s making between them and he connects them together himself. I want to start by highlighting something really helpful that West does. He acknowledges Protestants use the word justification differently than other Christians do. When a Catholic or an Orthodox talks about being justified, we are talking about being in right relationship with God. That includes becoming in right relationship, but it’s much bigger than that. But when a Protestant talks about being justified, they’re talking typically just about becoming in right relationship with God. And these are two different things and they mean a lot for the question of what is the role of human cooperation or what is the role of works or anything like that. Think about it like this. If I ask, how does a human being become alive? The answer is biological, dad and mom, Sperman egg, but also God created a new life in the womb of the mother, but the unborn baby clearly has nothing to do with the process.
The unborn baby has done nothing to become alive. But if I ask on the other hand, how does a human being stay alive? The person does have all sorts of things to do. They got to breathe, eat and drink, exercise and grow. And in fact, we can even recognize that there’s going to be a close link between staying alive and growing. Just as there’s going to be a close link between staying alive, justification and sanctification, which is growing. So I’m grateful that Wes is very clear when he’s talking about justification. He defines what he means when he says justification.
CLIP:
Okay, justification. I touched on this a little bit before when I talked about sufficiency, but when I use the word justification, what I’m asking is the question, how am I made right with God? How is God’s work in moving a person from sin to a state of grace accomplished?
Joe:
So if we’re going to talk about how we go from being in a state of sin to being in a state of grace, there’s actually not a huge disagreement between the Catholic and Protestant position. I think both sides have tended to sort of exaggerate our differences here. As West says-
CLIP:
The Protestant position is that humans possess no inherent capacity to contribute meaningfully to their own salvation, having lost the freedom to accomplish anything pleasing to God.
Joe:
West cites to Hebrews 11: six and Romans eight: eight, that we cannot please God apart from faith. But I want you to compare that with the teaching of the Council of Trent. Man is justified by faith and freely because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and the root of all justification without which it is impossible to please God and nothing we do before being justified, be it faith or works merits the grace of justification. For if it be a grace, it is not now by works. Otherwise, as St. Paul says, grace is no more grace. Now West cites to a number of verses showing that justification is by faith apart from works of the law. The Catholic church agrees completely. That is not our area of a disagreement. So where do we disagree? Well, for one thing, we disagree on what we mean by justification, but the biggest disagreement is over what God is doing in justifying sinners.
The reformers tended to imagine justification in legalistic or judicial terms, God simply declaring us righteous, whereas the Catholic church, Orthodox Church, and I would argue the Bible have a much deeper understanding that God actually makes us righteous.
CLIP:
Justification, which is going to be a further point that I’m going to elaborate on a little bit later, is a definitive moment when God declares a person righteous and they enter the Christian life. This represents a judicial understanding. God pronounces the believer righteous based on faith in Christ. This disagreement stems from competing interpretations of the word justification itself. Historic Protestants, thinkers like the Lutheran and reformed camps recognize that the verb to justify was forensic, meaning to declare or pronounce to be righteous, not to make righteous.
Joe:
As the Calvinist historian, Alistair McGrath has conceded, the reformer’s idea of justification is fundamentally incompatible with what Christians believed about justification for the first 1500 years of Christianity. Now, McGrath goes into much greater detail than I can right now. I’ve actually got a longer video called The Doctrine that didn’t exist, comparing the reformers to specific church fathers on this point. But the main point is this. In three major areas, the reformers introduce novel doctrinal teachings about justification that are simply unknown to Christianity. Number one, the idea of forensic justification. Number two, this idea of a sharp distinction between justification and sanctification and number three, the idea that Christ’s righteousness is merely imputed to us rather than actually imparted to us. So if you want a deep dive, you can see that in the link below. But with the reformation, in Alster McGrath’s words, a fundamental discontinuity was introduced into the Western theological tradition where none had ever existed or ever been contemplated before.
The reformation understanding of the nature of justification as opposed to its mode must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novo. In other words, the reformer’s new understanding of the nature of justification isn’t the reformers returning to the faith of the early Christians. It’s them introducing a theological novelty, a set of teachings on justification that would be entirely unrecognizable to early Christianity and even fundamentally opposed to what those early Christians believed. That’s the fundamental discontinuity that Alistair McGrath talks about. So if you accept the reformers that their doctrine of the justification is the gospel, then either the reformers got the doctrine of the gospel wrong or everybody prior to the reformers got the gospel wrong. Now, getting that question right is important. Once you see what St. Paul means by justification, as opposed to what the reformers thought he meant, things that might seem like contradictions to modern readers suddenly make sense.
For example, St. Paul teaches on the one hand, by grace, you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not because of works list any man should boast. But St. Paul also teaches that God will render to every man according to his works, to those who by patience and well doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are factious and do not obey the truth but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. So if your idea of justification and of salvation of a one-time event, then Paul just seems to contradict himself. First, he says works have nothing to do with salvation, and then he explicitly talks about God saving and damning people according to their works. But if you understand the distinction between becoming alive and staying alive, you can see how there’s no actual contradiction here.
Part of that happens completely without your cooperation and part of that requires your cooperation. All right. Wes’ third reason for not being Catholic is what he calls the sufficiency of grace. But as he acknowledges, both Catholics and Protestants actually believe we are saved by grace. Both sides agree that apart from divine grace, we can do nothing of merit. As Jesus says, apart from me, you can do nothing. So the question is not actually about the necessity of grace. It’s not even really about the sufficiency of grace. The question is about how it is that grace works within our humanity.
CLIP:
Rome maintains that grace enables but does not compel salvation since grace cannot initiate or sustain or complete salvation without human ascent and cooperation.
Joe:
I want to be very clear that even our cooperation with grace is already the work of divine grace. And this is something both the catechism of the Catholic Church and the Council of Trent affirm. The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace. But Wes, who’s nevertheless done a good job again of keen and on one of the main differences. Does grace compel us or does grace empower and enable us? I would suggest that the whole weight of scripture stands in favor of the second of those two options. God would have no need to tell us to do what we’ve already been compelled to do, nor would he have any reason to tell us not to do something we’re compelled not to do. That’s why you don’t see a Bible verse telling you to breathe, for example. But we do have God saying to Israel, “I have set before you life and death, bless you and curse.
Therefore, choose life that you and your descendants may live.” Now it sounds as if God is giving his people real choice. The power to choose life over death, that he’s not compelling their choice, he’s enabling them to make the right choice. And sometimes bear in mind, those in power to choose life nevertheless, choose death. We see this in scripture as well. Remember, Jesus is lament over Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered your children together as a hin gathers her brood under her wings and you would not? Jesus is very clear both that he’s desired to gather them and that they have refused. It’s hard to square those words with a view of God compelling his people. Now, this is not just my own personal read of scripture. This is how the Bible was understood by the earliest Christian disciples, the earliest followers of the apostles.
Saint Irenes, for example, writing around the year 180, says that Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem sets forth the ancient law of human liberty because God made man free to obey the behest of God voluntarily and not by compulsion of God. So he explicitly rejects compulsion saying there is no coercion with God, but a goodwill is present with him continually, meaning a goodwill towards us. So in both men and angels, Uranus writes, “God has given the power of choice so that those who have yielded obedience might justly possess what is good given indeed by God but preserved by themselves.” In other words, as we saw at the prior point, the work of salvation is begun by God alone, but we are then responsible of cooperating with God and preserving the gift of salvation he gives us. St. John Christisten would later ask, “What then? Does nothing depend on God?” All indeed depends on God, but not so that our free will is hindered.
And St. Justin Martyr writing even before Irreneus says back in the mid 100s that we have learned from the prophets and we hold it to be true that punishments and chastisements and good rewards are rendered according to the merit of each man’s action. After all, as he points out, if everything is simply predetermined by faith, it’s all just predestined, there would be no sense in calling people good or evil since no one is morally responsible for deeds done outside of their own control. As Justin puts it, unless the human race have the power of avoiding evil and choosing good by free choice, they are not accountable for their actions of whatever kind may be. On this point, the early Christians are just exceedingly clear that we have freedom with grace, not compulsion. All right Wes’s fourth point is on the papacy and he says he’s unpersuaded that St. Peter is the rock of Matthew 16.
Frankly, I think that’s understandable, though I think Peter is the rock of Matthew 16. I think it’s a mistake on both sides to reduce the question of is the papacy true simply to the question of whether or not the rock upon which the church is built is Jesus or Peter or Peter’s confession or something else. This gives the false impression that the Catholic claim hinges on one part of one verse and that’s just not true. I’ve actually got an entire book, Pope Peter, which-
CLIP:
You can purchase in the shopping tab below.
Joe:
Looking at the enormous amount of biblical evidence that Jesus established a church in which the care of the whole flock was entrusted to St. Peter, but I’m going to give just a couple examples from that here. So for example, in Luke 22, Jesus says that leaders are to serve. He appoints the 12 apostles to a position of leadership and he says that they may sit on thrones in Jesus’s own kingdom judging the 12 tribes of Israel, but Jesus then singles Simon Peter out and he tells him that Satan wants to sift all of them as wheat. He uses a euplural form, but then he switches from the euplural to the Yusingular to tell Peter that he has prayed individually for him adding, and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. So the care of the whole church is entrusted to the 12 and the care of the 12 is entrusted to Peter.
In John 21, Jesus goes further. He commissions Peter to care for the entirety of his lambs and his sheep. He entrusts the entire flock to Peter. And to no one else does Jesus ever say anything equivalent. No one else is told to feed Jesus’ entire flock in this way. And in Matthew 16, even if you’re not convinced by the rock, even if you want to leave to one side entirely what Jesus means by renaming Simon to a word meaning rock and saying, upon this rock, I’ll build my church. You’re still left with Jesus saying to Peter, “I will give you, singular, the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Now, while the church collectively receives the ability to bind and loosen in Matthew 18, what is it that Jesus means in giving this authority to Peter individually as well along with also giving him the authority of the keys, an image used in the Old Testament for royal authority.
Now, I would suggest there’s a much bigger case being made here. You could say, for example, how God always entrusts the care of his people in such a way that the buck stops with one person. He does this in the Christian family with the Father. He does this with Moses and Joshua leading the people. He does it with the judges, the kings and so on amongst the priests. Of them serves as high priest. And so the papacy clearly fits within a biblical model very neatly in a way I would suggest no other model does. But again, you can pick up a copy of my book, Pope Peter, if you want more of the biblical evidence. Wes makes a lot of his case historically instead. He says, “We don’t see this historically and He cites to say Ignatius for the proposition that there wasn’t a single governing bishop of Rome during the first hundred years of Christianity.
CLIP:
So this like 100 year period after Jesus, as the office of bishops developed into a role distinct from pastors hierarchically, it does not appear that there was a single ruling bishop say in the late first or early second century during Ignatius’ time. Rather than addressing a bishop of Rome or a college of presbyters, Ignatius never mentions any presiding or noteworthy supremacy authority for the Roman Catholic Church. And this isn’t a fallacious argument from silence. Ignatius held extraordinarily strong convictions about hierarchiculture structure and the necessity of obedience to bishops.
Joe:
So let’s recap the basic facts about St. Ignatius. Around the year 107, Ignatius believed to be a student of the Apostle John writes a series of letters. Six of those letters are to people and churches that he knew personally in the region of Asia minor. And in each of those he greets or references their three-tiered hierarchy and he reminds the lady to obey their bishop, their presbyters, and their deacons. Often he’s greeting them by name because they’re people that he knows. I want to stress here, he’s not proposing a three-tiered model of church governance as some scholars have claimed. He’s recognizing one that very clearly already exists and this is of itself remarkable. Remember, Ignatius is writing less than a decade after the death of the last apostle, John. And the churches in which Ignatius is describing this three-tiered governance structure are in many cases churches cared for by the apostle John himself, the same churches that are greeted in the book of Revelation.
Now, if the apostles had been establishing some other form of church governance, if John was out there setting up Presbyterian churches or congregational churches, why did all of his churches, and in fact, seemingly all of the churches and Christendom all rebel and all rebel in the same direction? Now, leave that thought aside because I want to turn to one of the most important lines in making sense of the early church. This is from Ignatius’ letter to the trilians. He tells them to obey the bishop, the presbyterist and the deacons, but then he adds, apart from these, there is no church. Concerning all this, I’m persuaded that you’re of the same opinion. So according to Ignatius, by definition, you are not a church unless you have a bishop, presbyters, and deacons. Remember that because now we’re going to turn to his letter to the Romans. In this letter, he’s greeting the church that he doesn’t know personally.
He doesn’t greet anybody by name. And rather than giving them partying instructions, he’s telling them a deeply personal account of his own upcoming martyrdom. So Wes is right. He doesn’t mention them having a bishop. What he doesn’t mention is Ignatius also doesn’t mention them having presbyters or deacons or anything. He does not greet the hierarchy at all. He does not mention the hierarchy at all. That’s not the theme of the letter. He’s talking about his own martyrdom throughout. But for some reason, Wes and many other Protestants think this is a good argument from silence. They use his argument from silence as proof that the Romans must have had presbyteries and deacons, but must not have had a bishop, even though he’s equally silent on all three offices. But what’s more, it seems to me there’s a really strong case be made against this argument from silence.
Let’s start with the obvious fact that Ignatius refers to them as a church. In fact, he twice refers to them as the presiding church. He calls them the church which presides in the place of the region of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of the highest happiness, worthy of praise, worthy of obtaining her every desire, worthy of being deemed holy and which presides over love. That second reference to presiding, presiding over agape seems to be a Eucharistic reference. He seems to be comparing the Church of Rome’s position within the church to the position of the presider and the agape meal en masse, but it’s a little unclear. Either way, he’s praising them as a model church, as a presiding church in a way he does to none of the churches that he greets. So let’s ask, if Rome did not have a bishop, would Ignatius regard them as a model church?
We don’t have to guess the answer to that because Ignatius has already told us that if they don’t have a bishop, they’re not a church at all. In my book, the early church was the Catholic Church. I give an analogy which might be helpful here. Imagine you’ve got somebody like Dr. James Dobson who writes a lot about how a family consists of a mother and a father. And then one day you discover a previously unknown letter of his and which he writes to a family called the Joneses. You know nothing about them except that he calls them a model family. But then you notice in the letter, he doesn’t actually say who their mom or dad is. He doesn’t even mention a mother or father. He just says that they’re a model family. Would you conclude from that silence? Would it be a reasonable inference that therefore they must have been a same-sex couple?
Of course not. That would contradict every other thing you know about his views about the structure of the family. Similarly, to say maybe Ignatius Greeks of Romans as a model church as the presiding church but they didn’t have a bishop would involve contradicting every other thing we know about Ignatius’s view of the necessity of the bishop for a church to be a true church. It’s also worth mentioning that Ignatius does actually talk about bishops in the letters. Specifically, he refers to himself as the bishop of Syria and then later asks him to pray for the church in Syria, which now has God for its shepherd instead of me. So Ignatius takes for granted that the Christians in Rome, like the Christians everywhere else, understood that there’s only one bishop per church. Now it’s true, as I said, Ignatius doesn’t name the Bishop of Rome, but it’s also true that other authors from this same century do.
We actually have a full list from Iraneus tracing the bishops of Rome from the time of the apostles down to his own day around the year 180. Hagosippus before him had compiled a similar list and mentioned such, but that list is unfortunately lost to us now. Churtulian mentions around the year 200 that every church founded by an apostle can do likewise and that these lists were actually an important part of the early churches fight against heresies. The Catholics would show that they were the one true church. They were able to trace their lineage back to the apostles, whereas the heretics were preaching some novel interpretation of the scriptures, interpretations which were unknown to the apostles and to their successors. What are we to do with that? Are we to believe that the Christians of the 100s simply doctored this evidence? They didn’t really have a lineage of bishops going back to the time of the apostles.
Even the heretics in the second century didn’t appear ready to make that claim. Now, as for the special authority of the Church of Rome within the church, Irreneus explains that he traced the history of the bishops of Rome instead of any other church because it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. Now, that is a strong endorsement of the need to agree with the Church of Rome. If that’s true, everyone should be Catholic. Now, I’ve addressed this all recently in response to inaccurate claims made about Ireneus by Patrick O’Brien. So I’m just going to point you there if you want to know more again, link to it in the comments. But needless to say, it is clear from the evidence of the early Christians, both that bishops presided over their local churches and that Rome had some kind of presiding role over the whole church, just as Peter had some kind of presiding role amongst the apostles.
Wes’ fifth reason he’s not Catholic is prayer to the saints and he regards this as a serious problem for Catholicism. But here again, Wes is fair and he admits both that Catholics do not worship saints, but also that early Christianity is against Protestants on this point.
CLIP:
Then I even see prayers for the saints as an early developing practice. I grant that that goes within antiquity. Origin in the late second century and early third century, he defended it by appealing to the communion of saints. I
Joe:
Am really glad to hear Wes admit this because when I made this exact same point to Dr. Gavin Ortland, he claimed I just didn’t understand origin because I was reading him through a Catholic lens.
CLIP:
My basic concern is I think Joe is reading origin through a Roman Catholic lens. I really think that’s what’s happening. Later ideas are being imported back onto origin that he had no awareness of. So because never in all his writings does origin ever make any reference to praying to the saints in heaven or to angels.
Joe:
But Wes cannot be waved away by Protestants as a Catholic and he likewise recognizes that origin very clearly teaches in the 200s that we can pray to saints. So what’s the actual evidence here from origin? As Big explains, Origin looked at four types of prayer mentioned by St. Paul in one Timothy, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and Thanksgiving, and origin argued that three of those supplications, intercessions, and Thanksgiving may be addressed to men for help or pardon or to saints or angels as well as to any of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. Now you can read all of that for yourself in chapters nine and 10 of Origin’s work on prayer. But as Wes pointed out, origins theology of prayer is actually grounded in the theology of the communion of saints. So we’re all united in the body of Christ, both on earth and in heaven.
As origin explains, when we have the favor of God, we have also the goodwill of all angels and spirits who are friends of God, such that men who aspire after better things have when they pray to God tens of thousands of sacred powers upon their side. These, even when not asked, pray with them. They bring sucker to our mortal race and if I may so say, take up arms alongside of it. Now for some reason, despite this, West claims that prayers to the saints don’t really start to crystallize until the fourth or fifth century.
CLIP:
But it’s really in the fourth and fifth centuries that you see the practice start to crystallize with its advocacy by individuals like Serial of Jerusalem and Chris Ostem and Gregory Nazienzin. So I don’t think we start to see a shift from praying for the dead to praying to them until a little bit later. I think the evidence shows more that for the first three centuries, veneration of martyrs restricted itself to remembrance of their virtues and celebration of their death as their heavenly birth. That’s kind of the language that’s used in some of these early writings.
Joe:
Here, I’m just not entirely sure how West squares this latest claim with what he’s already said. Origins on prayer dates to between 2:32 and 2:35 AD. So he’s already granted a very clear instance of intercessory prayer to the saints from before the fourth or fifth century. And we can add to that things like the catacomb descriptions in which the underground Christians repeatedly wrote prayers to the saints on the walls. And we also have new archeological evidence. For example, the oldest Christian artifact north of the Alps contains a prayer to Saint Titus and very clearly dates to the third century. I did an episode just on that kind of early evidence and I’m going to link to that below as well. Now certainly Wes is right. We have more evidence from the fourth and the fifth century than we do from the second and third century, but that’s true of almost everything.
There are way more Christians in the fourth century than in the second or third century and we have way more documents from the fourth century and on. And whether you’re dealing with biblical manuscripts, theological treatise, you name it, it’s a near universal rule. You’re going to find more evidence in the 300s and 400s than you do in the 100s or 200s when Christianity was both small and underground. But the fact that prayer to the saints is early doesn’t actually answer Wes’s concern about it. So I want to answer his concerns about it because he’s concerned because number one, he views it as fundamentally an act of worship and number two, he claims that this kind of prayer is only ever addressed to God in scripture.
CLIP:
So prayer is only ever addressed to God within scripture. It is a fundamentally worshipful act in its nature and its function, even in instances of biblical prayer that encompasses complaints or negotiation or self-defense or maybe even like raw emotional expression. Every instance of prayer within scripture is only ever a genuine dialogue with the divine.
Joe:
I think those are perfectly reasonable concerns. I want to suggest a couple points from scripture that might be helpful here. First, while prayer and worship are connected, they’re not actually the same biblically. And the easiest way to see that is by recognizing that the ancient Jews prayed in various places but worshiped only in one place in the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus talks about the Pharisees praying in the synagogues and at the street corners and while they’re doing it for the wrong reason, they want to be in public to be seen by other people, it’s very clear that people knew they did not have to go to Jerusalem to pray. But as a Samaritan woman pointed out to Jesus, Jews did believe you had to go to Jerusalem to worship. So what makes worship distinct? Now I actually have an entire video on this exploring how Protestants often misunderstand the idea of worship, but as Everett Ferguson explains, the first century Christian spoke of worship in sacrificial terms because sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world, Jewish and pagan.
As we’re going to see in a few minutes, the earliest Christians recognized their Eucharist as a sacrificial offering. They recognized it as worship because it was a sharing in Christ’s own sacrifice, but merely praying to God for something on the other hand is not automatically worship. Those things are distinct in scripture and they’re distinct in the way the earliest Christians talk about them and think about them. Second, contrary to West’s claim, we actually have plenty of examples in the Bible of people talking to saints in heaven or more usually to angels. For example, in Genesis 22, an angel calls out to Abraham from heaven and Abraham responds, even though he seemingly cannot see the angel, he’s calling out to an angel. Jacob and blessing his sons prays, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil blessed the lads. Zachariah and Mary quite famously speak with the Angel Gabriel.
There’s no hint that this is somehow inappropriate or that it’s somehow worship. And if you took out every time that an angel talked to John in the Book of Revelation, you wouldn’t have a book left. And John himself speaks in response to the angel. After a voice from heaven tells John to take a scroll from the hand of an angel, he goes to the angel to give him a scroll and he asks for the scroll. Now, is that statement to an angel, a fundamentally worshipful act? Now later in the book to be clear, John does try to worship the angel. This is clearly distinct from merely talking to the angel, offering obesiance to the angel, offering him worship that’s immoral. Talking to the angel isn’t. But Wes seems to collapse these two by suggesting that simply talking to a saint or an angel is fundamentally an act of worship that can only happen to the divine.
Notice Jesus even speaks to demons. For example, he addresses the demon possessing the Garrison demoniac and asks, “What is your name?” And then he commands it to come out of the boy. Now, the apostles, of course, similarly engaged in exorcism. Would it be okay? Is the argument Wes is making here and that other Protestants are making that it’s okay to speak to demons from hell in the context of exorcisms, but it is not okay to speak to angels in heaven. And if that is the argument, what is the theological rationale behind it? And as for the saints who have the faithfully departed, Judas Macchibias and two Macabees has a dream or a vision in which he speaks with the high priest Onayas as well as with the prophet Jeremiah and they prepare him for battle. Now, I realize that book is not in Protestant Bibles anymore, but nevertheless, it’s helpful in our understanding of whether this would’ve been regarded as idolatrous worship or not.
Let’s turn now to Wes’ sixth reason, which involves his rejection of the sacrifice of the mass.
CLIP:
The mass, as it’s understood in formal Roman Catholic doctrine and dogama, is at minimum theologically problematic from a biblical standpoint and at most what I believe to be a denial of the work communicated within the gospel message.
Joe:
Wes is clear that he affirms some kind of view of baptistrial presence and also that he is fine with our worship being a sacrifice of praise, but he rejects the idea that the mass is what’s called propitiatory. Now, I did a lengthy debate on this exact subject with James White and I’m going to share that below as well, but let me offer a brief explanation. These days, when we envision something like animal sacrifice, we envisioned as the killing of an animal on a sacrificial altar, but historically sacrifice involved much more than that. Now you can see that very clearly in the Passover. Exodus 12, God describes the need to select lambs, kill the Passover lamb, smears blood on the doorpost and eat the lamb and he describes that whole thing as a sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover. It’s not just the killing. The eating is an integral act as well.
The eating of the sacrificial offering was in fact the normal means by which both Jews and pagans participated in the sacrificial system. They had priests who would sacrifice the animal for them. They participated by eating the sacrifice and St. Paul explicitly applies this to our understanding of the Eucharist. In one Corinthians 10, Paul asks, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” And to explain this, he says, “Consider the practice of Israel are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar. We become sharers in this sacrifice by eating the sacrifice. When a Jewish family sat down at the Pasover meal, they were not resacrificing the lamb killed on preparation day, but they were participating in that sacrifice by becoming partners in the altar.
Jesus offers once for all the perfect propitiatory sacrifice for sins. Christ, our pascal lamb has been sacrificed. But in the sacrifice of the mass, we don’t resacrifice Jesus, but we do become partners in the altar by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And this is explicitly what St. Paul says in one Corinthians 10. As St. Irnes points out in the 100s, Jesus institutes the Eucharist as the new ablation, that is the new sacrifice of the new covenant, which the church receiving from the apostles offers to God throughout the world. In other words, the church offers at the mass not merely our sacrifice of praise, but Jesus’s own propitiatory sacrifice. That is the sacrifice of the New Covenant. That is what was recognized as the heart of worship as the heart of the new covenant, as the heart of Christianity from the very beginning of Christianity.
And in fact, we can trace it back even further. Irreneus points out that this is the fulfillment of Malachi chapter on which God says that in the new covenant, both incense and sacrifice will be offered by the Gentiles at the table of the Lord. Even the dedicate, believed to be from the first century, connects the Eucharist as a sacrifice with Malachi one explicitly. Saint Syril of Jerusalem, jumping forward now to the mid 300s, describes the Eucharistic sacrifice as the spiritual sacrifice, the bloodless service because Jesus’ blood is not being shed again and the sacrifice of propitiation. I don’t know exactly what it is Wes means when he says he believes in some kind of real presence, but I do know what the early Christians believed, that they believed that Jesus turns bread and wine into his own body and blood so that we can share in the sacrifice of the cross at the altar, at the table of the Lord.
So that is not as West fears, some kind of denial of the work of Christ on the cross. It is rather the application of that work to our own lives. All right Wes is seventh reason, and this is really his final reason. It involves what he calls the changing unchanged church and it really involves the idea of development of doctrine.
CLIP:
I look at this idea that the Roman Catholic Church is the true unchanged 2000-year-old church. And I simply look at the evidence for that and I don’t see it. I see clear developmental change.
Joe:
Now, like many Protestants West seems to believe the development of doctrine is some kind of 19th century invention by St. John Henry Newman to explain away the apparent contradictions Protestants claim to have found between modern Catholicism and the early church. And so West suggests that the fathers at Trent would never have accepted something like Newman’s doctrine of development.
CLIP:
The polemics that took place during the Reformation taught that Roman Catholic teaching as it was at Trent was the universal teaching of the whole church and that’s simply false. So when you have Cardinal Henry Newman writing an essay on the development of Christian doctrine in 1848, he’s outlining the parameters of why the claim of unchanged continuity isn’t true. The development hypothesis undermines a unified constant and uniform teaching from the apostles to today, what Neumann outlines is simply not the thinking of those at Trent. It isn’t. They would not have agreed with Cardinal Henry Newman’s thesis.
Joe:
But I think Wes is just clearly wrong about this. Newman is by no means the first to talk about development of doctrine. This was a widely accepted idea. It was widely acknowledged both in the early church and in the middle ages. To give just a few examples in the fourth century, St. Gregory Nazianzen pointed to the Trinity as an example of where we see development of doctrine. He wrote that the Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly and the son more obscurely. The New Testament manifested the son and suggested the deity of the spirit and then talked about how Christians were increasingly recognizing the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Now, similarly, he says,” You see lights breaking upon us gradually and the order of theology, which it is better for us to keep neither proclaiming things too suddenly nor yet keeping them hidden to the end.
In other words, the early Christians realized they did not just start out with a fully fleshed out systematic theology overnight. They knew this at the time they didn’t suddenly forget this in the Middle Ages. And in the fifth century, St. Vincent of Loren famously asked in the commentarian, shall there then be no progress in Christ’s church? Certainly all possible progress. He then gives criteria to distinguish real progress from alteration of faith since progress required that the subject be enlarged in itself, whereas alteration, which it’s bad, involves a thing being transformed into something else. G.K. Chesterton put it a little more colorfully when he said, When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat. We mean that he becomes more doggy and not less. So there’s good development and bad alteration.
The idea that progress or development in theology would have been alien to the fathers at Trent is simply untenable historically. What Newman believed about doctrinal development was well established by the early church, fourth of fifth century at least, and was widely agreed upon widely accepted. Now, of course, St. John Henry Newman, St. Gregory, St. Vincent, and the others who talk about doctrinal development are clear that this is about unpacking the full implications of a thing. It’s not about using development of a euphemism to go from yes to no or from no to yes. So I want to address the particular contradiction West believes that he’s found and it is one that Protestants often mention and even some traditional Catholics mention as well.
CLIP:
The papal bowl Unum sanctum issued by Pope Bonifus in 1303 stated, “We declare a firm define and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary to salvation that every human creature should be subject to the Roman Pontiff. A modern Roman Catholic teaching acknowledges that those suffering from invincible ignorance of the true religion can achieve salvation through moral readiness and faithfully fulfilling God’s well through the precise mechanisms that remain unexplained. And this includes, according to the Catholic catechism, Muslims and Jews being able to be saved even if they are outside the church. Let me read for you paragraph 84: one, 841 of the Catechism. It says this, “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the creator in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims, these profess to hold the faith of Abraham and together with us, they adore the on merciful God makins judge on the last day.” I’m sorry, but this is not the teaching that you find in the very clear medieval Catholic theology of extra ecclesiamola salus.
Outside of the church, there is no salvation. It’s just not the same. There’s a clear change.
Joe:
Again, the standard should not be change but contradiction. Properly understood there is simply no contradiction here, but this involves making important theological distinctions, particularly between those who knowingly and intentionally reject the Catholic church and those who do so in ignorance because theologians have long talked about invincible ignorance. For a thing to be mortally sinful, there must be grave matter, but there also must be knowledge and intent. That is not some new church teaching at Vatican II. That is rather moral theology rooted in scripture. Jesus cries. Father forgive them for they know not what they do. It’s why St. Paul can say that the times of ignorance God overlooked when he’s addressing the pagans in Acts 17. And contrary to what West claims, Vatican two actually reaffirms that a knowing rejection of the Catholic church is damnable. Lumingensium teaches that whosoever therefore knowing that the Catholic church was made necessary by Christ would refuse to enter or to remain in it could not be saved.
Okay then, what about this language of the plan of salvation, including Muslims and others? And what do we make of that? Well, remember, the plan of salvation is that God, our savior desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Saying that God’s plan of salvation includes everybody doesn’t mean that we believe they’re all in fact saved or that they’re all already saved. It’s rather a reminder when we evangelize that Go desires that person to be saved and is already at work in their life in some way and that our job is to see where do we already agree? What are they already getting right? What is the area God’s already spoken to them in some way so that we can build from that in proclaiming the gospel? It’s not a sign that, well, the plan of salvation includes everyone, so therefore we don’t preach to anyone.
That would be a contradiction, but is not what Vatican II teaches. West concludes his argument by saying that being a biblically based, faithful Christian will make you a bad Roman Catholic and vice versa. But as I hope I’ve shown here, that’s simply not true. There are good biblical reasons that Catholics believe everything we believe on each of the issues he takes issue with. And in each of the cases, church history and the testament of the earliest Christians is on our side as well. It agrees with our interpretation of scripture, not Wes’ more novel interpretation. And I think that’s important because Wes claims he’s a convictional Protestant because of church history. If somebody said that they’re a flat earther because they’re a scientist who’s looked at the science, you would reasonably conclude from those words science somehow proves a flat earth. Likewise, when West claims that he’s a convictional Protestant because of church history and then lays out these objections, you might naively think that he means that church history is on his side.
But as I think I’ve sketched out for each and every one of these issues, church history speaks against him. He thinks the early Christians got each of these issues wrong. He is arguing against early Christians, not with them. And citing to Martin Luther-
CLIP:
The reformers recognize the continuity of the church and their inheritance over the 1500 years prior to them going right back to Jesus.
Joe:
That’s a beautiful claim to make. It sounds really nice, but what’s the evidence that it’s actually true? On issues like baptismal regeneration, the sacrifice of the mass and so on, Wes is clearly arguing against the unbroken lineage going back to the time of Jesus. Where are the Baptists who deny baptismal regeneration or who deny the sacrifice of the mass or who believe that justification is merely imputational in the 1500 years before Luther? So let me end this too long video with gratitude for you first of all for making it through to Wes for laying out a clear and charitable case for why he’s Protestant. Obviously we’re focusing on our disagreements, but I hope that this is still done in a spirit of Christian charity. He has said that he believes that despite being Catholic, many Catholics can still be saved and I would happily say the same of Protestants as well.
Now, if you want to know more about what early Christians actually believed on an important issue like the mass, I encourage you to check out this video, which I believe might be truly life-changing. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you. I