Audio only:
Today Joe explains how so many different Protestants give so many different answers about who was the first Pope. Most of them will REFUSE to say that it’s Peter, but if Joe can show that all their answers are wrong….who else is left?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and one of the things that’s happened with the death of Pope Francis in this move towards conclave, which begins May 7th, I’ll talk about that more when we get there as we await the election of a new Pope. People who may not normally ask questions about Catholicism are asking a lot of questions about the papacy. This includes both Catholics who want to know more about their faith, but also a lot of non-Catholics who are just curious. Why do Catholics have a pope in the first place? And I think this is really good and it’s really good amongst Christians that we ask this question, and I’ve actually talked about this at much greater length than a book called Pope Peter, in which I refer to the papacy as the church’s most distinctive doctrine. Here’s what I mean by that and here’s why it matters.
If you are someone who’s exploring Catholicism for the first time, if you’re coming from say a Protestant background or really an Orthodox background, but especially if you’re coming from say, evangelical Protestantism, the number of questions you might have, the number of areas where Catholics believe one thing and you were taught something else, or we do one thing and you do a different thing. That can be overwhelming, and I’ve talked to people who just feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer number of questions that they have where they’re finding a draw. They feel compelled to look into this, but they don’t know how to sort through the sheer glut of information, and I think it can be very important to highlight that this is the one issue we have to get right now. I want to make something very clear saying that the papacy is the church’s most distinctive doctrine does not mean that it’s some church’s most important doctrine.
It’s more important that you get the Eucharist right? It’s more important that you get the divinity of Christ, right? It’s more important that you get the Trinity right? It’s more important that you get the existence of God. Those kinds of questions are obviously an uncontroversially more important than the question of the papacy, but the papacy is distinctive. Here’s the difference. If I want to know, should I buy a car or a truck? Well, the engine is the most important part of both vehicles, but knowing that I need an engine doesn’t tell me that I should get a car or a truck. Instead, I should be asking questions about like, well, do I need a truck bed or do I need space for kids in the backseat that’ll help me figure out if I should get a truck or a car? Because what distinguishes it? What is distinctive?
Is the truck bed not the most important but the most distinctive? The papacy is like that. Why does that matter? Because instead of asking 20 different questions about doctrines and practices and everything that can feel overwhelming and scary, you’re asking one question and that one question is really simple. Did Jesus establish the papacy or not? Because if he did, you and I and everyone on earth should be Catholic, and if he didn’t, no one on earth should be Catholic. And so that saves so much time. The other stuff matters. But now, once we have our ducks in the row on the papacy, have the grounding in the framework to answer all those other questions we might have. Because for one thing, if I know I can trust that the Pope can authoritatively decide doctrine, then when I’m trying to figure out other doctrines, if the Pope has said something really important on that subject, I’m going to take that into account in a different way than if I don’t think the Pope has authority or if I think the Pope is the antichrist or something, right?
Obviously the other doctrines kind of go downstream from getting the question of the papacy, but I think we can make it even easier. And this is a question that if you are a Protestant, I hope you’re asking this question and I hope you are working to answer it. If you’re a Catholic, you should have this question in your back pocket as a simple icebreaker kind of question to get people to think more deeply about doctrines they maybe don’t think about. The question is simply this. Who was the first pope? Who was the first pope? Now as I understand it, there are basically three ways you can respond to it. Two of these are answers and one of them is kind of a non-answer. Here’s what I mean. Now, the first obvious answer and the Catholic answer would be St. Peter is the first Pope that you can see in scripture.
Peter is being entrusted with the kind of authority that we can know both from scripture and from early church history is carried on in one way, shape or form by his successors, the bishops of Rome. Now, I’m not even making that full case right now. I’m simply highlighting that that is one answer and I think pretty clearly the correct answer, and I’m going to instead look at the other two ways people answer the question because the second way to answer it would be to say, yeah, there is a first Pope, but it’s not Peter, it’s somebody else. Okay? The obvious follow up then is who is the first Pope? Then if it’s not Peter who we’re talking about, and as we’re going to see there’s several different names that get thrown out and they’re not particularly compelling. I’ll explain why they’re not compelling when we get there.
But the third, at least the second tier is answering the question. They’re saying, okay, you asked who the first Pope is. Here’s who the first pope was. The third is it feels like an evasive answer, although I don’t think it’s meant to be, but it just says, oh, it’s just evolution. The papacy sort of evolved over time. So you’ve got different leaders and some of them have more authority than others, and then you eventually we have a pope. Now you’ll notice that just kind of avoids answering the question because if eventually we have a pope, then the obvious follow-up is, okay, who was the first Pope? Like fine, if you believe there was something that wasn’t quite the papacy, but whether it was good or bad existed before it. Okay, when did we have an actual papacy? Because you’ll notice that third answer just does not actually answer the question.
It just sort of waves away the question. It sort of takes black and white and makes it gray. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly fine to believe, and I think both Catholics and Protestants would recognize that the papacy looks different in say 2025 than in 10 25 or in 1 25. That’s fine, and we’ll talk about that at the end of this episode, but it still needs to be asked, well, where do we find a person that you would recognize as Pope and who are they and how do we know that they’re the first one? So with that, let’s then delve even a little bit deeper because the question of who was the first Pope is closely linked to another question that Catholics are very fond of asking, which is who founded the Catholic church? Now, I think that’s a very good question to ask, and I think it should be paired with the who was the first Pope.
And the reason I think it should be paired is if you don’t parrot, then you’re going to have Protestants who give answers that are just kind of like, oh yeah, Jesus established Christianity broadly and we’re all part of that. So sure Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, whatever it is, it’s all sort of founded by Jesus. I don’t think that actually answers the question asking who was the first Pope more clearly gets to what the actual question is. And so here I’m going to let actually Dr. Jordan Cooper, who’s a Lutheran, lay out the Catholic argument, which he doesn’t think is a very serious argument, but I think is quite devastating in terms of really highlighting the difference between SA Catholicism and Lutheranism.
CLIP:
Their founder is Jesus Christ and our founder is Martin Luther. So they were founded by Jesus himself, and we were founded by just some guy in the 16th century. So how do we rebut those claims?
Joe:
So yeah, that’s exactly why the question matters. If we can trace Lutheranism to Luther, which I think it’s fair to say we can in 1517 or whichever date you want to give it, but October 31st, 1517 is the usual date people give. We can to the day point to the beginning of the Lutheran movement that very quickly breaks off from the Catholic church. Luther is excommunicated Lutherans rebel against the church, Luther Denounces Pope as the antichrist. There’s clearly a break that happens on both sides. Catholics say Lutherans are not part of the Catholic church. Lutherans say We’re not part of the Pope’s church. There’s no denying this break. You cannot say Luther was part of the same visible church body in 1530 that he was in 1510. It’s just not true and no one will seriously claim that. So yeah, Lutheran is in fact founded by just some guy in the 16th century and in response to this, Catholics would say, but we are not, you can’t tell that same story about the founder of the Catholic church that we can tell about the founder of or fill in the blank various form of Protestantism. Instead, if you’re going to tell the honest story of where the Catholic church comes from, you have to tell the story about Jesus Christ and the apostles. Now, Cooper rejects this kind of, but he admits that, well, if Jesus really does found the church, then he should be a Catholic, which
CLIP:
It’s not really a helpful way of actually having a discussion because you’re presuming the thing you’re trying to argue for because you’re presuming that Jesus created the Catholic church, not just the Catholic church, but the Roman Catholic church. So obviously if I accepted that Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church specifically, then I would be a Roman Catholic. I mean, duh, of course he would. You should, if Jesus really is the founder of the Roman Catholic Church, but to argue that Jesus is the founder of the Roman Catholic Church is to argue that Jesus appointed Peter as the first Pope and that Peter was given instructions to then lay hands on another individual after him who would also be the next Pope and Vicar of Christ. So if you make that, you’re just making a claim and then saying that your claim proves your claim. So I mean, it’s not an argument,
Joe:
Right? So if the first Pope is Peter, then it follows Jesus established the Roman Catholic Church, really just the Catholic church, and we should all be Catholic. We don’t have to be Roman Catholic. You could be a Byzantine Catholic, a Malachi Catholic, whatever, but you do need to be a Catholic. You need to be in union with the Pope. And so obviously Protestants like Cooper aren’t going to want to accept that. So that’s the stake. If you say that the correct answer to who is the first pope is Peter, then you need to be Catholic. You should be Catholic, and we can both sides agree on that. So what if you reject it, then well, that leaves you with either offering a different candidate as the first Pope or just refusing to answer the question of where the papacy comes from or who the first pope was.
So let’s look then at the people who actually do answer the question, what are some of the other candidates who were given? Now here, I want to make an important distinction. When we’re talking about the first Pope, you can expect two objections. First, there are going to be people who claim there wasn’t even a bishop in Rome until later. Various dates are kind of given, so okay, was there even a bishop of Rome? Because if you don’t have a bishop of Rome, do you even have a pope? That kind of question. And if you’re going to say there wasn’t a bishop of Rome who was the first bishop of Rome, is one part of the question you’ve got to answer two, there are going to be people who say, sure, there was a bishop of Rome, we find a bishop of Rome as far back as we go, but maybe they weren’t always the Pope.
Maybe they didn’t always have the kind of authority that we think of when we think of the Pope. Well, in that case, if the early bishops of Rome don’t count as the Pope who was the first pope, who is the first person you would say meets the criteria to be Pope, and the criteria shouldn’t be just you arbitrarily coming up with something. Now you’ll notice I said I liked the question, who is the first Pope paired with the question of who founded the Catholic church? And one of the reasons I think it’s really important to parrot is because people who don’t know a lot of church history will often have this idea that somehow Constantine was responsible. So they’ll really want to say, oh, Constantine founded the Catholic church. But obviously if the question is who is the first Pope, that’s a nonsensical answer, right?
Constantine isn’t a bishop. No one Catholic or Protestant claims that he was clearly not a pope. He didn’t think he was. We don’t think he was. You don’t think he was. So he can’t be the answer. But nevertheless, people trying to find the origins of the papacy will still try to work him in somehow. And so this answer is really in some ways the kind of evolutionary evasive non-answer. But I’m going to give you just a sense of the sort of something about Constantine evolutionary theories that you’re going to hear before we get into some more particular candidates.
CLIP:
And truthfully, this is how it was for the most part. During the first three centuries or so of the church, men were appointed as pastors and bishops, and that’s essentially the same word, pastors and bishops over the regional churches with the goal of leading the flock humbly under the leadership of Jesus Christ, the true head of the church and one of these regional churches was in Rome, which had its own bishop, but in the fourth and fifth centuries ad, and this was when Christianity went from an outcast in the Roman world to the dominant faith in the Roman world, church leaders began to grow in authority and power. They were called upon by emperors such as Constantine, the great if you remember, to establish church doctrine and also even to intervene in secular matters. So as such, churchmen grew in great power. Bishops and archbishops rose to the levels of princes and dukes and knights and the bishop of Rome, the center of the church on the ashes of the old Roman empire would become the most powerful man in the church. He would actually become on par with emperors and kings. He became the papa or the Pope of the church. Now, this was not an immediate transaction, but by the early Middle Ages we see a power structure very similar to the papal power structure we see today where the Pope wielded absolute power over the affairs of the church and significant power over secular affairs as well. Now, for better or worse, this system would come to dominate the fabric of medieval Europe for over a thousand years.
Joe:
So you’ll notice in a real way, there’s not an actual answer to the question being given. So the question that he’s asking in the video is what are origins of the papacy? And so you would expect him to say, well, the first pope was so-and-so. If I say the origins of America are blank, you might expect me to talk about say the founders or the first president or something like this. If I just said, oh, Americans, they got more independent feeling from the British over time, that’s all true. But I’m not actually answering like, well, when does America start? At what point does it cease to be the 13 colonies and it starts to be something different. And so it is that evolutionary sort of theory, and so somehow Constantine is supposed to be part of this story, but then there’s this multi century sort of a thousand years, the papacy is really important, dominates church politics.
So seemingly if that’s tied to the reformation or the enlightenment and you go back, it seems like he’s saying somewhere between the 300, 400, 500, 600, somewhere in there, you get the rise of the Catholic church, the earliest possible date. If you say Constantine is critical, like he’s a necessary at least forerunner for there to be a papacy, then the earliest you could be putting that is Saint Sylvester. Now, I’m not sure that’s what he’s actually arguing because he doesn’t ever answer the question directly, but we’ll just put St. Sylvester as one of the candidates or I guess any of his successors for the next 400 years. The second candidate that deserves a look is St. Leo the Great. Now Leo, the Great, you’ll find people who know church history really well, who argue that Leo was the first Pope and not without cause, namely Leo is a strong and effective pope.
And so you see the papacy in action under Leo in a way. You don’t always see it in action either before or after Leo. He’s just really good at doing Pope stuff. So one of the people arguing that Leo should be regarded as the first Pope is the 19th century historian and theologian, Philips Scheff. Now s Scheff was a Protestant theologian, but his work on the church fathers tends to be pretty well respected by Catholics as well as Protestants. Obviously we’re going to disagree on some things like the papacy, but he argues that the first pope in the proper sense of the word is Leo, the first who justly deserves to be called Leo the great, and that in Leo, the idea of the papacy as it were, became flesh and blood. Now, I love this answer because it’s a clear answer to the question.
I think the answer is wrong, but I like that he doesn’t just vaguely wave to several centuries of history and say somewhere over here he says, this guy from four 40 to 4 61, the Catholic church was headed by St. Leo the great, and according to Schaff, he’s the first guy who meets his standard as a Protestant for what it takes to be Pope. So he’s going to be the second candidate that we put on the board. The third candidate that deserves to be put on the board is also one of the greats, St. Gregory the greats. So here’s the argument that Gavin Orland makes, that there’s kind of a sword of papacy with Leo, but that you really get the papacy with Gregory. And again, I like that Dr. Orland is answering the question.
CLIP:
Now, eventually in the fifth century, I would argue that’s when you really start to see strong, it starts to come into focus more this role of the Roman bishop as more preeminent and with the pontificate of Leo the great for example, and then definitely in the sixth century, you have a massive consolidation and expansion of papal power with Gregory the Great who’s an incredible leader, and I love Gregory the great, his book of pastoral rule is awesome. And then after that, and by the way, this is Yaroslav Pelican, his history of Christian doctrine. He calls this idea that there was a turning point for the papacy with Gregory the Great in the sixth century, the conventional view. So I’m not way out of bounds here with how this is often looked at after Gregory the Great, you get a massive expansion including into the temporal realm.
Joe:
Alright, so Gavin’s view, if I understand it correctly, is that you get something, this is kind of forerunner to the papacy under Leo the great, but you don’t really have the first pope for another 150 years until you get to St. Gregory The great he recognizes that there’s something, this thing Shaef recognizes as a papacy and it’s just strong Roman authority, but apparently not a papacy and to have the papacy, you don’t have it in until Gregory. Okay, well, some are going to take that view even further and say, yeah, you have it with Gregory and then treat Leo as just like another one of these alleged pastors in the pre-PA church.
CLIP:
Now you’ve already seen this chart many times Christ died on the cross. God’s word was written, the church was suffering and it was kind of a mixed bag. Constantine legalized Christianity. So a lot of people wanted to go along with a bandwagon and they joined the church and the church began to be diluted and diluted, not diluted, diluted, but the gross error didn’t really start until about the sixth century. The first real pope there is a whole string. If you go to the Vatican, you can see all their names. Most of those men, if you’d have talked to ’em in their day, didn’t know they were the Pope. They were bishops of the church in Rome. Rome always had a bishop, a pastor, and in fact, one of the pastors went out and met the barbarians when they came and that’s why they spared Rome. They sacked and took over the Roman empire, but they didn’t destroy the church there because he came out in his white robes and talked to him and everything. But the first real pope was he’s called Gregory the first.
Joe:
Now I want to point out that video that’s from John Barnett. There’s over 400,000 views of him spouting this idea of the history of the church. And if you know anything about church history, you’ll see it’s riddled with often pretty flagrant errors, but the advantage that it has is he is very clear and precise in his allegations. So his allegation is about the split between Roman Catholicism and Christ goes down to a particular year. The year is 5 93 and the Pope is Pope Gregory the great Pope. Gregory the first, and you’ll notice in his presentation he contrast Gregory with the earlier pastors that he alleged. Again, these are obviously bishops over the entire city, but Protestants who don’t want to acknowledge that, just call them pastors, fine. He talks about one of these pastors who’d gone out and talked to the barbarians. Well, he’s obviously referring to Leo the great talking to Atilla the Hun, where he spares the city of Rome.
So he’s clearly putting Leo not in the Pope category, but in the pre Catholic pastor category and saying You don’t have a pope until Gregory the Great. So you’ll notice so far in as much as we have theories, they don’t actually agree with one another. They’re contradictory, but we’ll put his name on the board again. So it could have started sometime with maybe Sylvester, sometime with Constantine, could have started with Leo at the time of Atilla, could have started with Gregory the great. But if we’re just going to choose random popes from history, why not just go fully the West Huff route and claim that the Catholic church doesn’t exist until the ninth century? If that sounds like I’m exaggerating, here’s Wes in his own words.
CLIP:
I know many Roman Catholics will push against this, but I think even using the term Roman Catholicism to talk about the time period where the canon of scripture was being discussed isn’t anachronism in that what we know of as modern day Roman Catholicism, its ideas, its teachings, its dogmas would have been foreign to
The
First few centuries. In fact, I would argue that you don’t get what I would consider to be Roman Catholicism until the ninth century. And the reason I would argue that is because of the ninth century. It’s the first time that the Pope, the bishop of Rome chooses the Roman Emperor Charlemagne and not the other way around. So it’s the first time where there’s a shift in that you have what’s considered the Carol engine. What’s the term I’m looking for? Renaissance, the Carolin Renaissance where you have under charlamagne the great, but all of a sudden there’s a shift in power where now you have this idea of a holy Roman emperor and he’s kind of being given his authority by the Pope rather than the emperor having political authority and the Bishop of Rome being a religious figure, although you could argue that before that there was political messes tied up and I think that that’s granted, but so if I was going to pick a timeframe, I would say what we refer to as modern Roman Catholicism with kind of the magisterium, with the Pope having this position as the bishop of Rome and that superseding all other bishops and this kind of thing, the Vatican, I would say you get that understanding at its kind of earliest fruition in the ninth century.
Joe:
So you’ll notice Wes is doing something kind of strange. I mean he claims that like the magisterium and all of that doesn’t exist until for some reason the coronation of Charlemagne. Now two things should be clear from this. First it sounds very arbitrary. He’s just deciding that the thing that matters is well is the Pope crowning emperors and by that standard, do we have a Papa Sea today? Because popes don’t crown emperors. You’ll notice, I mean I want to really stress this because if you listen to Gavin, he cited the secular influence of the papacy. If you listen to the video about Constantine, it’s looking at the secular influence with the papacy. If you think about Leo and the interactions with the barbarians, it’s about the secular influence of the papacy. These aren’t even asking the right questions. The question of when does the first pope exist is probably not going to be answered by can we point to geopolitical crises, whether that’s who’s the valid holy Roman emperor or can we stop barbarians from invading or can Christianity be legalized?
Those are all external issues that the church is facing. They’re issues the church is facing with secular politics or dealing with barbarians or dealing with persecutor of Christianity, et cetera. And in all of these kind of candidates we’re looking at, yeah, how did they interact with the world outside of the immediate ecclesiastical affairs of the church? Those are important questions for the secular authority of the church, but it seems very strange to say you don’t have a papacy until the Pope is crowning an emperor. That feels absolutely arbitrary, but fine, we’ll put it on the board. But you’ll notice that even after he makes this claim that the Roman Catholic Church, he always has to add, Roman doesn’t exist until the ninth century. He then has to say the modern Roman Catholic church, but okay, was there a Catholic church before that? A Roman Catholic church before that, did it have a pope?
Even if it wasn’t a pope who crowned an emperor? Why? It just feels like we’re getting hung up on irrelevant details. So hopefully it’s at least clear at the outset that Protestants when asked a simple question, who was the first Pope? Give various and contradictory answers. Now, if you want to ask this yourself, I’m sure you could find even more. These are just all popular level channels that are Protestants engaging in many cases, Protestants with degrees in this field, engaging with this question and coming to contradictory sort of answers. Now, I would argue none of these claims work, none of them actually hold water first. As I’ve already said. They’re looking largely not at what the papacy is, but about the Pope’s relationships with others, which would be like saying, you don’t really have a US president until we win our first foreign war. And I don’t know why that would be the standard for what makes a president, because the question is internal to the church, is the church internally headed by a pope on Earth or not?
I don’t think you need to look to a till of the Hun or Charlemagne or Constantine or anyone else to answer that question. You can look at the church itself, but second, all of these answers are as arbitrary as Wes Huff’s answer was. So when the answers aren’t vague of just, oh, it happened sometime here, they’re arbitrary, they choose a particular person or date, but then you look right before that person or even well before that person, and lo and behold, you find that the Catholic church exists and that there’s a pope and you can do this with anybody up to the time of Peter. Now I’m going to look at Philip s Scheffe’s work because he’s written about this. It’s easier to interact with his argument at greater length. He’s not just saying something off the cuff in a YouTube interview, and Scheff, as I said, makes the argument that Leo is the first one to be the pope in the proper sense of the word.
But if you read right before that in his chapter on the rise of the papacy, he says first and most of the earlier bishops of Rome, notice he doesn’t pretend they’re just pastors and most of the earlier bishops of Rome, the person is eclipsed by the office. In other words, when you read something like First Clement, now there’s questions about whether Clement was written at the time that Clement was Pope or not. There’s a whole dating controversy about when Clement wrote first Clement, but it’s written not in his personal capacity but on behalf of the Church of Rome. And likewise, when I talks about the need of agreeing with the Roman church, he doesn’t say You have to agree with the Pope. He says You have to agree with the church built up by the apostles, Peter and Paul in Rome. So you have to agree with the Roman church.
It’s true a lot of the early stuff focuses not on the individual man who happens to be the bishop of Rome, but on the authority of the Roman church itself. Now, a Catholic would readily grant that and say, yes, a proper understanding of the papacy is that the Pope is living out this office, but that you have to agree with the Church of Rome. This is why non-Catholics will sometimes call the Catholic church, the Roman Catholic Church and only in a pejorative sense we’ll say like the Papal Catholic church or Papus or the name colleague kind of stuff, because yeah, agreement with Rome is really important, but you can’t agree with Rome and reject the Pope. So if you grant that you have to follow the teachings of the Roman church, then you’ve granted the Catholic claim. So Scha is right that the early emphasis isn’t on the individual man.
Also, I think one practical reason for this Christianity is outlawed, so really putting the spotlight on the individual man was only going to hasten his martyrdom, murdered him probably, but the emphasis is on the Church of Rome. But then he looks at the Popes, the bishops of Rome in this period that he claims they’re not yet Pope, and he says in this proceeding period, Victor who reigned from about 180 9 to 1 99 has this controversy over the dating of Easter. So Victor ex communicates or moves to excommunicate. We don’t know all of the details, the bishops in what’s now Turkey, Asia minor because they celebrate Easter on a different day and then Callistus or Calsus from two 18 to 2 23 has a controversy on how we restore lapsed Christians back into full communion. And Pope Steven 2 54 to 2 57 has this controversy about is baptism when done by heretics valid or not?
And in Scheffe’s interpretation, he says, well, each of these three guys came out with hierarchical arrogance. In other words, when you’ve got one Clement in roughly the year 96, the Corinthians have written to the Church of Rome to settle an internal dispute. Now, I think that’s already pretty telling about the authority of the Church of Rome because the Apostle John is alive at the time and rather than writing to the apostle, they write to the Roman church, but one Clement is a response to a letter. Rome doesn’t go out looking to meddle in the Corinthian affairs. They are written too, but there are other times where the Pope seem to almost provoke a fight where they try to make sure everybody is in union on a disputed issue. And if you think that union is important, then you applaud this If you think it’s bad to try to create this union, then you call it hierarchical arrogance and that’s what Scheff has done.
But he says they were found somewhat premature and found vigorous resistance in SA politics and cyprian, and now that’s true. When the Popes intervened in affairs, they often got pushback even from faithful Catholics, and I’ll tell you a secret that still happens today. If the Pope decides I need to decide what the local diocese does with say the traditional Latin mass Catholics, don’t just say, well, you’re the Pope. I’m going to just accept whatever you’ll find pushback, including from faithful, loyal Catholics. If there’s a perception that the Pope is pushing it, not even just like you don’t have the authority to do that, but you’re misusing your authority, you’re using it in a way that isn’t the most prudent or you’re using it in a way that doesn’t honor Christ, it doesn’t build up the body. You can believe in the papacy and still say, I don’t know if you’re using your authority.
Well, to use the obvious example from a family, you can believe in something like male headship and still say, honey, I think that you were too harsh with the kids. There’s no contradiction between those two things, but okay, fair enough. We have in these three examples from the one hundreds and the early two hundreds, three instances where at the very least the popes seem to think they have some kind of papal authority. They have the ability to intervene in other local church conflicts, and they have the ability, maybe even the duty to try to establish a uniform faith across the empire and across Christendom, across the church. Now, Gavin will respond to this by saying that argument, you can’t prove much from that, but I think that we can prove maybe a little more than he can see. So here’s his kind of rebuttal to what I’ve just said,
CLIP:
Or people will point to Victor in the late, he was a bishop of Roman, the late second century Victor is there’s a dispute about what’s the proper date of Easter, and Victor seeks to excommunicate a number of people who are on the other side, and a bunch of bishops including EU rise up and Zeus says they sharply rebuked him, and so he backs down so people from the say, oh, look, Victor would not have attempted to do that if he didn’t have the right to do that. And I just think you can’t prove a positive from a negative like that. You can’t prove that someone had the right to do something because they attempted to do it. Perhaps the very reason why EU and these other bishops are rebuking victor is because he was overstepping his bounds.
Joe:
Now, I understand Gavin’s point that you can’t prove just from the fact that these three popes acted in a papal way that they had the authority to do that. I actually don’t know what historical evidence you could point, even if say you a politic, and Ian all said, we completely agree. I don’t think a Protestant would read that and say, therefore there was a papacy. I think there’s a better way of thinking about the evidence instead, which is at the very least, Victor ti and Steven seem to think they have this authority. Presumably they wouldn’t be attempting to get involved in an affair if they were just going to find out there could be batted down very easily. They didn’t have the ability to do so. Additionally, there’s another detail that I don’t hear mentioned a lot, which is that the bishops of Rome won all three of these fights. As Shae points out on all three questions, the Roman view at last carried the day. Now it’s true, it didn’t always settle the controversy immediately. Again, look to modern day controversies in the church where the Pope thinks we should do one thing, and you have theologians and bishops and laity who think we should do a different thing that doesn’t disprove the papacy that just kind of is real life. But in the end, the Roman bishop won each of these fights.
That’s all well before Leo or Gregory, and certainly well before Saint Leo II is crowning Charlemagne. Then we go a little closer to the time of Leo. You have Pope Dames from 360 6 to 3 84 who Schaff says he subjected Elyria to the Roman jurisdiction and established the authority of the Latin Vulgate. But yeah, there’s more that happens in this period as well. Midway through his time with Pope Saint Jerome, who many Protestants know as the guy who translates a lot of the Latin Vulgate writes to him, and Jerome is famously living in the East, he’s living in Bethlehem, and he has this issue he wants to know because different eastern bishops are not in communion with one another, which is the proper bishop of Antioch with whom he should be in communion and answer that question, he turns to the church of Rome and he tells us why this is letter 15 and it’s two.
Pope Dames directly and stated to either 3 76 or 3 77, excuse me, he opens the letter by saying, since the east shattered as it is by the longstanding feuds, subsisting between his peoples is bit by bit tearing into shreds, the seamless vest of the Lord woven from the top throughout. Since the foxes are destroying the vineyard of Christ and since among the broken cisterns that hold no water, it’s hard to discover the sealed fountain in the garden. Enclosed, I think it is my duty to consult the chair of Peter and to turn to a church whose faith has been praised by Paul. So okay, two things there. Number one, the Catholic is going to notice that language of the chair of Peter is very important, particularly when you have people claiming there’s no papacy at this point, there is clearly an understanding of a unique petrin office tied to Rome.
Remember, he’s writing from the area of Jerusalem writing about a controversy involving Antioch, both of which are patriarchic, and yet he’s writing to Rome to address Peter’s successor and the chair of Peter. Now, the second thing I’d point out is one of the things that he’s writing about is the chaos that’s happening in the east, and so someone could object and say, well, maybe this is just pragmatic. He didn’t know who the bishop of Antioch was. He knew who the bishop of Rome was, so Jerome and also lived in Rome, so maybe it was just that. Fortunately Jerome tells us it’s not just that. He says, while the Pope’s greatness terrifies him, his kindness attracts him. Now, I should say he didn’t use the word pope. He says, your greatness terrifies me. Your kindness attracts me. Then he says, from the priest, I demand the safekeeping of the victim from the shepherd, the protection due to the sheep away with all that is overweening, let the state of Roman majesty withdraw.
In other words, he’s not just writing because the bishop is the bishop of the imperial capital of Rome. Remember that moves over to Constantinople. He’s not appealing to Rome because it’s the old imperial capital or political authority or anything like that. That’s a common modern misconception. Oh, the Roman church was important because that’s where the capital of the empire had been, but when you read saints from this era, they say something different. They point to Peter and Paul and Jerome does likewise. He says, my words are spoken to the successor of the fishermen, to the disciple of the cross. As I follow no leader save Christ. So I communicate meaning like to be in communion with none. But your blessedness that is with the chair of Peter for this I know is the rock on which the church is built. This is a house where alone the Paschal Lamb can be rightly Eden.
This is the ark of Noah and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails. So make no mistake, Jerome has just said in 3 76, allegedly before, there’s a pope that dames this. The bishop of Rome is the successor of Peter. He sits in the chair of Peter, and it is a matter of salvific necessity that we are in communion with him. That’s his argument, and this is before Leo, and this is before Gregory, which is why I say pointing to Leo Gregory or certainly Leo III or any later figure just feels like choosing a name out of a hat. It would be like saying, we don’t really have an American president until Harry s Truman because without the atomic bomb, can you really say someone is president? That just feels like a completely arbitrary point. Sure, you can say the first president who did X, Y, Z.
That doesn’t mean they’re the first President. Simply likewise, we can say the first Pope who negotiated with Huns or the first Pope who crowned a holy Roman emperor, but that doesn’t mean he’s the first Pope. Simply and we’re seeing in this correspondence with Dames where it’s not dams making these claims about him himself is Jerome writing from the East making these claims about him, what looks like a pretty incredible papal authority. Let’s turn back to Schaaf though, because he’s also going to say that in this period again, before Leo, before Gregory, you also have Pope Sirius who issues the first genuine dec credle letter. Now, I want to say something very clearly here. This is recognized by secular historians as well to be the first dec credle. Now, dec credle is like a papal decree. It’s giving directives. In fact, this one is called the Direct a Dec credle of 3 85, and again this is all before Leo, all before Gregory, and it’s enforcing priestly celibacy, which again is one of those things that you’ll find many Protestants claiming wasn’t a thing until the 11th century or so.
You can go back and read the sources for yourself. He’s speaking to married priests telling them that following the practice of the Jewish priesthood before it, even the married aren’t allowed to engage in marital relations before they offer the holy sacrifice. There’s a lot in there. It’s one of the earliest clear bits of evidence pointing to priestly celibacy being the norm in the church. It clearly points to the mass being understood as a sacrifice. It clearly points to there being an understanding of a New Testament priesthood foreshadowed by the Old Testament priesthood. But for our purposes, we want to look at something else that when you read what the Pope actually says, it sounds awfully papal. So he talks about how the bishop in Spain had written to him and he addresses the individual cases, which you referred to the Roman church just as to the head of your body.
So he’s acknowledging why you would write to Rome. Well, because the church of Rome is the head church and then he incites him to observe the cannons and adhere to the constituted les so that you may make known to all our fellow bishops and not only those situated in your region. What we wrote back in response to your questions, two things. One, we’re not just calling this the dec credle, it’s clear he’s understanding that he’s giving directions, and two, that he expects these directions to be obeyed not only to the Pope who wrote to the bishop, who wrote to him, but also the bishops in the region around him and also the other bishops. It’s not just a regional authority. And then he stresses that there is freedom for no priest of the Lord to be ignorant of the statutes of the apostolic sea that is Rome, and he’s saying priests aren’t free to live in a different way than what Rome has decreed.
Now you can say that’s not a papal intervention, that’s a papal intervention. It just is. If anybody else did that and said, I’m the bishop of I don’t know Sandusky, and I’m ordering that the entire church follow what I say, we would say that guy thinks he’s the Pope. Well, Pope Arius thinks or knows that he’s the Pope and he’s before Leo as well as Gregory as well as Leo ii. The dec Credle goes on to say that those who disobey have been expelled by the authority of the apostolic sea from every ecclesiastical office, and explicitly it includes bishops here, which they used unworthy, nor can they ever touch the mysteries which ought to be venerated. So you have again, these references to Eucharistic veneration. You also it being a mystery like a sacrament, but then you also have him expelling bishops in his individual capacity.
There’s not an ecumenical counsel that needs to do the expulsion. He’s just denouncing this. Okay, let’s keep going. In this period before Leo Gregory and Leo iii, Pope Innocent, the first took a step beyond, so a step beyond everybody we’ve just seen, and then the pian controversy ventured the bold assertion that in the whole Christian world, nothing should be decided without the cognizance of the Roman Sea and that especially in matters of faith, all bishops must turn to St. Peter. Now, we can already see that’s very much consistent with what came before in the directed ACC Credle in 3 85, but it’s just so explicit here. So I would ask what’s missing? What is Pope innocent the first not doing that he would need to do to be considered the pope? Does he need to be crowning secular emperors or talking with a king somewhere? And if so, why?
That’s not essential to the definition of the papacy. Everything that is essential to the papacy we see these popes doing and all of this in the period when allegedly they didn’t exist. So that’s why I say the Protestant answers are stumped because they not only contradict one another, they contradict the historical evidence and in pretty blatant sort of ways, and Schaff is pointing this out as someone who still wants to hold that these guys aren’t really the Pope yet, and I would just again ask why not other than it’s inconvenient to the Protestant case to acknowledge that they were the Pope because the earlier you go, the more likely it is the Catholic position is right. That says it actually goes all the way back that it actually goes to Peter and thus to Jesus. Now that leaves that last wave answering the question, the kind of vague hand wavy, it all sort of develops.
Now, I want to say this vague hand wavy, it all sort of develops answer while not really answering the question does point to something true and an important difference between how Catholics and Protestants understand these things. Typically, namely, if you look at church history, you can find a development in doctrine, and there’s this myth that this is some invention of St. John Henry Newman in the 19th century. You go back and read the early Christians, people like St. Vincent of Loren, and they talk about how we have a deeper understanding building on those who come before us. And so there is an authentic development. Now significantly, this is like the growth of a puppy into a dog. This isn’t a change like a puppy becoming a kitten. This is a change only in the sense that in technical terms, the potencies are actualized, that the thing sort of grows, but it remains authentically itself.
So we would accept yes, the papacy of course looks different and was meant to the way you govern, say 120 people assembled in an upper room is not the same way you govern a church of 1.2 billion. So of course they look different. Nevertheless, many Protestants will recognize of course that there is development, whether it’s the Trinity, whether it’s Christology, whether it’s which books are in the Bible on all of these things, it takes a while to come to a consensus answer on it, and that’s true of the issues that Catholics and Protestants disagree on as well. But many Protestants while accepting the development with the Trinity by accepting the development with Christology while accepting part of the development with the Bible will nevertheless treat development as if it’s some bad or wicked thing. I think James White gives a kind of classic response to this.
CLIP:
I hope you understand that. I see, I agree with Newman. There’s doctrinal development that takes place and it’s, it’s going the wrong direction. Okay,
Joe:
So here’s the problem with knocking this whole idea of development, because again, I hear development of doctrine use this really bad thing or Oh, there’s a development that happened, and I think what people actually mean is they think a break happened and a break in a development are not the same thing Chesterton gives. As I mentioned before, this example of a puppy becoming a dog. That’s not a break. It is a development, and development seems to be foretold by Jesus At the Last Supper. He talks about sending the counselor the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in his name and the Holy Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I’ve said to you that there is this sense in which the faith is delivered once for all as Jude one three tells us, but there’s this other sense in which we continue to be reminded of things and the Holy Spirit is continuing to lead us into things, not that we’re getting new doctrinal content, but that we’re understanding it at an ever deeper level.
And again, I would just point to things like the Trinity and Christology and the like as clear indications of this happening in real life. But with the papacy, I think you actually see a different kind of development as well, what we might call organizational development or institutional development, whatever you want to call it, and that can rub people the wrong way. One of the reasons people don’t like the Catholic church is as big and hierarchical and there’s layers of management and organization and all of that. It’s the same reason that you don’t like Walmart as much as you like the mom and pop grocery store, right? It makes sense. I get it. We shop at a local market rather than trying to do the big chain stories. I relate to that on a certain level. But here’s the thing, when it comes to the church, we’ve been given pretty clear indications of what to look for in Matthew 13.
Jesus gives the kingdom of heaven parables. Now even when they’re called Kingdom of Heaven, they’re clearly about the church on earth. And one of the ways we know they’re about the church on Earth is from verse 47 to 50, when the kingdom of heaven is likened to a net containing both good and bad fish and the bad fish are the unsaved. So this is clearly not a reference to the church as it will look in heaven, where it’s only the saved. It’s the church now where the true church has both the wicked and the righteous. But for our purposes, we want to turn to one of the other examples Jesus gives where he compares it to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a mustard tree. In fact, in Jesus’s words, the grain of mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. So the church is like the smallest possible organization, say 13 people or really like the 120 who were gathered in the upper room plus Jesus.
But when it is grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree. So you’re looking for something going from the smallest organization to the biggest religious body that the church is going to be the largest religion on earth. And sure enough, Jesus’s foretelling came true. The Catholic church is that, and I think that’s significant for two reasons. One, it means that I give this example in my book, Pope Peter, it’s a little grim, but bear with me. If you see those milk cartons that say, have you seen me of missing kids? Let’s say you find one from 20 years ago and you decide, I’m going to go out and look for that kid, and you go to the park and lo and behold, you see a kid who looks exactly like that 20-year-old picture on the milk carton, should you be like a hi?
Found the kid? No, of course not. The fact that he looks exactly like the picture tells you that it’s not him because the kid you’re looking for is no longer a kid. He’s 20 years grown up. Well, likewise, when you read acts, you’re reading about the mustard seed. But when you want to find that church, don’t go looking for something that still looks like a mustard seed looking for something grown up 20 centuries and you’re going to find the largest church on earth fulfilling what Jesus said. There are a lot of Protestants who I think are drawn, and again, I understand why are drawn to the model of this nice simple kind of house church. It’s small, it’s intimate. It’s not hierarchical because it looks like the mustard seed. That’s not the church that Jesus founded, and he tells you that pretty explicitly in Matthew 13.
But there’s a second implication of this as well. As this growth happens as you go from mustard seed to mustard tree, inevitably there’s more hierarchy. Inevitably there’s more levels of organization. Inevitably there’s also more power, and the secular world cares more about what happens. There’s a reason heads of state, even ones who aren’t religious, went to the Pope’s funeral and they didn’t go to the funeral of your local Protestant pastor. I’m not knocking him right. It’s just a recognition that the bigger organized institutional church matters more even in the eyes of the world. And that’s what I think many of these Protestants are looking at when they say Aha. Well at until the Hun cares more about what the Pope says now than a barbarian one of a few centuries earlier, Constantine cares more about what the church says now than a Roman emperor would’ve a century earlier, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That’s not an evidence that something has changed in terms of some new foreign thing that’s just that the mustard seed as it grows into a tree, as becomes stronger and people react to that. I’ll give you the example of Steve Jobs and Apple. Famously Steve Jobs starts Apple in his garage. It’s the same organization headed by the same man when he dies, when Apple’s headquarters are massive, and they’re like two thirds of the size of Vatican City, I believe. And in fact, actually the headquarters Apple created a couple of years after he died is bigger than Vatican City. So you have this growth at an organizational level of Apple from in the garage to being this massive multinational corporation. And you should ask the obvious question. Steve Jobs is the head at the beginning, and he’s the head I know he leaves for a while and comes back.
He’s the head at the end of his life. Did that leadership look the same when he’s leading this massive institution than when he was leading just his friend and his garage? Of course not. So it’s perfectly fine to say the papacy is going to look pretty different when it’s 120 people in an upper room or when it’s 1.2 billion Catholics. That makes a difference. And so we shouldn’t be surprised to see the Pope being more influential and we shouldn’t be more surprised to see him more influential, particularly as not only has the church changed and grown, but the world around us has changed. And to give just one of the many examples, you can now talk to somebody at the other end of the world instantaneously in real time. You don’t have to be in the same room as me as I’m recording these words and as you are listening to them, that was unthinkable in the very recent past.
And of course that was unthinkable in the early days of Christianity. So that means that the Pope has more authority and more influence in the ordinary lives of Christians because all of us have more ability to influence the lives of one another than we did in the past. That’s not some deviation from Christ’s plan. That’s just a technological reality that of course, there were natural limits on the papacy, particularly in the East when it took ages to get a letter from point A to point B from say, Rome to Constantinople or much less. If you go out into a rural area and you have the language differences and you don’t have Google Translate and you have all the in other words, the lived reality of the church changes both because the church is changing and growing in a healthy development sense, but also because the world is changing and growing.
So they kind of, oh, this is a development argument. Of course it’s developing and you may think that’s good or bad, but that is the nature of what Christ promised of the church and the inescapable nature of reality that the world in which we live in is changing and so we are necessarily going to change with it to spread the gospel in new contexts. Nevertheless, last point I’ll make here in calling this a development, it’s worth asking a development from what? And the answer seems to be the church founded by Christ that whether you think that’s good or bad, there’s not a break. If there’s a break, tell me who the first Pope is. If you say there’s not a break, is just that Christ instituted these pastors that were over churches that everybody else calls bishops, and they grew more influential and powerful over time.
Great. So you’re saying it goes back to Christ or you’re not, but choose a position on that, right? You might say, I don’t want to call these bishops Pope, but that’s just an arbitrary decision. You’re still saying the structure goes back to Christ. It develops organically from that, or it doesn’t. If there’s an inorganic move, if there’s a break, show me when. Tell me who. If you’re just saying that the Pope is more powerful now than he was in the past, we don’t even need to disagree. And here’s the cool thing about development. You run that clock backwards. If I say, you’re so-and-so’s grandson, then the flip side is, well, that’s your grandparent. And so we can go back the two generations. Well, likewise, if you say this develops from what Christ put in place, great. You’ve just given us the 2000 year lineage we’ve been talking about because we wouldn’t say Lutheranism develops from the Catholic church.
It breaks away. Protestantism breaks away. We can point to specific times and places and individuals we can meet that burden. You may not be able to say who the first Catholic pope is because it’s Peter, but I can say who the first Lutheran is. It’s Luther. It’s not hard. So I want to leave you with this advice from St. Jerome. Now we know where St. Jerome falls on this issue, but he’s going to make the appeal to development. He’s going to say, we ought to remain in that church, which was founded by the apostles and continues to this day. So you want the church that’s a mustard seed grown up. You don’t want a church that’s a new upstart. And he warns that. 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, Marcionite Valen Men of the mountain or the plane, there might be some other names we could add here.
Post Reformation, you may be sure that you have there. Not the Church of Christ but the synagogue of Antichrist. This is in the three hundreds. He’s saying this and he says, for the fact that they took their rise after the foundation of the church is proof that they’re those who’s come in the apostle foretold. So this is the critical test he’s laying out. If I can point to when your church is founded and it’s not the time of the apostles and it’s not by Jesus Christ, that is not the true church. And as a Catholic I say, I think we can do this for all the different Protestant denominations. Now, you might say you’re spiritually akin to the early Christians or something like this, or you’re holding to the scriptural teaching of the apostles better than the church. But Jerome would say this, don’t flatter yourself because you think you have scriptural authority, because the devil himself quoted scripture.
And the essence of the scriptures is not the letter but the meaning. You can take the plain language of scripture, come to any number of false conclusions. He talks about Christ at one point, sends out the 72 and tells them not to wear two coats. So you could make it a church doctrine in your new denomination that you’re not allowed to have two coats and you’ve followed a very literal interpretation of Jesus’s words, but you’ve missed the meaning of Jesus’s words. And so I think it’s fair to say that Jerome would say we should follow not some guy in the 16th century, but Jesus Christ and particularly Jesus Christ as he gives authority to St. Peter and then to his successors. Alright, I hope that helps. I hope that question gives you kind of a launching off point, and hopefully you have some idea where to go with the conversation depending on which of those three avenues the person you’re speaking to goes, or depending on which of the three avenues you might be tempted to go with yourself. Would love to hear your thoughts and the comments below. For Shamless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.