Audio only:
Joe attends to what remains of Ryan’s argument against the salvific power of Baptism.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer and this is the first episode I’ve recorded since I did my debate with Ryan from Need god.net on Sunday. So I wanted to cover a few of the things. Anytime you do a debate, there’s always some stuff where afterwards you say, oh, I wish I’d spent more time on that, or I wish there’d been more time to cover this topic. And this was no different. I think the debate went really well. I still think there were some things I would’ve liked to cover in greater depth, partly because I was under the impression we were going to debate the resolution about whether baptism saves. Whereas Ryan seemed to want to debate faith alone instead. And I understand there’s a connection between baptism saving you and faith alone, and I want to explore that and then explore a few of the other areas and I’m not going to cover everything. So for example, one of the notable moments was when Ryan denied that the latter half of Mark 16 was actually part of the Bible. We should be Mark 1616. You think it should be taken out of the Bible? Is that
CLIP:
It’s
Joe:
Not in the Bible.
And I think there’s a really powerful case to be made there that he’s showing the problem with sell the scriptura. I’ve been told for like a year now after pointing out that the church having infallible authority is really important for determining the canon of scripture that this is a ridiculous Catholic argument and we can know the canon from scripture alone. And here I go debating the canon and saying, Hey look, here’s what Jesus says about belief in baptism in Mark 1616, and he just says, modern secular scholars don’t accept it as valid. So not part of the Bible. And I would just suggest there’s probably more to be said about that, but I’m not going to cover that other than what you’ve just heard here. I’m going to instead look primarily at the arguments that he makes about justification because again, this was not the point of the debate, but I want to cover that as well as this idea of whether baptism is the work which is closely related of course, and then pitting faith against baptism, maybe some tools about how we misread scripture sometime, and then the arguments from silence and we’ll get into all of that stuff.
So it’s going to be a little more of just a bunch of stuff that isn’t big enough on its own, but things I want to cover, not as separate episodes, but just this is going to be a grab back. So buckle up. The first point is this. I think the critical one, people who think Ryan won the debate are people who believe that salvation is by faith alone and that therefore you can’t be saved in any way by baptism because that’s a work. So to put some meat on the bones, I think the argument works in the minds of these people, something like this. Number one, we’re saved by faith, and you can also put that as we are saved by faith apart from works of the law. Step two, therefore we’re saved by faith alone. Step three, baptism is a work step four. Therefore, because we’re saved by faith alone, we’re saved apart from baptism.
Therefore step five, baptism doesn’t save. Now rarely do people spell it out that clearly or coherently because I think they’re assuming a lot of this stuff, but if you were to logically spell out the argument for them, I think that’s what it would look like. And now spelling it out in this way can be really helpful. It shows where we agree and where we disagree. So for instance, that first point, we’re saved by faith or we are saved by faith apart from works of the law. We absolutely agree on that. So I saw in Ryan’s postmortem, he tries to say, oh, Joe’s running from all these verses about how we’re saved by faith. And I agree with all those verses. There’s nothing to run from. Absolutely. We are saved by faith. Catholics and Protestants and Baptists all agree that we are saved by faith. So if you think you’re going to win the argument by stressing the part we agree on more, that’s not going to do it.
I mean imagine if you’re debating someone on the trinity, you believe in the trinity and they don’t and they say, aha. Look at all these passages saying God is one. You’d be like, yeah, that’s right. That’s why we don’t believe in three Gods. We accept all that. Maybe you understand the implications of that differently than we do, but let’s debate your understanding of the implications we agree on the verse. Well, so it is here. We both believe that we’re saved by faith. We disagree with the implications, but people who don’t realize that they’re actually interpreting the text, they think they’re just reading it without realizing that they’re making certain assumptions about what does Paul mean by faith? What does he mean by salvation? What significantly does he mean by works or works of the law? All of that stuff is super important and just largely gets glossed over because people assume certain definitions, ones that aren’t right.
So Ryan seems to divorce faith even from obedience, whereas St. Paul speaks of the obedience of faith. This is strong indication that while Ryan and I and St Paul all agree we’re saved by faith, St. Paul and Ryan don’t mean the same thing by that because they don’t mean the same thing by faith. So that’s the first step and we agree that we are saved by faith. The second is therefore we are saved by faith alone. Now that first step has a lot of biblical evidence. The second step, it depends what you mean by it. If you mean that you come into a right relationship with God by grace through faith apart from anything you’ve done, then yeah, we actually agree on that. There’s a misconception that Catholics believe that you have to earn your salvation, you have to earn your justification, you have to get yourself in right relation with God or you do 50% and he does 50%.
And Ryan spoke this way a lot throughout the debate and that is just a very bad understanding of what Catholics actually believe. Now this gets into that question of what do we mean by justification? What do we mean by faith? But let me give you, you don’t have to take my word for it, you don’t have to take Ryan’s word for it. Certainly you can listen to the Council of Trent, right? The Council of Trent defines what the Catholic church teaches on these issues and says that when the apostle meaning Paul says that man is justified by faith and freely that we’re to understand that in the way Catholics have always understood that namely that we are justified by faith, that faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification without which it is impossible to please God and to come into the fellowship of his sons and that we are justified gratuitously.
Why are we justified gratuitously? Because none of those things that precede justification. So nothing you do before you’re brought into a saving relationship with God, whether your faith or your works, none of that merits you being justified. That’s huge. And so in as much as Ryan was trying to prove that point in the debate, yeah, we agree on that, we would actually go further and say not only do your works not justify you, your faith doesn’t justify you in the sense of meriting it. It is still gratuitous. Your faith saves you, but it is still a gift. So you don’t earn your salvation by your faith. You don’t earn your salvation by your works. None of the gift of God is earned. Now, once you become justified, once you get saved, you do have to work to maintain it. And I’ll talk about that in a second, but I want to give Trent the last word here because they quote Romans 11, six, a very popular go-to verse for many Protestants thinking they’re really disproving the Catholic view.
And it’s funny because Trent says the same thing, if by grace it is not now by works otherwise as the apostle says, grace is no more grace. So we agree on all that. So how can we harmonize that with the view that later actions are needed after you become justified? Really simple. I’ve used this example before, but permit me to use it again. You did not merit the gift of life. You did not do anything to earn being here on earth. You just did not. Nothing you did possibly could have earned you conception or birth because you weren’t around to earn it. And what possibly could you have done to merit existence in the first place? You are owed nothing. However, once you are given that free gift gratuitously by God, do you have to maintain it? You do. So Ryan repeatedly will give these examples that, oh, if I give you this reward but you have to swim a lap in a pool for it or something, then it’s not a reward anymore.
But that completely misunderstands St. Paul actually Hughes the imagery of running a race and winning an award to describe his view of salvation, which again suggests that Paul and Ryan very different understandings and one of them is an apostle. And so yes, we can both say this is an utter gift and gifts have to be maintained with our effort. Someone gives you a car, you might have to put gas in it, you might have to change the oil, you might have to not drive it into a tree. That’s how gifts work in real life. And the gift of salvation is no different. So you can’t earn it, but you do have to maintain it and you can wreck it. There’s no contradiction between believing those things. Now for the record, none of that debate should be relevant for a debate about whether baptism brings you into that right relationship or not.
That’s a totally different debate, but that’s the debate Ryan apparently wanted to have instead of the one we agreed to. So let’s get back to the argument. So you’ve got, we’re saved by faith apart from works of the law. Agree there’s a bunch of biblical evidence, therefore we’re saved by faith alone. Depends a lot of what you mean by saved. But if you mean in the way that you’re brought into a saving relationship, then sure we would say you have to do works after that to maintain it, but they can’t earn it. So we might agree. So where do we disagree? Well, we disagree on the idea that baptism is a work and therefore it doesn’t follow that we’re saved by faith alone apart from baptism, we’ve introduced attention where none belongs and then the conclusion doesn’t follow. So think about the Trinitarian debate. If somebody said God is one, therefore Jesus isn’t God because he is not the father, you would say, okay, I agree with the first part. I even agree with Jesus is not the father, but I disagree with the conclusion you’re drawing from your premise. Well, that’s how it is here. We agree that salvation is not something you earn by your works, not even a little bit initial justification is a gratuitous gift from God. You have to maintain it, you can’t achieve it on your own.
That then leaves this question of baptism because here’s the thing that other debate about maintaining your justification is, as I said, a totally separate debate when the real issue is baptism is just not a work. Step three of the kind of argument is just flat out wrong. Now, strangely, I was reading some of the, or watching, excuse me, some of the reactions to the debate that various people had had. I had sought out what could I do better? And one of the things that I heard from a few different Protestant sources is one of the mistakes that I made was claiming that baptism was a work.
CLIP:
I will say this though, I disagreed with Joe when he was trying to conflate baptism as a work. Did you see that part he was saying was saying, oh,
Joe:
I missed.
CLIP:
He was saying it was a work. The main focus of it is baptism is not a work of man, it’s a work of God. So it’s not a work. Joe Hess was wrong about this in this debate when he was trying to conflate baptismal regeneration with works righteousness.
Joe:
And what’s weird about that is that I said the exact opposite repeatedly in the debate. Now maybe I didn’t say it clearly enough, but here I am trying repeatedly to say I don’t think baptisms at work. And more importantly St. Paul says, baptism’s not a work. When St. Paul says that we’re saved by faith apart from works of the law. Sometimes he says apart from works that he means that we’re saved apart from any human action or that we’re saved apart from anything like baptism. Now I think we’re going to see this misunderstands the Paul line sense of works, but for now, suffice it to say that no passage anywhere in the Bible ever describes baptism as a work. And St. Paul explicitly says in Titus three that we’re not saved by deeds, done by us and righteousness, but that we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.
If that sounds like baptism, it’s because it’s so, Paul believes both that baptism saves and that it’s not our deeds that save, it’s not works that save. And just as we saw in Titus three, the early Christians realized that baptism isn’t a human work, but it’s God’s work in the means by which God saves us by grace. Titus three St. Paul says We’re not saved because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but that we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. So we’re not saved by our deeds, by our works. We are saved by baptism here. Go trust Paul, not Ryan about what Paul means about works. So there you go. I mean quite clearly in Titus three, St. Paul says, on the one hand, we are not saved because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but on the other hand we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. So that washing that water with spirit, that very much sounds like baptism and that is how that passage was historically understood. It neatly seems to show baptism is not a work. Now this raises all these questions about what does it mean to be a work? So from how to be Christian, talking about four different ways we can understand the word works in the Bible depending on the context.
CLIP:
Like in the Bible there’s works of law, there’s works of the flesh, there’s works of God, there’s good works, also known as works of love. These are all different categories of works that the Bible discusses.
Joe:
Okay? Now just think that through baptism is clearly not a work of the mosaic law. It wasn’t part of the mosaic law at all. It’s not a good work in any ordinary sense of that word. It’s not something you’ve done that people are like, wow, what a hero of our community. He got baptized as a baby. It’s not even a work in the ordinary sense of an active verb. Belief is much more of an active verb. I believe I trust I make an act of the will, whereas baptism is something you receive. So it’s not a work in that third sense. And it’s certainly not a work in the sense of a work of the flesh or else it would be evil to be baptized. So Ryan hasn’t shown any sense that baptism was understood by Paul to be a work, but more importantly, he doesn’t just need to show that under some grammatical sense of the word work. Maybe it could be he needs to show that this is the kind of work that St. Paul is saying that we’re saved apart from when St. Paul himself says that we’re saved through baptism and not the things he’s calling works. Whatever Paul means by works clearly doesn’t include baptism. So that faith alone argument falls completely apart that it’s fine to say we’re saved by faith. It’s fine to say even though we’re saved by faith alone, if you understand it properly, it does not follow that. Therefore faith is unnecessary because baptism’s not a work.
This points to I think a deeper problem though, which is a kind of pitting faith against baptism. And I worry here that one of the issues going on is that this kind of evangelicalism that Ryan is espousing pits one thing against another because of poor philosophical understanding of causality. And this is going to be nerdy here for a couple minutes, but hopefully not much more. So let me give the example I always give because the Sistine Chapel, if I said who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Was it Michelangelo, was it Botticelli? It can’t be a hundred percent of both, might be 50% of one, 50% of the other and might be a hundred percent of one and 0% of the other as it is, but it’s not going to be a hundred percent of both. It couldn’t be they’re competing actors. This is how Ryan imagines God and us in salvation.
He gives this strange example of putting one foot on the bus and one foot on the ground like you’re trying to get there by yourself or taking the bus. Now that’s a bad understanding of baptism. As I’ve said before, the only reason to be baptized is because you’re going where you believe God is telling you to go that is not trusted in yourself rather than God. That is definitionally what it is to trust in God. But the deeper issue there is to say it has to be faith or baptism would be like saying that we have to be saved by Christ on the cross or by faith. No, it is both of those and it’s a hundred percent of both of those. Well, how could that be? Because these are different levels of causality. They’re different types of causes. So go back to the Sistine Chapel example. If I said what percent was Michelangelo and what percent was paintbrushes, you would look at that question hopefully as a very stupid question. It was a hundred percent of both.
Was it Michelangelo or was it paint? Was it Michelangelo or was it the idea of these Old Testament images? Well, you can’t put those things against each other because they’re not the same type of actors, they’re not the same type of cause and the same way that a thing can’t be simultaneously like a hundred percent red and a hundred percent blue, it can be a hundred percent red, a hundred percent rectangle because those aren’t the same type of thing. Well, so too something can be fully God and fully man for instance, Jesus. And also we can talk about things like baptism being completely human and completely defined or scripture having true human authors and true divine authors in no competition where we can say this is a hundred percent the work of God and a hundred percent the work of the human authors led by the Holy Spirit and we don’t have to pit the two against each other.
The council of turn in talking about justification makes these distinctions. And this is coming from classical philosophy with people like Aristotle with the different types of causes. So some of this language might be foreign to you, but it’s important to note that this is helpful for avoiding the kind of false battles that many evangelicals find them in themselves. Then they don’t have enough philosophical training to realize you’re forcing a battle like Michelangelo against the paintbrushes. So in talking about justification, the Council of Trent says the final cause meaning the purpose is the glory of God, the efficient God, the efficient cause is the merciful God who washes and sanctifies gratuitously. So how are we justified? Well, because God wants us to be and because he causes us to be, but also the meritorious cause is Jesus’s death on the cross, the instrumental cause. How does Jesus apply this to us?
In other words is the sacrament of baptism, which is the sacrament of faith and then the single formal cause is the justice of God but significantly here. Not that by which he himself is just but that by which he makes us just. So if you want to know how are we justified? Well because God wanted us to be just, and so he sent his son to die on the cross. And that’s an important part of the answer. And you’ll notice that answer doesn’t actually mention faith or baptism or anything, but it’s still a hundred percent true. That would be a correct answer to the question. How do we become just good Friday? How do we become just the incarnation? How do we become just God’s desire for men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth? Those would all be accurate answers just dealing with different levels of causality. And so here to insist that it has to be faith and not baptism forces this absolutely unnecessary battle between two aspects of causality.
So I just want to highlight that and again, it’s theologically and philosophically deep waters, but just watch out for that kind of trap of pitting, lowering God basically to the level of a human actor and imagining that if I’m doing something that therefore God isn’t, that is completely unbiblical when St. Paul talks about how we’re saved and then do the good works that God has in store for us, he’s making it very clear that these are both God’s actions and ours simultaneously, not a 50 50, a hundred percent and a hundred percent because we are not at the same level of God. Alright, relatedly, I wanted to talk about how to misread scripture because one of the other things that I see coming up time and time again with this is just not knowing how to read scripture correctly. And I’m going to use this debate with Ryan as an example to draw broader points.
I want to suggest if you want to interpret scripture, well follow these points and if you don’t want to follow the scripture, well don’t do that. So the first point is you should favor specific biblical evidence over applying general or generic principles. Here’s what that means. So if you’re having a debate and the two sides are debating is adulterous sin, one side of the debate says, look at all of these verses in the Bible about adultery and the other side says, we don’t even have to look at those. We can just look at Titus chapter one verse five that says to the pure, all things are pure. What’s gone wrong there? Well, both sides are right to cite to scripture, but only one is citing to passages actually about adultery. The other one is citing to a general principle and then making a poorly educated guess about how that general principle would apply in a specific case, a guess that we know is wrong by reading the rest of scripture.
Well that’s exactly what’s happened here. Ryan has taken a general principle, how are we justified? And he’s misapplied it to what that means for baptism by just taking a guess about what that means. There’s no passage that he quoted at any point in the debate that says baptism does nothing. My opening statement alone, I give 11 different biblical texts that show that baptism does save us. And for many of those, Ryan had little to nothing to say about them. For instance, one of the ones I hope you really, if you’re at any point wondering about this, read Acts chapter two very carefully. You’ll see that the people are struck, they’re convicted when they’re hearing the preaching of Pentecost by Peter and they ask what must we do? And Peter tells ’em they need to repent and to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins.
And then they’re told to save themselves from this crooked generation. Now the apostles are telling the save themselves and there was no rhyme there to say, Hey, you can’t tell them that justification has to be 0% them or else it won’t be God’s action. That doesn’t happen because the apostles understood salvation better they got that it’s not God or man in some sort of tension between the two. And so reading Acts two, you’ll see it says we’re baptized for the Greek word there is ace, the forgiveness of sin. I covered this in my Tuesday episode and in the debate, and I would just stress here, Ryan has no answer to that other than to claim that the Greek word means the opposite of what it really means and he can point to no non-AP who agree with him. So it’s pretty straightforward. We don’t get baptized because our sins are already forgiven.
And it would be insane for Peter on Pentecost to assume this crowd of thousands of people, oh, they’ve all been forgiven. He’s just accused them of killing Jesus. And so when you read the biblical texts, these specific biblical texts, they say over and over and over and over again, baptism does save us. So if you’re applying a general principle that would have you deny these specific claims of scripture, then you know you’re applying the principle wrong. That’s the first term. When you have specific evidence about in this case X, then listen to that. In other words, to put it in very simple terms, if you want to know what scripture has to say about baptism, read the passages about baptism. And for those who haven’t watched the debate yet, if you go back and watch it, listen for any times that Ryan ever cited any passages about baptism for his side, he will mention the passages about baptism only to wave them away.
It’s quite striking. Second principle, and this is a basic one that Catholics and Protestants alike should agree on. You interpret ambiguous passages of scripture in light of clear ones not the other way around. Now the problem with this is people who are wrong in their theology are often very convinced of their own rightness. One of the reasons they become very dangerous is they don’t have the humility to say, maybe I don’t understand this text. And so fortunately there is one part of the New Testament we’ve been given an explicit warning against thinking we have too good of a grasp on, and that’s the writings of St. Paul. So for instance, in two Peter chapter three, Peter acknowledges Paul’s writings as scripture but then says there are some things in them hard to understand. Now I want you to pause on that part because that is a thought in itself.
There are things in Paul’s writings hard to understand. That’s the first point he makes. The second one flows from it, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. So because of point number one, Paul’s writings are hard to understand, therefore the ignorant and the unstable can twist them. Point three, you therefore beloved, meaning people who aren’t intentionally ignorant or unstable. You therefore beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability. Now think about how important that is. He’s telling you don’t read Paul in a lawless way. Don’t read Paul in a way where he’s just contrary to the law in this radical kind of and to know me way. That’s what it is to be lawless and watch out because Paul is hard to understand and so many Protestants are like, oh yeah, I understand Paul, I’m going to interpret everything else through my understanding or Luther’s understanding of Paul. Watch out for that. I actually, this came up in my debate with James White and this will probably be the last, I’m going to leave poor James alone, but I need to point out just the glaring logical fallacy where he tries to get around the straightforward admonition Peter gives us.
CLIP:
So there are objectively, the scriptures are clear enough. Peter warns that untaught and unstable men distort Paul’s words,
Joe:
But he also says Paul is hard to understand.
CLIP:
And then if he says untaught and unstable man, would it not follow that a taught and stable man can understand Paul’s words and can accurately handle what he wrote?
Joe:
No, that doesn’t follow logically,
CLIP:
Doesn’t follow,
Joe:
No.
CLIP:
Then why did he use the term untaught and unstable men?
Joe:
There’s two warnings he gives in that passage. One is that Paul’s writings are hard to understand and the second is that there are wicked men who are misusing Paul’s writings.
CLIP:
Why does he say untaught and unstable if it does not
Joe:
Follow? That’s a description the people he’s warning about,
CLIP:
Okay,
Joe:
If I said gnostics misused this text, that doesn’t mean if you’re not agnostic, you’re going to use it correctly. That doesn’t follow at all. That’s not logical,
CLIP:
But it
Joe:
Might be true.
CLIP:
Prove it from the text. I’ll use my last minute here because I’m really not following how you can say it is not logical. If Paul introduces the category of untaught and unstable men, does it not follow that taught and stable men can accurately handle the word of God?
Joe:
Clearly doesn’t. If I say idiots are out there honking their horn, that doesn’t mean non idiots aren’t honking their horn. That’s a logical fallacy. If I say dogs or animals, that doesn’t mean non dogs aren’t animals. This is literally what you’re presenting is a formal fallacy.
CLIP:
I can’t argue during cross x, so well, I’ll have to find a time to point out where that’s wrong later.
James White never found the time to point out why that was wrong later and poor Joe is still sitting in that same chair to this day waiting for an answer.
Joe:
So James’s argument is because he doesn’t consider himself ignorant or unstable, therefore he must be qualified to handle St. Paul. Now if that sounds logical to you, it’s not and very clearly not, if I say don’t leave the back door open, a robber could get in. You would be incorrect to think that means if you’re not a robber, you are incapable of coming in the back door that doesn’t follow at all. Or you’re at work and somebody says, your boss says the stairs are wet, which a customer might slip on to their own destruction, know this and beware so that you don’t slip on them. Does that mean you are incapable of slipping on them because you’re a worker and not a customer? Of course not. And anyone who can’t grasp that basic of logic seems like they are the ignorant that are going to unintentionally twist the writings of St.
Paul. So I give that again, not to say don’t use Paul or anything like this, but if you think that we should ignore the clear stuff like believe and be baptized or baptism now saves you or be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins in favor of your own interpretation of what Paul means by justification, sanctification works, works of the law, all of this stuff, you’re using bad hermeneutical principles, you’re not using good exegetical principles, you’re taking the ambiguous and hard to understand stuff and assuming that’s going to give you the answer to the easy stuff when it works the other way around, you use the principles of arithmetic. When you go into calculus, you don’t start with thinking you get calculus and then use that to set up your times table. That’s bad in principle. And the third is just to follow the consensus of the early Christians.
And so one of the most striking moments in this debate is when I asked Ryan the simple question, does anyone in the early church agree with your view? And he couldn’t name a single person that he wouldn’t view as damned because his argument was, if you don’t agree with him on baptism, then you’re trusting in yourself and you’re going to hell. And yet every Christian from after the time of the apostles for at least a thousand years, he couldn’t name one person who wouldn’t be damned by his theology. That’s a red flag. When if the idea is, oh, this text is so simple, even I can understand it. And then it’s like, well everyone before you understood it differently, that should give you a little pause, should give you a little humility, right? If you’re taking a test, everybody else says the answer seven, and you’ve got a square.
I hate to tell you this, but you got something wrong. You should listen to everyone around you. It doesn’t mean that your neighbor is always right or perfect, but just in basic humility, if you know you’re surrounded by people who are pursuing Jesus, you’re not the only person trying to be holy, then you should have the humility to realize you’ve got no reason to believe you are smarter or wiser or better able to understand the scripture than your neighbor. And when a thousand of your neighbors are coming to one conclusion and you’re coming to the opposite red flag even more so when the neighbor in question are the early Christians who were famously holy and who died for the faith and did so much, the only reason you have the scripture to mangle is because they preserved it at the expense of their own blood.
So that’s the third principle. If you are ignoring and listen, this came up the debate as well. I’m not arguing that the individual Christians are infallible. That’s not my argument. My argument is instead that we are more aware of their fallibility than we are of our own because of pride and that an attitude of humility will say there’s a 0% chance I’m right and everyone else is wrong. So if it’s me and one person, fine, maybe I’m right and they’re wrong. If it’s me and everyone, I’m wrong and so are you. So apply those principles and you’ll read the Bible better. That’s why we care about the early Christians. So spare me the, oh, they’re individually fallible because what you’re really saying is I’m unaware of how much sin and ignorance have darkened my understanding of the scriptures. They’re living in a time and place where they spoke the language natively in some cases knew the apostles personally and had better context to grasp. But idioms and other things meant you’re reading a translation of the scriptures without any of the cultural context to make sense of it and imagining that you understand it better than they do. Watch out for that because that’s an attitude of hubris and you won’t get very far as a Christian with that attitude towards scripture.
So that kind of concludes the portion of faith alone. Therefore baptism doesn’t save, but there’s another kind of dimension to it that’s half related. And these were these arguments from silence. So Ryan would make the argument something like this, some writer St. Paul or whomever mentions justification or they mention salvation and they don’t mention baptism in that verse. Therefore they must not have thought that baptism was required for salvation. That’s how the argument goes. It’s not hard to see that this argument is false using scripture alone if you want to that there are plenty of times where salvation is described, where faith isn’t explicitly mentioned, for instance in Matthew 25 and the separation of the sheep and goats, when God is describing what the king will look at in telling the sheep why they’re saved, it’s I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink and so on.
Not a word is said explicitly about faith at all. Does that mean faith is not important for salvation? It does not. You just don’t want to apply the principle that every important aspect has to be mentioned every single time. A second thing to remember in understanding these passages is that sometimes there are just details that the evangelist doesn’t include that actually happened in the event that they’re describing. Lemme give you a couple examples. When St. Luke is describing Paul’s conversion, he talks about an and I is coming and laying hands on him and telling him to receive his sight. He’s filled with the Holy Spirit, something like scales fall from his eyes, then he rose and was baptized. And you might say, okay, cool, looks like baptism is not very important. He’s already filtered the Holy Spirit and then he just gets baptized after. But that’s because you haven’t gotten the full story because Luke doesn’t record every line of dialogue that happens when Paul tells the same event in Acts 22.
And he recounts how one of the things Ananias told him was, why do you wait, rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name, reading just Acts nine. You might assume, well, Paul’s already filled with the Holy Spirit and saved his sins are already washed away. Acts 22 makes clear that is not true. He still needs to have his sins washed away in baptism. And so making an argument from silence there is hasty and erroneous. There’s a very common argument this is used for that is just very clearly wrong. And Acts 16 when you have the jailer, he says, men, what must I do to be saved? And Paul and Silas say to him, believe in the Lord Jesus and you’ll be saved you and your household. And so if the text stopped there, you’d imagine people saying as Ryan did, like, oh therefore I guess baptism is not important.
But the text doesn’t stop there, we’re told that they told him more. We don’t know what they told them. We know it included baptism. How do we know that? Well, it says they spoke the word of the Lord to him and all that were in his house and then he and his whole family were baptized at once. So whatever they said led him to be baptized a thing he wouldn’t have just naturally known about. So we know they talked to him about other things in the word of the Lord, and we can infer from the fact that he got baptized that necessarily he had to have learned about baptism. So to assume, well, Paul and Silas don’t mention baptism. Well, they almost certainly do mention baptism. Well, how did the jailer know about it otherwise? So you’re making a bad argument from silence. You can also see this by looking outside the biblical authors themselves.
So one of the debates that Ryan’s had on this subject before was with Brian Mercer and he tries to make the same kind of argument claiming that a bunch of the early Christians would’ve agreed with him on baptism. Now in Ryan’s defense, I guess he now doesn’t claim that he just claims that they’re apparently all going to hell. I mean there was a remnant somewhere, but he doesn’t know where they are and no one else does. But at the time he alleged. Well, here’s the way Brian sets up the question, and I’m going to give you the list. I’m not going to give this super long clip, but I’ll give you the list of all the authors that Ryan claims answer Brian’s question.
CLIP:
But my question to you is can you name any early church fathers leaders bishops who didn’t believe that baptism was necessary for salvation or who didn’t connect it to John three five?
I would say I would go to the people who affirmed that faith alone.
I’m talking about leaders who have names. Do you know any?
Yeah, I could give you a couple. Let me give you
Say, baptism doesn’t save us.
Not in that sense.
Doesn’t refer to John three five.
Just wait. A lot of the church fathers don’t actually deal with the subject of baptism,
Right?
Because think about that. They deal with faith. Faith is a common topic across pretty much every church father. They taught at least some aspect of faith. But baptism is not talked about all the time. So let me show you, I’ll share my screen actually this is, I’ve got a few quotations just not specifically on the topic of baptism, but on topic of faith and faith alone justifying. So since Hillary has said in three 15 to 360 8, this was forgiven by Christ through faith because the law could not yield for faith alone justifies,
Joe:
Okay? So Ryan is going to claim in response to this prompt that people who believed that we were justified apart from baptism, that baptism was not necessary for salvation, include St. Hillary, St. Basil, the great Saint Jerome, Saint Sil of Alexandria, St. John, Chris Ambrosio Aster, a k, pseudo Ambrose, St. Clement of Rome and St CIA of rose B. Now of those eight St Clement, we only have one writing from him. So you can pretty cleverly make an argument from silence. So little we have from him that you can just imagine, well, maybe he was a Baptist or maybe he was a Methodist, or maybe he was whatever I want him to be. He does talk about being justified by faith apart from works. But as we saw, that is not a point of dispute between Catholics and Protestants. But what about the other seven on this list?
Now, according to Ryan, because they talk about justification and don’t mention baptism every time that therefore they didn’t think baptism was ic, and then you just actually take the trouble of reading their writings rather than listening to Ryan and you find out that he’s wrong about all of them. So for instance, St. Hillary and his J ate ends with a prayer in which he prays to ever hold fast to the creed which he prayed at his regeneration when he was baptized in the father and son and the Holy Spirit regeneration is rebirthed. He’s saying he was born again in baptism. The very thing Ryan is denying, St. Basil talks explicitly about how foolish it is to try to pit faith in baptism against one another. The very thing Ryan tries to use him to do, basil says, don’t do it. He says, faith and baptism are too kindred and inseparable.
Ways of salvation, inseparable ways of salvation. Faith is perfected through baptism. Baptism is established through faith and both are completed by the same names for as we believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. So also we are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Ghost. First comes the confession introducing us to salvation and baptism follows setting the seal upon our ascent. So if you ask him, does faith save you? He would say yes. If you asked him, does baptism save you? He would say yes. Because according to him, they’re kindred and inseparable ways of salvation. They belong together. And belief in baptism saves you Mark 1616.
St. Jerome likewise has this long bit in letter 69, I’m only going to get little clips because it’s very long in which he warns that we must not emp empty this efficacy, the baptismal rite ordained by the savior like don’t miss the power of the baptismal rite because his argument is you can see all throughout scripture things prefiguring baptism and he begins with Genesis itself. And I mentioned Genesis one verse two in the debate, and I’m pretty sure I got it from Jerome because he talks about how the spirit of God moved above the face of the waters and produced an infant world prefiguring how the Christian child is drawn from the waters of baptism that we are born again in baptism as infants in Christ. The whole universe is made infant through the spirit and water. In Genesis one, two, he goes on to say that those who’d only received John’s baptism and didn’t know about the Holy Spirit had to be baptized again lest any should.
Suppose that water unsanctified, which suffice for the salvation of Jews or Gentiles, in other words, symbolic baptism won’t save you. The obvious contrast that he’s making is Christian baptism does it is y the people who’d had the symbolic baptism when we see them in Acts 19 is that they have to be rebaptized with Christian baptism and then go to Saint Sir of Alexandria. Very clearly when he’s writing about actually preaching about originally Jesus’s baptism, he talks about how strange it is for Jesus to be baptized because we get baptized because we need our sins forgiven. He says it like this, he says, what is it that we gain by holy baptism plainly the remission of our sins. So there’s no doubt that he believed baptism washes away our sins, which is why he begins his homily by focusing on, isn’t it kind of strange that Jesus is here getting baptized even though he’s sinless?
Go find out for yourself why Jesus got baptized. But notice here he clearly believes baptism does something. Saint John Christ in his third baptismal instruction says, we even baptize infants even though they’re sinless, as in they haven’t committed personal sin so that they can have number one, the further gifts of sanctification. Number two, justice like God’s justice. Number three, al adoption that becomes sons or daughters of God. And number four, inheritance you inherit the kingdom if sons then heirs, number five, they may be brothers and members of Christ. And number six, to have the dwelling become dwelling places of the Holy Spirit. So does that sound like John Christ system thinks baptism is unnecessary? It doesn’t save you. Of course not. Ambros asked her in commenting on Romans six says, therefore is the death of sin so that a new birth might follow, which although the body remains nevertheless renews us in our mind and buries all our evil deeds.
And then finally, Saint FIUs of Rusty, the funniest one that Ryan could have possibly cited to arguably because he quotes John three verse five, which Ryan claims is not about baptism, but everyone in the early church recognized was and said from the time onward when Jesus said that without the sacrament of baptism, apart from those who pour out their blood for Christ in the Catholic church, but without baptism, so martyrs, no one can receive either the kingdom of heaven or eternal life. So his argument is explicitly not just that baptism saves, but that without baptism, no one is saved. He’s a hardliner on this. I’m not endorsing this position. He actually goes further than the church would go. My point is just to say it’s wild to say this guy didn’t think baptism was necessary or that baptism saves. He even says anyone who receives the sacrament of holy baptism in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, whether in the Catholic church or in any heresy or schism, receives the complete sacrament, but you won’t have salvation, which is the effect of the sacrament unless you receive the sa, if you excuse me, if you receive the sacrament outside the Catholic church, that’s his argument.
So he would say Protestants are validly baptized, but they cannot be saved because they’re not full members of the Catholic church. Again, he’s a hardliner. It’s hilarious to cite to him as someone who thinks baptism is just a symbol that doesn’t do anything. He could not be more clear about the opposite. And I mention all these church fathers because it shows Ryan’s argument there. They don’t mention baptism every time they mention justification or salvation is really bad. It’s a bad argument from silence. You can see over and over again that people who believes baptism saves also talk about faith saving, also talk about Christ’s death on this cross saving us. And they aren’t pitting these things against each other. So the arguments from silence are just terrible arguments. They’re just very bad arguments here and we have abundant evidence that they’re bad arguments. Alright, well there’s one more reason that some people think Ryan might’ve won the debate.
Baptism doesn’t save because Catholics are bad is what I’m shorthanding this. And it’s just this idea that many of the people replied to the debate by just saying how much they didn’t like Catholics. And there’s a lot of things wrong with this. Number one, it doesn’t settle the debate. You can think Catholics are wicked. You can think the Catholic church is bad. You can be full of whatever bigotry and prejudices you want and still realize baptism safes. One of the first things I said in my talk to try to head this off was Lutherans, Anglicans, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, all agree that baptism safes, many Presbyterians believe baptism saves. So even if you hate the Catholic church, if Catholics and Lutherans and Anglicans tell you the sky is blue, it doesn’t mean it’s black just because a Catholic tells you. So you could actually listen to the merits of the argument rather than being clouded by this.
But I fear based on just reading comments of the people who didn’t like how the debate had gone, that if they’d heard these exact same words from someone who they thought was another Protestant, they might’ve been maybe more open to it. And it’s something I think all of us need to watch out for. Look, I’m going to risk stirring things up even more by saying the Trump Biden debate, the one that went so famously bad for Biden that he dropped out of the presidential reelection race in the aftermath of that debate, an Ipsos poll of likely voters who watched at least part of the debate, 21% claimed that he had been the winner of the debate. 21% of a debate that went so badly that it destroyed his chances of being reelected president. That number should be zero. In a purely rational world, whatever you think of Donald Trump, whatever you think of Joe Biden objectively, if one guy blanks on stage and then says that he defeated Medicare and can’t form a thought to save his life or his political aspirus, he did not win.
But 21% of people said he did another 19% said they didn’t know. So 40%. So if you had five people, three of them would claim Trump won, one would claim Biden won, one would claim they didn’t know. And so if you’re reading the comments of a debate, watch for that, you’re always going to get the 20%. And I don’t, again, this is not like a Democrat republican thing. I think if the other thing, if it had happened the other way around, you would see those colors just inverted. You’re going to get about 20% who are just hard liners for their side and they don’t care about the truth of who actually won because they’re just saying, I like my guy better than your guy, and I like my guy so much, I won’t even listen to what your guy has to say. Or I like my tribe so much.
And so you’re going to get some of that. And so I would just say watch out for that. If you find yourself being unwilling or unable to listen to, probably you haven’t made it this far in the video if you’re one of those people, but I get comments whereas is clear as people who are just looking to disagree with anything Catholic. This is one of those times where it’s not just a Catholic thing. Alright, related to this, Ryan kind of leaned into a bunch of arguments against the Catholic church. I mean literally the first argument he makes in his opening speech was about how the Council of Trent Mizes people who hold his position. This is ironic because look, it’s like, okay, the church damns you, damn all the early Christians, which of those is easier to believe? And actually the church only damns you if you’re doing it knowingly and willingly.
But leave that aside. This is an argument against the Catholic church, not an argument against baptism saving. Likewise, one of the things that I think frankly caught me a little bit flatfooted, he told me there were some parishes in his area that were charging for baptism. I’d never heard of this practice because I’ve always had all of the sacraments free or every sacrament other than occasionally hear about people charging for the wedding space. But even there, it was our parish, and I knew the pastor and we got married in the church for free. I, I’m not bragging, but there you go. It’s always been a donation in our experience. So yeah, I was caught off guard by that and he suggested it was simony and it could be, it is not. Strictly speaking, I think it looks bad. I would love it if every church moved away from that practice.
But technically the Catholic church allows you a small amount of money for your services because if you’re a priest being called out to go perform a private baptism for someone, you are doing work and the worker does deserve his wages and all of that is biblical. So canon law says this Canon 8 48, the minister is to seek nothing for the administration of the sacraments beyond the offerings defined by competent authority, always taking care that the needy are not deprived of the assistance of the sacraments because of poverty. So if somebody can’t afford some sacrament, you still have to give it to them, but it is still just for you to be able to be paid. So in this sense, I mean frankly it’s very similar to the model in the US for healthcare, which is you can charge, but if someone can’t afford for urgent care or emergency room, you still have to do it because you can’t deny someone something life-giving just because they can’t afford.
So that’s where things are. That’s not actually simony, but I understand why people would view it as that, and I wouldn’t be opposed to more parishes saying we don’t want anything close to that. But that’s suggested. This was his strongest argument. I think it was. It just does nothing to help the debate. Nothing in sometimes parishes charge you a fee when you have a private baptism gets to, therefore baptism doesn’t save. There’s no way to logically make that a thought. The last thing I want to kind of ask more than anything else is just, is this a Baptist problem or a Protestant problem? And so I’ve already said, and I want to really reaffirm a lot of Protestants were shocked to even hear that anyone took Ryan’s side of this. I had a Protestant correct me and say, no, Protestant believes that. And I had to be like, no, you’re mistaken Baptist do.
And he took it back in his defense. He was just trying to make sure I didn’t straw man. And so I don’t want to suggest everyone agrees on the Protestant side with Ryan. Clearly they do. This is not the historic Protestant position. But I do want to ask at least is his position in spite of his being Protestant or is it the result of him taking a certain form of IDE in a certain form of Sola script Torah without any guidance from a church, without any guidance from tradition and ending up in this place? I mean, it does seem some responsibility for this chaotic antigo kind of theology has to be put at the feet of the reformation in some way. I admit, I acknowledge Martin Luther would be aghast. My question is, did the principles that he established in the Reformation go beyond him in a way that undermined even theological conclusions that he would’ve favored?
I would suggest you would not have this kind of preaching, this kind of baptism. That’s not important. Obedience is not necessary for salvation kind of theology without the reformation. Now I’m happy to have someone show me where that’s wrong, but that’s where I’m kind of inclined to go. So yeah, those are somewhat scattered thoughts of just kind of loose ends from the debate. And if you’re interested, let me know. I might do a full episode just exploring Mark 16, what can we say about the authorship? What can we say about its inspiration and canonical status and what does this mean for other parts of the Bible that get disputed as well? So if that’s interesting, let me know and I’d be happy to cover that more fully. Alright, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.