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Canon Clash! Evangelical star Frank Turek spars with sharp Catholic student Chase over the Bible’s origins and the Church. Jimmy Akin breaks it down with brotherly insight—praising Chase’s solid defense while giving Frank “iron sharpens iron” recommendations on John 14, Trent, the deuterocanonicals, and more. Witty, fair, and packed with surprises—you’ll never see these topics the same way again! Listen now!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Recently, well-known Evangelical apologist Frank Turek posted a video of a conversation he had with a Catholic student named Chase who asked him a question.
It was a very interesting exchange.
I thought Chase did very well defending the Catholic understanding of the Christian faith, though I did think that there were some ways Frank could have done better.
What were those ways?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Introduction
Longtime listeners and viewers will know who Frank Turek is.
He’s an evangelical apologist and podcaster, and he’s a really nice guy.
He’s had me on his show before, and we’ve had very pleasant conversations.
I also responded to a claim he made about hearing the gospel at Mass way back in Episode 3 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast.
And if you use the search feature on my YouTube page, you’ll find several more videos where Frank and I have interacted.
Recently, Frank has been doing an apologetics speaking tour on college campuses, and one of the places he spoke is the University of North Florida.
During that event, he took questions from the audience, and one of the people who asked him a question was a gentleman named Chase.
Frank—or his web team—then put a clip of their interaction on his Cross Examined YouTube channel with the title “Can Christianity Exist Without the Catholic Church?”
And—this is a very little matter and off topic—but I’m really impressed with their proofreading skills, because they correctly capitalized the preposition “without”—which is seven letters long—in the title.
Many people know the general rule that you don’t capitalize prepositions in titles, but you do if they’re five or more letters long, and most people on YouTube don’t know anything about proofreading.
Like a certain other highly entertaining channel that has a video titled “What is a Christian?” where they don’t capitalize the word “is” even though it’s a verb, and verbs are always capitalized in titles.
Sorry. This is the kind of thing that leaps out at you after you’ve been working in the publishing industry for more than 30 years.
Anyway, I watched the interaction between Frank and Chase, and I was rather surprised.
One thing that surprised me is how well Chase did defending his position. He had a lot of facts at his command, and they were quite solid.
I also later spoke with Chase, and he also is a really nice guy.
But I was also surprised at how Frank did.
Proverbs 27:17
Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another.
So I thought I’d go through the video and—in a brotherly spirit of iron sharpens iron and how one man sharpens another—suggest a few things that could help Frank up his game in the future.
“Good Evidence”
We’ll begin where Chase poses a question about how we know what books belong in the Bible.
CHASE: What good is if we can’t have a table of contents given to us by our Lord and the apostles, how can we have Christianity? Honestly, how can we have it without the Catholic Church?
FRANK: Are you talking about the Bible or the interpretation of the Bible?
CHASE: Kind of both of them. Yeah. I mean, we can just fine. The Bible’s fine. That’s a fine one. How do we know what books, especially even just the New Testament can and the Old Testament canon, we could talk about that too. But how do we know that the 27 books in it are correct? Truly not just, well, we think they’re correct because if that’s our one rule of faith, wouldn’t we need to know with absolute
FRANK: Certainty? Jesus and we have good evidence that Jesus said this in John chapter 14 and 26 said . . .
I want to stop there and say that I’m not sure what Frank is referring to here.
He says we have good evidence that Jesus said what is recorded in John 14:26.
I don’t know why he says this.
If you have faith that the Gospel of John is divinely inspired, then yes, we have good evidence that Jesus said what is in John 14:26—or at least that it is consistent with Jesus’ thought, even if it’s paraphrased.
But that’s true of every passage in John.
Here Frank seems to be saying that we have good evidence beyond the mere fact that John reports it that Jesus said this.
And that’s the kind of thing you’d expect him to say at an apologetics talk like this, where many in the audience are atheists.
But what else—beyond the fact that John reports it—could Frank be thinking of?
What makes the evidence good that Jesus said this?
Scholars have proposed various criteria that make the evidence for some statements better than others.
One of these is Multiple Attestation, where we have the same statement or thought reported by multiple independent sources.
Another is the Criterion of Embarrassment, which holds that a statement is more likely to be true if it’s an admission of something the author could find embarrassing, since people don’t like to admit embarrassing things.
But none of the so-called Criteria of Authenticity apply here.
We don’t have multiple authors reporting the thought that Jesus expresses in John 14:26, so multiple attestation doesn’t apply.
And what Jesus says in John 14:26 would not have been embarrassing to John, so the criterion of embarrassment doesn’t apply.
Neither do the other criteria of authenticity.
I also checked multiple commentaries on this passage, and none of them cited any special evidence for why we can have greater confidence that Jesus said this than the other statements John reports him making.
So I don’t know what Frank is referring to here.
I suspect this may have been a slip of the tongue on Frank’s part or a bit of accidental hyperbole, which is no big deal.
But if so, then that’s something I would not say in the future.
“He Will Bring to Your Remembrance”
But back to Frank.
FRANK: . . . in John chapter 14 and 26 said “First of all, I will bring your remembrance all that I taught you and I will lead you into all truth.”
Okay, that’s actually a fusion of two different passages in John.
John 14:26
The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
John 16:13
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.
First, in John 14:26, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will teach the disciples all things and bring what he has said to their remembrance.
Then, in John 16:13, Jesus says that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.
Fair enough.
And I’m not criticizing Frank here. Speakers—myself included—often mention different passages in the same breath when giving answers that they’re composing off the tops of their heads.
So what implications does Frank draw from these two passages?
FRANK: The idea here is that Jesus was going to inspire the apostles or people that the apostles knew to write down the New Testament.
Whoa! Okay, here is where Frank and I have a disagreement.
I don’t think that you can establish that from either of these passages, so let’s take another look at them.
First, let’s look at John 14:26 in context. Verses 25 to 27 say:
John 14:25-27
These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you.
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
So Jesus begins this passage by pointing backwards to the things he has spoken to you during his ministry.
He then assures them that the Holy Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance everything Jesus said.
So the disciples would have access to that material if they wanted to write the books of the New Testament, and that would be useful to them.
But Jesus doesn’t give them any command to do that. He doesn’t mention them writing any books.
In fact, he pivots to a new subject, saying, “Peace I leave with you my peace I give you.” So he moves on to start talking about peace.
And if you keep reading subsequent verses, he never mentions them writing anything there, either.
So this passage simply is not talking about the writing of the New Testament, as illustrated by the fact it never mentions the New Testament or writing at all.
So what does this passage mean?
Put yourself in the position of the disciples sitting around Jesus at the Last Supper.
They’ve been following Jesus for three years, but they haven’t always understood his teaching.
In fact, the Gospels show their understanding of his teachings being repeatedly corrected.
And now Jesus is giving a big farewell speech and saying goodbye to them.
You know, “My peace I leave with you.”
So Jesus is going away, but he’s leaving his peace.
In this circumstance, the disciples might wonder, “Will we be able to hang onto all of his teachings? Will we forget some of the Master’s precious teachings? Will we be able to teach others the way he wants us to?”
Yes, Jesus assures them. The Holy Spirit will remind you of them.
So that is what this verse is: An assurance that the disciples will remember what Jesus said.
It doesn’t say anything about them later writing them down.
And they wouldn’t envision him as giving such a command, because they didn’t expect him to be gone long.
Just forty days after Pentecost, the disciples are asking him:
Acts 1:6
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
They were expecting him to bring about the end of the world right then!
And even after the Ascension, they continued to expect the Second Coming to happen in their own lifetimes.
They thought they were the last generation.
That’s why Paul—in 1 Thessalonians 4:15—puts himself into the category of people who will still be alive at the Second Coming and says:
1 Thessalonians 4:15
For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.
We can also show that the disciples didn’t understand Jesus’ statement in John 14:26 as an instruction to write the New Testament because they didn’t write any of the Gospels for literally decades.
1 Thessalonians may be the very first book of the New Testament to be penned, and it wasn’t written until A.D. 50—17 years after the Crucifixion in A.D. 33.
When it comes to the Gospels—which should be the books in focus if we’re talking about things Jesus had [I have] spoken to you during his ministry—it’s even worse.
Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and most scholars date it to between A.D. 68 and 73.
I put it earlier than that. I think the evidence indicates it was written in the A.D. 50s, say around A.D. 55.
You can check out Episode 64 for more information on that.
But if Mark was written in A.D. 55, that’s 22 years after the Crucifixion, so the first Gospel wasn’t written until literally decades after Jesus gave the disciples this assurance.
The other Gospels were even later.
So that’s a pretty good sign that the disciples did not take Jesus’ words to be an instruction to go and write Gospels.
It’s a sign that they took Jesus’s statement in the obvious way—that it was just an assurance that they—his closest disciples—would be able to remember what he said and presumably teach it to others.
It would also be strange for Mark to write the very first Gospel since he wasn’t even at the Last Supper.
You’d expect that one of the disciples who was there and who unambiguously received this assurance would be the first one to write a Gospel.
Now what about the second passage Frank quoted, from John 16?
Reading that statement in context, in verses 12 and 13, Jesus says:
John 16:12-13
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
So Jesus does say that when the Spirit comes, he will guide the disciples into all the truth.
But what is Jesus thinking of here? There are two elements in this text that indicate Jesus is thinking of future revelations that have not yet been made.
First, Jesus says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
This suggests that he’s referring to things he has not yet said to the disciples and that will be difficult to bear.
If he were referring to things he had already said, they would have already been bearing them, and he’d just be giving them a reminder.
Thus the reference to the future—“I still have many things to say to you”—is to be taken in its natural sense of things he has not yet said.
Second, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will declare to you the things that are to come, which is an unmistakable reference to future events.
And we know from other places in the New Testament—including the book of Revelation—that there would be persecutions and difficulties ahead.
That sounds like things Jesus might have to say to the disciples that they could not now bear.
This passage is thus naturally taken as discussing a future prophetic ministry by which Jesus speaks things to the disciples that they cannot bear now, but the Spirit will speak whatever he hears from Jesus, and so he will declare to them the things that are to come.
This isn’t an instruction to go out and write books.
In the literal sense of the text, it’s a prediction of a future prophetic ministry involving Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
I’m thus sorry to say that Frank is simply mistaken about these passages.
Neither of them contains anything like an instruction to write the books of the New Testament.
That’s not to say that they don’t have anything to do with the writing of the New Testament.
As I mentioned, Jesus’ assurance that they would remember what he said would be of use if the disciples ever decided to write Gospels.
And the prophetic ministry of Christ and the Holy Spirit could play a role in something like the book of Revelation.
But the writing of such books simply is not what Jesus is talking about in these passages.
Westminster Confession of Faith 1:6
The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.
And—frankly—it’s not something that someone who believes in sola scriptura would propose, since it is neither expressly set down in these scriptures nor by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from these scriptures.
What Frank has been doing here is not Exegesis or = Bringing the meaning out of the text.
It’s Eisegesis or = Forcing a meaning into the text.
So if I were Frank, I wouldn’t make this argument.
What the New Testament Contains
But let’s set that aside and see what he says next.
FRANK: And so the only question we have now is what documents were written in the first century by apostles or people that knew the apostles that would qualify as scripture? And if you look, there are nine authors of the New Testament depending upon who wrote the book of Hebrews. So you got Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and then the writer of Hebrews. Okay? The only question mark is the writer of Hebrews. All of those other people were either apostles or were confirmed by apostles like Luke is confirmed by Paul. Okay? So that’s all we have from the first century.
Except, that’s not all we have from the first century. We have other Christian works from this period, too.
In addition to the books of the New Testament, we have other books that were certainly or possibly written in the first century, including:
- The Didache (“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”)
- The Ascension of Isaiah
- 1 Clement
- 2 Clement
- The Letter of Barnabas
- The Shepherd of Hermas
- The Odes of Solomon
- The Apocalypse of Peter
And some of these books were considered to be Scripture by some in the early Church.
You can check out Episode 32 for more information on that.
Part of the reason for that was that most were regarded as fitting the criterion Frank just named—of being written either by an apostle or someone who knew the apostles and thus could be presumed to have their approval, as Mark and Luke did.
The Didache was regarded as being by the Twelve apostles as a group.
1 Clement was written by Clement of Rome, who was held to be the one mentioned Philippians 4:3 and who had been ordained and thus approved by Peter and Paul.
2 Clement was commonly regarded as written by him also.
The Letter of Barnabas was held to be written by the Apostle Barnabas, who Luke calls an apostle—together with Paul—in Acts 14:14
The Shepherd of Hermas was written by a Roman freedman named Hermas who was held to be the same one mentioned and greeted by Paul in Romans 16:14.
And the Apocalypse of Peter was held by many Christians to have been written by Peter himself.
So there were multiple books that were held to be written by apostles or those they approved that did not make it into the New Testament, even though they were regarded as Scripture by some orthodox early Christians for several centuries.
Thus, if I were Frank, I wouldn’t claim that the books of the New Testament are all we have from the first century and that only they meet or were regarded as meeting the criterion of apostolicity.
And I definitely wouldn’t imply that there was no dispute about these being Scripture, because there was.
Agreement on the New Testament
But let’s continue. Frank says concerning the books of the New Testament . . .
FRANK: And Roman Catholics and evangelicals all agree on that. Those are the books that should be in.
Yes. True. Catholic and Protestants—as well as Eastern Orthodox—agree on the books of the New Testament.
But there was a process by which that agreement arose. So how did that happen?
FRANK: And it’s not the church that determines what went into the Bible.
CHASE: For sure. And that’s not position is that they recognize.
FRANK: They recognize.
CHASE: Not that they grant authority to, that they recognize . . .
Again, we have agreement here. Nobody thinks that the Church invested the books of the New Testament with divine authority.
That’s something God did.
The Church merely recognized it.
But we still need to consider the process by which that happened, which was through the Church, as we’ll cover later.
A Detour on the Old Testament
However, at this point, the discussion takes a detour to look at the Old Testament canon.
FRANK: The Old Testament canon was pretty much agreed on prior to the Council of Trent.
That’s true. The Old Testament canon was pretty much agreed on prior to the Council of Trent.
But not the way Frank thinks it was.
It was pretty much agreed that it contained not only the protocanonical books that you find in a Protestant Old Testament today but also the deuterocanonical books you find in the Catholic and Orthodox canons.
There was some disagreement about a few of these books, and there were even occasional individuals who thought it should only be the protocanonicals.
But it was pretty much agreed by the large majority of people prior to the Council of Trent that it included these additional books.
An Ecumenical Council Argument
Unfortunately, Frank says the opposite, and he says something really strange here.
FRANK: Because there was never an ecumenical council that put the apocrypha in the Old Testament from the Catholic church.
Okay, we’ll deal with the ecumenical council claim soon, but first we need to notice a flaw in the reasoning.
Even if it were true that Trent was the first ecumenical council to include the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books in the Old Testament, that does not mean that there had previously been a general agreement to the contrary.
Just because an ecumenical council affirms a doctrine does not mean that, prior to the council, most people rejected the doctrine.
For example, the First Council of Nicaea taught the divinity of Christ, but you can’t infer from that that—prior to Nicaea—that most people rejected the divinity of Christ and then the council suddenly reversed this position.
That’s not how ecumenical councils work.
Ecumenical councils are not popular consensus reversers. Their job is not to reverse what people were believing right before the council.
They tend to do the opposite. They tend to reaffirm the things that were commonly believed before the council and add more authority to them.
Thus—prior to the Council of Nicaea—there was a general agreement that Jesus is God.
Then an Egyptian priest named Arius started teaching that Jesus was not God, it caused a huge controversy, and the Council of Nicaea reaffirmed that Jesus is God and added new authority to this teaching.
In the same way, there was a general agreement before the Council of Trent that the Old Testament includes the deuterocanonicals, the Protestant movement then started and began denying this, a huge controversy erupted, and the Council of Trent then reaffirmed the common understanding and added new authority to it.
I’ll show you more evidence for that soon, and as we’ll see, there was an earlier ecumenical council that included the deuterocanonicals in the canon.
But setting that aside, you simply can’t infer from Trent that the opposite opinion prevailed before Trent.
If you want to maintain that, you need to provide evidence for the position.
Augustine and Jerome
So what evidence does Frank offer?
FRANK: Go back to the 400s AD. Augustine thought the apocrypha should be in the Old Testament, but Jerome, the great translator, did not.
So Frank names two individuals from the early Church—Augustine and Jerome—and says that they were on opposite sides when it came to whether the deuterocanonicals should be considered canonical.
The situation is actually more complex than that, but again—for the sake of argument—let’s suppose that’s accurate.
We’d now have the opinions of two guys.
So what?
Two guys doesn’t tell you anything about what most people thought, and especially not if they are on opposite sides.
They also lived more than a thousand years before Trent, so they’re not representative of the time period before Trent.
You’ve just got a yes vote and a no vote more than a thousand years earlier, and that doesn’t tell you that there was a consensus of no’s prior to Trent
Jerome’s Actual Position
But Jerome’s position was actually more nuanced than Frank has suggested.
CHASE: He died recanting that position.
FRANK: I don’t think Jerome ever … He wouldn’t even translate the apocrypha.
CHASE: He did. He put it in the Vulgate. He didn’t want it to, but he said, who am I to deny the authority of the Catholic church?
FRANK: Okay, well . . .
I’m going to interrupt here because Frank then takes the conversation in an unrelated direction, and I want to clarify Jerome’s position.
Jerome’s attitude is ambiguous and may have changed over time.
While learning to translate Hebrew, Jerome was in contact with non-Christian Jews who were intellectual descendants of the Pharisees and therefore rejected the deuterocanonicals.
Under this influence, he at least for a time appears to have rejected their canonicity.
This is indicated in the prologues he wrote for his Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, where he says certain books are non-canonical.
For example, in his prologue to the books of Kings, he says that Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit are not canonical.
In other cases, he says a book is not read among Hebrew-speaking Jews but does not clearly state his own view.
For example, he says this about the deuterocanonical book of Baruch in his prologue to Jeremiah.
Frank is also incorrect in stating that Jerome did not translate these books, which implies that he did not translate all of them.
However, Jerome is known to have translated Tobit and Judith, along with the deuterocanonical portions of Esther and Daniel.
And Jerome did show deference to the judgment of the Church.
Prologue to Judith
But because this book is found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request, indeed a demand, and works having been set aside from which I was forcibly curtailed, I have given to this (book) one short night’s work translating more sense from sense than word from word.
In his prologue to Judith, Jerome tells his patron that “because this book is found by the Nicene Council [of A.D. 325] to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request” to translate it.
And this is interesting because we have only partial records of First Nicaea, and we don’t otherwise know what this ecumenical council said concerning the canon.
Jerome’s deference to Church authority was also illustrated when he later defended the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel, writing:
Against Rufinus 2:33
What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the churches?
In the same place he stated that what he said concerning Daniel in his prologues was what non-Christian Jews said but that it was not his own view.
This may indicate Jerome changed his mind or that his reporting of Jewish views may not indicate his own view.
So Jerome’s position on the deuterocanonicals is not the simple no vote that Frank said it was.
But even if it were, so what?
The guidance of the Holy Spirit is given to the Church as a whole. No one Church Father can settle the canon of Scripture, and on this subject Jerome was clearly in the minority.
We know that because we have summaries of what large groups of Church Fathers from this period thought.
These summaries exist in the form of local councils that were held between A.D. 382 and A.D. 419.
- D. 382, Council of Rome
- D. 393, Council of Hippo
- D. 397, Council of Carthage
- D. 405, approval by Pope Innocent I
- D. 419, Council of Carthage
While these councils are local rather than ecumenical ones, they nevertheless are summaries of the opinions of multiple bishops from the local areas in which they were held.
They thus have more weight than the opinions of individual fathers, and they all affirm the deuterocanonicals as part of the Old Testament.
There are not comparable councils rejecting the deuterocanonicals, and later rejection of them was confined to the opinions of individual people here and there.
So, although the deuterocanonicals had not yet been infallibly taught to be part of the Old Testament, there was a general consensus in favor of them.
This consensus solidified by the late 300s and remained in place through the Council of Trent, when they were infallibly taught to be part of the canon.
A.D. 500?
But now let’s get to Frank’s divergence onto a new topic.
FRANK: First of all, the Catholic church really didn’t … The Roman Catholic church did not really assert its authority until like 500 AD. It was after 500 AD. Okay? So this idea that there was a monolithic Catholic church from the beginning just isn’t true. Okay?
My problem here is that this is simply a subjective claim.
What would it mean for the Catholic Church—or Roman Catholic Church—to assert its authority?
The Catholic Church is an extensive body that covered the entire Christian world in this period, and its bishops and councils obviously asserted their authority prior to the year 500.
I assume that what Frank means is the Church in Rome specifically, but we have numerous examples of the Church of Rome exerting authority prior to that time.
In fact, we have an example of it asserting its authority to settle a conflict in the Church of Corinth all the way back in A.D. 70.
That’s when the letter known as 1 Clement was written, and it told some rebels in Corinth to reinstate the leaders which they had ejected from office.
This apparently worked, because we know that 1 Clement continued to be read in the Church of Corinth well into the second century, so they apparently reinstated the leaders Clement had said to reinstate and then kept reading the letter that had led to this happening.
We also have other examples of the Church of Rome exercising authority outside of Rome itself before the year 500.
For example, in the year 382, Pope Damasus I wrote:
Decree of Damasus 3
The holy Roman Church has been placed at the forefront not by the conciliar decisions of other churches, but has received the primacy by the evangelic voice of our Lord and Savior, who says: ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it; and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you shall have bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall have loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven’ [Matt. 16:18–19]. The first see, therefore, is that of Peter the apostle, that of the Roman Church, which has neither stain nor blemish nor anything like it.
And Jerome, who Frank was a fan of a minute ago, wrote to Pope Damasus a few years later—in 396—and said:
Letters 15:2, 16:2
I follow no leader but Christ and join in communion with none but your blessedness [Pope Damasus I], that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that this is the rock on which the Church has been built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in the ark of Noah will perish when the flood prevails. . . .
The church here [in the Syrian desert] is split into three parts, each eager to seize me for its own. . . . Meanwhile I keep crying, ‘He that is joined to the chair of Peter is accepted by me!’”
Also, you’ll recall that in A.D. 405, Pope Innocent I confirmed the canon as including the deuterocanonicals.
That’s because he was asked by the bishop of Toulouse, France—a man named Exuperius—to confirm it for him, so that’s an example of the Church of Rome exercising influence outside of Rome itself—way over in France.
And in A.D. 451, the ecumenical council of Chalcedon read a letter from Pope Leo I and then this happened:
Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, session 2
After the reading of the foregoing epistle, the most reverend bishops cried out: “This is the faith of the fathers! This is the faith of the apostles! So we all believe! Thus the orthodox believe! Anathema to him who does not thus believe! Peter has spoken thus through Leo!”
These are just a few examples of many from before the year 500, so I don’t know what Frank is referring to.
Of course, he could jack up the standard of what counts as an assertion of Rome’s authority so high that he can claim it wasn’t met before 500, but that would be a purely subjective move.
And the truth is that we have multiple examples of the Church in Rome asserting authority elsewhere—like settling the conflict in Corinth in the first century or asserting in the 300s that it has authority because of Christ’s commission of Peter.
We also have multiple examples of people elsewhere recognizing its authority, like Jerome recognizing it when he lived in the Syrian desert in the 300s, or Bishop Exuperius of Toulouse, France recognizing it in the early 400s, or the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon recognizing it in the mid-400s.
So, whatever Frank thinks happened in the year 500, it didn’t come out of nowhere.
“They Quote from Every Section”
But let’s move on to Frank’s next argument.
FRANK: However, if you look at Jesus and the apostles, Jesus and the apostles never quote from the apocrypha. They quote from every other section of the Old Testament.
CHASE: That’s not true. Not every book. They
FRANK: Quote from every section. They never quote from the apocrypha.
So this is an argument from silence. Saying people didn’t quote from something is an appeal to silence, and arguments from silence are notoriously weak.
However, the argument is also problematic when it comes to the facts.
You’ll note how Frank said that Jesus and the apostles quoted from every section of the Old Testament.
That’s also a subjective assessment, because it depends on what you count as a section.
According to a common Jewish reckoning, there are only three sections in the Hebrew Scriptures:
- The Law
- The Prophets
- The Writings
So you could make the claim that Jesus and the apostles quoted from every section of the Old Testament with just three quotations:
- One quotation from the Law of Moses
- One quotation from somewhere in the Prophets
- And one quotation from somewhere in the other writings
And if you use the system that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament most commonly used, which was just the Law and the Prophets, then you could say they quoted from every section of the Old Testament with just two quotations.
So that’s pretty meaningless.
And if you make up your own, modern categories to flesh out the list, then you’re imposing your own, subjective categories on the books of the Old Testament, which proves nothing.
You can make up any categories you want to guarantee that they quoted from each section.
But if you say they quoted from each section, and you’ve made up the sections and they were not in use during the New Testament era, that wouldn’t prove anything.
What Frank is doing here by talking about sections rather than books is concealing the fact that the New Testament does not quote from.
Specifically, it does not quote from 12 books of the Protestant Old Testament:
- Judges
- Ruth
- 2 Kings
- Esther
- Ezra
- Nehemiah
- Song of Songs
- Ecclesiastes
- Lamentations
- Obadiah
- Jonah
- Zephaniah
You can make the numbers come out a little differently depending on where you draw boundaries between books.
But here I’m using the Protestant system of reckoning and making the point that—if the mere fact the deuterocanonicals aren’t explicitly quoted in the New Testament disqualifies them from being in the canon—then you’d need to remove books like these.
Because they also aren’t quoted.
Frank seeks to avoid that argument by talking about Jesus and the apostles quoted from every “section” of the Old Testament, apparently deviating from the common Jewish practice of three sections and using a much later, invented number of sections, which he does not name.
But even if we grant that, there are two further problems with his claim.
First, how do you know that the deuterocanonicals weren’t included in whatever sections you are using.
For example, they might be grouped under the historical books, or the wisdom books, or the prophets, or the writings.
Take the deuterocanonical book of Baruch as a case in point. It was often considered part of the book of Jeremiah—just like Lamentations which also isn’t quoted was.
So how do you know that Jesus and the apostles weren’t using a system that included Baruch and Lamentations as part of the prophets and—in this case—part of Jeremiah, specifically?
The truth is, you don’t know that.
Second, while the New Testament doesn’t contain direct quotations of the deuterocanonicals, it contains numerous allusions to them.
And this is not disputed by scholars. It’s recognized by Protestant scholars, Catholic scholars, Orthodox scholars, and atheist scholars.
To give just three examples:
- Hebrews 13:5’s reference to people who were tortured and refused to be release to obtain a better resurrection is a reference to this event happening in 2 Maccabees 7
- Romans 1:19-32 contains multiple references to material in Wisdom 13-15
- And Matthew 6:14-15 contains Jesus’ statement about the need to forgive others in order to be forgiven, and that’s a reference to Sirach 28:2
These are just three examples among many, and there is no doubt in the scholarly community that the New Testament authors were using and alluding to the deuterocanonical books.
Check scholarly commentaries—including those by Protestants—and they freely acknowledge this.
The Jewish Canon
But now let’s get back to Frank.
FRANK: And the Jews themselves did not include the apocrypha in their Old Testament, in their scriptures.
CHASE: Well, their canon was closed after our Lord. And why would we trust the people who reject our Lord to determine our canon? Our Lord did not promise to lead the Jews into the fullness of the truth.
FRANK: But why would Christians come along and add to the Jewish Old Testament?
CHASE: They didn’t have a closed Old Testament at the time of our Lord.
FRANK: Well, that’s debatable.
Except it’s really not. That’s an idea that was claimed by some older Protestant authors.
But it’s been discredited by more recent research. The evidence clearly shows that the Jewish canon wasn’t settled in the first century.
Contemporary Protestant scholars of the history of the canon acknowledge that the situation was not that simple, and I’ll give you an example of that in a minute.
First, though, if you’d like to know more about this subject, I suggest reading by book The Bible Is a Catholic Book, where I go into more detail.
But it’s simply incorrect to speak of there being a single Jewish canon, as Frank just did.
There were multiple canonical traditions during the time of Jesus. In fact, there were at least five major traditions, and only some of them were closed.
- Sadducee Tradition: We have good evidence that the Sadducees accepted only the five books of Moses as Scripture, and this was a closed canon
- Samaritan Tradition: The Samaritan tradition accepted the same canon as the Sadducees, and they maintain it to this day
- Pharisee Tradition: The Pharisee tradition roughly corresponded to the protocanonical books, but it wasn’t a closed canon—more on that in a moment
- Qumran Tradition: The Qumran tradition included the protocanonicals but also other books, including 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Temple Scroll
- Septuagint Tradition: And the Septuagint tradition included both the protocanonicals and the deuterocanonicals, which is where Christians got the deuterocanonicals in the first place
So it’s simply mistaken to talk about the Jewish people having a single canon of Scripture in the time of Jesus.
Further, if we’re talking about what the New Testament authors quoted, the New Testament overwhelmingly quotes from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text.
Statistically, between 80% and 90% of the times the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they’re quoting from the Septuagint.
That suggests that they were quite fine with the books contained in the Septuagint—including the deuterocanonicals that they used, that they alluded to, and that they never warned against.
So it was entirely natural for early Christians to adopt this canonical tradition rather than the one used by the Pharisees that survived the Jewish wars and became the foundation of modern, rabbinic Judaism.
Furthermore, the Pharisee canon was not closed in Jesus’ day. It had fuzzy boundaries, and there were debates about what books were canonical.
For example, some of the early rabbis argued that deuterocanonical books like Sirach did belong in the canon.
These debates continued into the third century A.D.—well after the time of Christ—and so it’s mistaken both to claim that there was a single Jewish canon in Jesus day and that it had been settled or closed by Jesus’ day.
If you’d like to read a Protestant treatment of this subject, see Lee McDonald’s book The Biblical Canon and his two-volume set The Formation of the Biblical Canon, among other works by recent Protestant scholars.
As works like these reveal, the neat and tidy image of a single, closed Jewish canon is simply inaccurate, and the situation is much more complex.
That means that—even if the early Christians had been inclined to let non-Christian Jews settle their Old Testament for them—there wasn’t a single Jewish opinion to appeal to at the time.
Prayers for the Dead
But back to Frank.
FRANK: The issue here is that in 1545 or so when the Council of Trent started in response to Luther, Luther was saying things like, “You say we should have baptism for the dead, prayers for the dead.” Where does it say that?
CHASE: When did the Catholics ever say we should have baptism for the dead?
FRANK: Well, this was a controversy of praying for the dead. Okay?
CHASE: Yeah, praying for the dead. But the Jews do that. They still do it today.
FRANK: Okay. But the point is it’s not in the Jewish Old Testament.
I’m not going to make an issue of the fact that Frank cited baptism for the dead, because he apparently misspoke and was thinking of praying for the dead.
And that’s not referenced in the final rabbinic canon that evolved out of the Pharisee tradition.
But it is in the Old Testament of the Septuagint tradition that was also used in Judaism at the time of Jesus and that was used by the early Christians.
2 Maccabees 12:41-42
So they all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous Judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to prayer, begging that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out.
Thus, in 2 Maccabees 12, Judah Maccabee and his men find some of the comrades who have fallen in battle and pray for them.
And Chase is also right that Jewish people continue to pray for the dead today. So do Catholic and Orthodox, who inherited this practice from Judaism.
It’s only been in the Protestant community that it’s been rejected.
“Added” to the Old Testament
FRANK: And so the books of the apocryphal were added in order to take care of that problem. That’s when the Catholic Church added officially the apocrypha to the Old Testament.
CHASE: That’s not true. The Council of Roman 382 affirmed the same 73, but cannon we have. They just elevated to dogma. Council Florence with Eastern Orthodox and the 1400s.
FRANK: It wasn’t an ecumenical council.
CHASE: Council Florence was though. And it was-
FRANK: No, no, it wasn’t.
Here Frank mistakenly claims that the deuterocanonicals were added to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
The truth is that the early Christians received the Septuagint tradition from the authors of the New Testament, and so these books had always been honored in Christian circles.
There may have been individuals who questioned or rejected them, but they had always been honored in the Christian community, and that was the majority position.
They weren’t “added” at a later date. That’s just inaccurate.
Frank also dismisses the early local councils that demonstrate this as the majority opinion by saying that they weren’t ecumenical councils, but this is irrelevant.
Regardless of what level of authority they had, they still document the majority opinion as being held by large groups of bishops in different areas.
And Chase is absolutely right to point out that Trent was not the first ecumenical council to list the deuterocanonical books as belonging to the canon.
The Council of Florence did that in the year 1442, more than a century before Trent.
Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, §§1334-1335
[The Church] professes that one and the same God is the author of the Old and the New Testament, that is, of the law and the prophets and of the Gospel; since the saints of both Testaments spoke under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, she accepts and venerates their books, whose titles are as follows:
Five 〈books〉 of Moses, namely, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four 〈books〉 of Kings 〈= two books of Samuel, two books of Kings〉, two of Paralipomenon 〈= Chronicles〉, Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, Psalms of David, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus 〈= Sirach〉, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel; the twelve minor prophets, namely, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; two books of the Maccabees; the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, two to the Thessalonians, to the Colossians, two to Timothy, to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews; two 〈letters〉 of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude; Acts of the Apostles; Apocalypse of John.
And if you look at paragraphs 1334 and 1335 of Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum—the standard collection of quotations from official Church documents—you’ll see all seven of the deuterocanonicals listed in the canon that Florence endorsed.
And yes, Florence was an ecumenical council. In fact, it was the Seventeenth Ecumenical council. Trent was the eighteenth.
So Trent didn’t add any books to the Old Testament. Instead, it reaffirmed the canon from Florence, and Florence reaffirmed the canon that had been commonly accepted all the way through Church history, as illustrated by the early, local councils.
So what did Frank say when Chase insisted that Florence is one of the ecumenical councils?
Let’s watch.
FRANK: But it wasn’t an ecumenical council.
CHASE: Council of Florence was though. And it was-
FRANK: No, no, it wasn’t!
CHASE: Council Florence. Yes, it was.
FRANK (mock exasperation): No, it wasn’t!
(Laughs) I have to confess, I wasn’t expecting Frank to do that, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it.
I thought it was a great way to inject some humor into the situation, and Frank went on to lean into the humor.
CHASE: Council Florence. Yes, it was.
FRANK (mock exasperation): No, it wasn’t!
CHASE: I’m not, but would you- Now
FRANK: Look, we’re all adults here. I know, would you look . . . Mr. Poopy Pants . . .
I didn’t expect that, either.
But I do appreciate Frank’s efforts to inject some humor into the discussion.
And he self-deprecatingly implies that they’re both adults but then undermines that in his own case by using the phrase “Mr. Poopy Pants,” so he’s not taking himself super-seriously.
So compliments to Frank for that!
A Contradiction Question
The discussion then moves on to a new area, and Frank says . . .
FRANK: Let’s suppose for the sake of argument, we say that the apocryphal should be in the Old Testament. What do we do when the book of Tobit or wisdom contradicts with salvation by grace?
CHASE: So when you say when it contradicts, I would say there is no contradiction and the Christians for 1500 years didn’t view there to be a contradiction. The same way someone might say a Muslim says, when it says Jesus says the “Father’s greater than I,” we would say that you can maybe at face value view that as an apparent contradiction, but it can be resolved. It’s not a true contradiction if you understand the-
FRANK: Okay, well, we’d have to look at the specific passage. . . .
And that’s true, you do have to look at the specific passage that involves an alleged contradiction.
But Frank is exploring a common argument made by Protestant apologists, which is that the deuterocanonical books contain passages that contradict either theological ideas—like the salvation by grace that Frank mentions—or passages in the protocanonicals.
And I thought Chase’s response was spot-on.
There are all kinds of passages in the Bible that people cite as contradicting other passages.
Protestant apologists have to deal with this all the time, when atheists throw these passages at them.
And they then have to apply themselves to show how the alleged contradiction can be resolved.
But Protestant apologists use a double standard here.
They are willing to go to the effort to resolve the contradiction if it’s part of the protocanonical books that they like, but they don’t even try to resolve the contradiction if it’s from the deuterocanonical books that they don’t like.
They just accept it as a genuine contradiction because it would be apologetically useful to them, the same way atheists just accept things as genuine contradictions because it’s apologetically useful to them.
But the alleged contradictions by the deuterocanonicals are no harder to resolve than the ones in the protocanonicals, so this is a double standard.
It’s a form, I hate to say, of intellectual hypocrisy.
I’m not accusing Frank of that here. He may have simply not thought about it and thus be in good conscience.
But that’s what it is when you apply more favorable standards to yourself than you apply to others.
And Chase is absolutely right that Jesus’s statement that the Father is greater than him could be taken as a contradiction of his divinity that is taught in other passages.
And a parallel to Frank’s claim that Tobit or Sirach might contradict salvation by grace is Proverbs 16:6, where it says:
Proverbs 16:6
By steadfast love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for.
Whoa! Steadfast love and faithfulness atone for iniquity? Don’t you know that it’s Jesus Christ who makes atonement for us?
If you say steadfast love and faithfulness atone for iniquity, that puts the burden on you to make atonement.
That can be taken not only as a denial of the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice but also a denial of justification by faith through grace!
Yet this is a passage that is in the protocanonicals.
So if a Protestant apologist can go to the effort of reconciling this statement, he should be able to open his mind wide enough to imagine how statements in the deuterocanonicals also can be reconciled.
It’s only fair to those you are interacting with apologetically to give them the same courtesy you also want people to give you.
It’s kind of required by the Golden Rule.
Matthew 7:12
Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.
Y’know, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium
Frank then tries posing the contradiction issue another way.
FRANK: If there’s a conflict between church tradition and scripture or early church fathers and scripture or Pope statements and scripture, which do you go with?
The answer here requires that we specify some things that Frank has left ambiguous, but I’ve had a lot of experience responding to this type of challenge, so here are the necessary nuances.
Frank has just proposed contradictions between statements of Scripture, statements of Tradition, and statements of the Magisterium, which he referred to as “pope statements,” though the Magisterium is broader than that.
He’s asked which we go with.
Well, we know that Scripture—correctly interpreted—is guaranteed to be true, so that’s helpful.
But there are different types of tradition.
Binding Tradition from the apostles is also guaranteed to be true, but there are other types of tradition—sometimes called “lower case” tradition with a small t—that are not guaranteed to be true.
So we need to specify whether we’re talking about apostolic tradition or some other kind.
Similarly, infallible magisterial statements are guaranteed to be true, but non-infallible magisterial statements are not guaranteed to be true, because—well—they’re not infallible.
So we also need to specify which kind of magisterial statement we’re talking about.
So let’s make those specifications.
Suppose we have a genuine contradiction between a statement of Scripture and either a non-apostolic tradition or a non-infallible magisterial statement.
In that case, the decision is easy: You go with the statement of Scripture.
Scripture is guaranteed to be true, but non-apostolic traditions are not guaranteed to be true, and non-infallible magisterial statements are not guaranteed to be true.
Scripture would thus be the one you go with, assuming you’re understanding it correctly.
But suppose we specify things the other way. Suppose that there’s an apparent contradiction between a passage of Scripture and either an apostolic Tradition or an infallible Magisterial statement.
Here, all three statements are guaranteed to be true. Scripture is true, apostolic Tradition is true, and infallible statements are true.
So you don’t “go with” one over the others.
The situation is parallel to proposing a contradiction between different books of Scripture.
If you’re a Protestant apologist, and an atheist comes to you and argues that a passage in Matthew contradicts a passage in Mark or a passage in Luke, which do you go with?
Well, you don’t pick any one of them over the others. Statements from Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all guaranteed to be true, assuming they’re understood correctly.
So what do you do instead?
The key is in the phrase “understood correctly.”
If statements from Matthew, Mark, and Luke are guaranteed to be true when understood correctly, and they appear to contradict each other, then you must not be understanding them all correctly.
The thing to do, then, is to devote more thought to the issue and figure out which isn’t being understood correctly.
That’s what the Protestant apologist will seek to identify rather than just choosing to disbelieve either Matthew, Mark, or Luke.
And a Catholic will do the same thing if there’s an apparent contradiction between sacred Scripture and apostolic Tradition or an infallible magisterial statement.
Since they are all guaranteed to be true if correctly understood, the problem must not be in the statements but in the understanding, so that’s what you focus on.
It’s exactly the same procedure, and if Protestant apologists use this procedure when it comes to their sources of authority, they need to acknowledge that it’s legitimate for Catholics to use exactly the same procedure with their sources of authority.
It’s that whole Golden Rule, “do unto others” thing again.
A Book Recommendation
At this point, the discussion starts to go over some material that has already been dealt with, but I want to point out one thing Frank said.
FRANK: Let me just recommend a book if you’re really interested. Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Agreements and Differences by Norman Geiser and Ralph McKenzie. It’s endorsed by Catholics, by the way, and it shows you where we agree, where we disagree, and why.
I’m familiar with that book. I participated in the writing of that book by extensively critiquing early drafts of it for Norman Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie.
They didn’t respond to many of my critiques, but they did later ask me to blurb it for them.
They said I could write whatever I wanted in the endorsement.
So I’m one of the three Catholics that Frank is referring to.
I wrote Norm and Ralph a balanced endorsement that both acknowledged that a Catholic would not ultimately find their argument persuasive, but the book genuinely had good points and should retire older, sensationalistic works.
The publisher—Baker Book House—then manipulated my endorsement by cutting it in half.
They deleted my overall assessment from a Catholic point of view and presented it as if I had nothing but praise for the book.
This misrepresented what I had said, and Norm and Ralph later apologized to me for what Baker did.
Unfortunately, there were now thousands of copies of the book in print, and Baker has never fixed the issue.
So if you do get a copy of this book and see my name on the back of it, that’s the story.
The Council of Trent
We then get to a nice point of the discussion, where this happens.
FRANK: But let me just ask you one question.
CHASE: Yeah.
FRANK: How do you get to heaven?
CHASE: By grace, through faith that works in love.
FRANK: Say again?
CHASE: By grace, through faith that works in love.
FRANK: That works in love. What does that last part mean?
CHASE: When Paul says, “If I have all faith but to move a mountain but I have not love, it profits me nothing.”
FRANK: Okay. So if somebody were to … Well, are works efficacious for salvation?
CHASE: You will be judged based on your works. Your works do not save you. Grace is what saves you.
FRANK: Okay, good. We’re in agreement then.
And that’s really nice.
Chase gave an excellent answer, and Frank acknowledged that he was right.
Unfortunately, an old misunderstanding then happened.
FRANK: So you would disagree with the Council of Trent.
CHASE: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I would affirm the Council of Trent.
FRANK: But the Council of Trent says anybody who says you’re saved by grace alone through faith alone, let him be
CHASE: Anathema. That’s not true. It’s session six. No. You can turn around. Frank, I’m-
FRANK: No, no, no. I’m sorry, man. I just looked this up like three days ago.
CHASE: I know and look it up. There’s a caveat. There’s a comma. It’s in session six of the Council of Trent on justification. There’s a comma insofar as meaning purely intellectual ascent is all that’s needed. Let him be anathema. The church does not condemn anathema, the term faith alone. It as a caveat, if by faith you just mean an intellectual ascent to a set of facts.
Here, Chase is absolutely right. Canon 9 of Session 6 of the Council of Trent states:
Decree on Justification, Session 6, Canon 9
If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone in the sense that (Latin, ita ut intelligat) nothing else is required by way of cooperation in order to obtain the grace of justification and that it is not at all necessary that he should be prepared and disposed by the movement of his will, let him be anathema.
There are several things to point out here.
First, Trent does use the common Protestant formula “by faith alone” here. But it does not condemn the formula itself.
At this time, the term “faith” was commonly used in theology to refer to intellectual faith. In fact, it’s still sometimes used that way today. Thus, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1814
Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us . . . because he is truth itself.
So with this theological usage in circulation, people could—and some did—misunderstand the phrase “by faith alone” to mean that intellectual faith alone could save you.
Galatians 5:6
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.
But there were other uses of the term faith out there, too. It could also be understood in the sense of what St. Paul refers to in Galatians 5:6 as “faith working through love.”
In Catholic theology, this is referred to as Faith Formed by Charity or, more concisely Formed Faith.
Catholics are happy to acknowledge that we are saved by this type of faith alone. Thus in 2008, Pope Benedict stated:
General Audience, Nov. 19, 2008
Luther’s phrase “faith alone” is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. . . . So it is that, in the letter to the Galatians, in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification, that St. Paul speaks of “faith that works through love.”
And this was not new with Pope Benedict. Centuries earlier, before the Council of Trent, Catholic authors had used the formula “by faith alone,” meaning by faith working through love alone.
St. Thomas Aquinas is just one example of a Catholic who did this.
And the Council of Trent knew that!
They thus didn’t want to reject the formula itself; they wanted to clarify the sense in which it could be misunderstood.
And so, in this translation of Trent, what it rejects is the statement that the sinner is justified by faith alone in the sense that nothing else beyond intellectual faith is required.
In Latin, the phrase translated “in the sense that” is ita ut intelligat, which literally means “so that he understands.”
The council is thus clearly rejecting one particular use of the phrase, not all possible uses.
“Nobody Believes That”?
Now, when Chase points out that the Council of Trent was rejecting the idea of salvation by intellectual faith alone, Frank responded:
FRANK: Well, nobody believes that.
Here Frank uses the present tense, saying nobody “believes” that, but this is not accurate.
Even today, there is a school of thought in Evangelicalism known as Free Grace theology. It’s also sometimes called “Easy Believism,” though that term is pejorative.
Free Grace advocates express themselves in more than one way, but they basically endorse salvation by intellectual assent or simply believing in Jesus and his offer of salvation.
You do not need to trust. You do not need to repent. Your faith does not need to work through love.
Free Grace faith alone is an exercise of the intellect.
What’s the case today, however, doesn’t really matter. The Council of Trent was responding to events in its own day in the 1500s, and—given the common definition of the theological virtue of faith as intellectual assent—people could and did misunderstand the formula “by faith alone.”
Was It All About Luther?
FRANK: Why would they even put it in there? That’s not the point.
CHASE: But they put it in there. . . .
FRANK: The point is they were going after Luther because Luther was pointing out that the Catholic church built a series of works around Christian theology that you had to go through them to get saved when Luther said nein. No in German. You’re saved by grace through faith. You don’t need a church structure to get saved. That’s the point. That’s why the Council of Trent came together to respond to Luther. It wasn’t to say, “Well, if I just have intellectual faith, you’re not saved.” James already said that. Even the demons know that God exists, but they tremble.
Here Frank misunderstands the nature of the Council of Trent.
It was not simply a response to Martin Luther. Martin Luther wasn’t even alive when the Council met to deal with the subject of justification.
Luther died in 1546, and the council took up justification the next year.
By 1547, there were all kinds of different Protestants. There were Lutherans, there were Calvinists, there were Anglicans, there were Anabaptists, and they didn’t all teach the same things about justification.
They had a range of different views, including on what justifying faith consists of.
And the Council of Trent was not responding to just one stream of Protestant thought. It was seeking to identify the problematic parts of multiple, different streams of thought.
Well, just like there are Free Grace people today, there were Free Grace people back then, though they didn’t have the modern name.
And—given the common definition of the theological virtue of faith—the Council was concerned that people would misunderstand the formula “by faith alone” in an unacceptable, Free Grace sense.
In any event, if we want to know what the Council meant, we need to start by looking at the language it actually used.
And it’s clear that it was not condemning all possible senses of the formula “by faith alone.”
It’s condemning a specific sense, as indicated by the language it used: If anyone says the sinner is justified by faith alone ita ut intelligat, so that he understands, in the sense that nothing besides intellectual faith is required.
That makes it abundantly obvious that they were condemning one, specific understanding of the formula, and if you know the history of this phrase and the uses of the term faith, it’s obvious what that sense is.
They’re condemning the idea that intellectual assent alone saves.
Anathema?
Frank also says something that is interesting.
CHASE: I didn’t bring up Trent. You brought it up. I just said what was said in the document.
FRANK: First of all, I’m happy you agree with salvation. What I’m not happy about is the Catholic church called people like Luther anathema!
Here I suspect that Frank has a misunderstanding of Catholic terminology.
In this period of Church history, the term Anathema referred to a type of excommunication that the local bishop would do with a special ceremony.
It’s the origin of the phrase “Bell, Book, and Candle,” because at the end of an anathema excommunication, they would end the ecclesiastical court session by ringing a bell, closing a book, and dropping candles on the floor to signify the seriousness of the situation and that the sentence had been put into effect.
So if you did endorse the faith alone formula and mean justification by intellectual faith alone, your local bishop could—after giving you the required warnings—excommunicate you.
There was also a special ceremony to lift the excommunication when you repented.
Unfortunately, many of our Protestant friends don’t know that this is how the term was used, and they often assume that anathema means something like “damned to hell” and that it applies to every Christian in the world who believes something that Trent rejected.
I suspect that is what Frank is thinking here, because he says Trent “called” people like Luther anathema.
But the Council didn’t do that.
Luther did not hold that we are saved by intellectual assent alone, so this canon would not apply to him.
And he was beyond the reach of excommunication ceremonies since he had passed on.
But, more fundamentally, the Council didn’t “call” anybody anathema.
It said, let certain people be anathema. In other words, let them be excommunicated.
Now, Frank shows a good bit of passion here:
FRANK: What I’m not happy about is the Catholic church called people like Luther anathema!
But I don’t think Frank would be showing as much passion as he did if he was referring to the fact that they were excommunicated.
I assume that his church sometimes has to kick certain disruptive individuals out.
So I don’t think he’d be that worked up over people being excommunicated.
I suspect he’s taking anathema to mean something like “damned by God.”
But that’s not what it meant.
In any event, the good news is that the penalty of anathema did not apply to all meanings of the “by faith alone” formula—just one of them.
Anathema does not mean damned to hell.
It also did not take effect automatically.
And it did not apply to ordinary Protestants, just people who claimed to still be Catholics.
I mean, bishops have better things to do with their time than endless court cases and ceremonies to excommunicate people who aren’t even claiming to be Catholic anymore because they lived in lands where the princes had forcibly imposed Protestantism on the populace.
Furthermore, the penalty of anathema no longer exists, because it has been eliminated from canon law.
Excommunication still exists, as does the rejection of the intellectual assent only understanding of “by faith alone,” but the special form of excommunication known as anathema no longer does.
So it doesn’t apply to anybody today.
“Can Catholics Be Saved?”
After this, Frank cites the number of people waiting to ask questions, he thanks Chase, and they bring the discussion to a close.
He then adds this:
FRANK: By the way, let me say one other thing. I was brought up in the Catholic church, okay? And people will ask me, “Do you think Catholics can be saved?” In my responses, “I even think some Baptist can be saved!” Okay? Because it’s not where you go to church that saves you. As he just said, it’s grace through faith.
And I appreciate this. That’s a nice ending.
Catholics and Protestants can agree that we are saved by grace through faith, and I appreciate Frank again injecting humor into the situation by saying he even thinks some Baptists can be saved.
He didn’t have to do that. I appreciate humor, and that’s a nice ending.
Conclusion
So Frank! If you see this, I hope you found it helpful. As I said, I mean it in a brotherly sense of
Proverbs 27:17
Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another.
If you’d ever like to discuss these subjects further—publicly or privately—just let me know.
Since the video was public and contained a number of misunderstandings, I decided to respond in a public way this time, but I’m also happy to also discuss things out of the public eye.
Speaking as one apologist to another, if I had an overall suggestion on these subjects, it would be not to make most of the claims covered in the video and argue for your position on other grounds.
You do a great job defending the Christian faith in general, and I hope that this is helpful and gives you things to think about.
I also very much hope that this is taken in the constructive sense it is intended, and—in keeping with that whole do unto others as you would have them do unto you Golden Rule thing I’ve heard so much about—turnabout is fair play.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so if you ever see me doing something where you think there are multiple ways I could up my game, please do let me know!
Finally, I want to give Chase a special compliment, because I thought he did an excellent job defending the Catholic understanding of the Christian faith in this encounter.
Good job, Chase!
* * *
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God bless you always!
VIDEO SOURCES:
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRakI8lIzLQ