In this episode, Trent shares an excerpt from his recent rebuttal of Dr. Jerry Walls’s argument against the doctrine of the papacy. He also engages Dr. Walls’s comments on the quality of Trent’s scholarship in defense of the Church.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. I want to give a big thanks to all of our supporters, everyone who prays for the podcast, who recommends it by word of mouth or by leaving a review on iTunes, and especially everyone who has financially supported the podcast to allow it to grow.
It’s really grown. We’ve done over 350 episodes. We’ve had nearly 4 million cumulative downloads of the podcast so far. Lots of people are hearing about it, and we’ve been able to expand. Especially if you’re supporting us a trenthornpodcast.com, you’ve allowed the podcast to grow so that we can now focus on doing YouTube rebuttal videos.
I love doing these. These rebuttal videos get somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 views, which is pretty good for a channel that just started actually. We’re getting way more views than even the subscribers that we have. If you haven’t subscribed, be sure to go check it out. Just search Counsel of Trent on YouTube and you’ll find it there.
What’s really neat is that people send me email recommendations. Our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com get kind of first priority if they send me a message saying, “Hey, here’s a video on YouTube. I’d love for you to do a rebuttal to it.” If you haven’t watched the rebuttals, I highly recommend you go watch them on our Patreon community at trendhornpodcast.com. I post the rebuttal videos in an audio form if you like to hear them in that way as well.
What I do is I just watch these anti-Catholic YouTube videos and I use a software called Camtasia, which records me, my webcam, but also my computer screen. I make a little usually a PowerPoint presentation to go along with my rebuttal to point out where the arguments in these anti-Catholic videos go wrong, where they fall apart.
A lot of people recently were messaging me about a video on the Capturing Christianity YouTube channel. The video was called The Strongest, all in caps, The Strongest Argument Against Catholicism. It was an interview between Cameron Bertuzzi and Doctor Jerry Walls.
Actually, I really enjoy Capturing Christianity and Cameron Bertuzzi. He is a Protestant apologist. He focuses more on defending mere Christianity. His YouTube channel has interviews with some of the best people. He has William Lane Craig on there. He has other Catholic philosophers. He’s interviewed Alex Pruss, all the biggest names when it comes to defending the basic claims of Christianity like the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus.
Though recently, Cameron has had an emphasis on the distinctions between Protestants and Catholics, because Cameron is actually pretty open to Catholicism. He’s Protestant, but he’s had some interactions with Matt Fradd, with Tyler McNabb.
I’m actually scheduled to go on the show soon. I really wanted to go on. People asked him, “Cameron, can you have Trent Horn on, because you’ve just had on people who are for Catholicism, people who are against it. We really want to Trent Horn on.” Cameron and I were talking back and forth, and I think the scheduled date so far, things can always change, but it’ll be the end of October. I think around October 20th, I’m going to go on, and the topic that I want to present on is The Strongest Argument Against Protestantism, kind of in response to Jerry Walls’s argument against Catholicism.
Now, Jerry Walls is an author I actually really enjoy. He’s written a book defending purgatory from a Protestant perspective. He has a book defending the doctrine of hell. He has criticisms of Calvinism. I actually agree with Jerry Walls on a fair number of things, even though he’s Protestant. Of course, I disagree with him on his assessment of Catholicism.
What I want to share with you today here on the podcast is an excerpt of that rebuttal video I made. The whole rebuttal video, you can get it on YouTube. You can check it out there. You can listen to the audio version at trenthornpodcast.com. The entire rebuttal that I do is three hours and 11 minutes long.
When I do these rebuttals, usually the rebuttal video is about three hours, sorry, three times as long, two to three times as long as the original video, because what I do is I play the original video I’m rebutting. I let this person have their say, and then I offer my thoughts. I might speed up the original video just a smidge to get things moving faster. But the original interview was about an hour and 17 minutes, so my rebuttal ends up being over three hours long. I’m going to play a nice little chunk of it here for you to get an idea of the rebuttal, but there’s so much more obviously I can’t play. Go to the YouTube channel and check it out.
But I’m going to play here a lot of it dealing with the core argument that Doctor Walls is trying to make against Catholicism. This is the basic argument, Doctor Walls’s argument, and I found it to be kind of weak. I think a lot of other people watching the YouTube channel thought that way as well, thought there were a significant number of people in the comments who were Catholic who said that their faith had been shaken by it. I was really surprised, but that’s why we do these rebuttal videos to be able to help people.
What is the strongest argument against Catholicism? Well, Doctor Walls basically says that just as the resurrection is the foundational element of Christianity, the papacy is a foundational element of Catholicism. His basic argument is that there’s way more evidence for the resurrection than there is for the papacy. In fact, there’s evidence against the papacy being something that was part of apostolic revelation. He claims the papacy kind of emerge ex nihilo if you will, in the middle of the second century and that no one before that had any idea about Peter’s successors.
His big argument is that if the papacy were true, then we would have abundant evidence that there was a bishop in the Roman Church in the city of Rome, that Rome would have had a bishop in the first century. But he claims that even Catholic scholars … and mostly Doctor Walls’s argument is an argument from silence based on an argument from authority.
He says that Catholic papal historians, people like Robert Eno or Eamon Duffy, he says even these Catholic scholars, they claim, they say that there was no papacy in the first century. At the very least, there was no first century bishop of Rome. Instead, the Roman Church was led by a community of presbyters or a community of priests, not a single bishop. Doctor Walls puts all this together to make an argument against Catholicism, claiming that if the papacy were true, then we would have all this evidence for a first century bishop of Rome and that even these Catholic historians like Eno and Duffy would recognize this.
Now, of course, in the three hour video, I meticulously show where this argument goes wrong. You’ll get the cliff notes version in the podcast today. But if you want the full unabridged version, be sure to go to the YouTube channel to be able to watch that.
But here’s the point that I make in the video. We know that the early church was divided as a hierarchy into three kinds of leadership: the deacons, the priests, and the bishops, or in Greek, the diakanoi, the presbyterate, and the episcopoi, so deacons, priests, and bishops. However, in the middle of the first century, these offices were somewhat interchangeable.
In Acts chapter 20, Paul calls the elders in the church of Ephesus to him. They’re referred to in Acts 20:17. It says, “Paul from Miletus sent to Ephesus and called to him the elders, presbuteros, of the church.” He called together the elders, presbuteros, where we get the English word priest. But then in Acts 20:28, so just 11 verses later in this address that he gives to the presbyterate, to the elders, AKA the priests, he says to them, “Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you guardians,” or in Greek episkopos, “To feed the church of the Lord.”
Here he’s gathered the priest or the elders, but he also calls them bishops. The titles of deacon, priest, and bishop were actually somewhat interchangeable. Paul referred to himself as a deacon. Saint Peter, who was an apostle, in his first letter refers to himself as a fellow elder. That was in the 60s AD, 60s in the first century.
But then you fast forward to the year 108 AD or 110 AD in the early second century. Saint Ignatius of Antioch makes it very clear that these three hierarchical elements are distinct. That there are deacons, then there are priests, and then there is a single bishop who has administrative jurisdictional control over a church in a particular area. That a church, whether it’s an Ephesus, or Tralles, or anywhere else, it will have deacons, priests, and a bishop that you are to follow just as, in Ignatius’ words, just as Jesus Christ follows the Father believers in these different churches are to follow the bishop.
We can see that there was a gradual development and understanding of what the office of bishop was, and that gradual understanding does not disprove the doctrine of the papacy. In the clips I’m going to share with you on today’s show, I talk more about this development, but also I go after the main argument that Doctor Walls makes. His argument is really an argument from authority. He says, well, these Catholic historians don’t believe there was a first century bishop in Rome.
Okay. Well, if you have really skeptical scholars, even skeptical Catholic scholars, you’ll get skeptical conclusions. I really want to know why don’t they believe that? Let’s examine the argument. I find the argument, the main argument people make against their being a first century bishop of Rome, to be spectacularly weak, very, very weak, as I’ll describe here in the video.
I go through that part of Doctor Walls’s presentation, and then I wanted to share with you an answer to one of the Q and A’s, one of the questions that was submitted to him in the interview, because I get brought up in the question that was submitted to Doctor Walls. I was brought up, and I found his reply interesting, as you will see. I’m going to address part of Doctor Walls’s argument and his reply to a question dealing with me actually, and show how his attitude towards addressing the doctrine of the papacy is actually contradictory when it comes to his attitude towards defending other aspects of Christian doctrine.
We’ll cover all of that, but if you really want more, if you’ve got the whole three hour shebang, be sure to go to Counsel of Trent on YouTube. You can listen to the full audio version at trenthornpodcasts.com. If you want to help us to keep making more rebuttal videos and to increase our frequency so we can just pump out even more of these things, because frankly, there’s nobody else on YouTube. I don’t know. There’s hardly anyone else. I know one or two YouTube channels that do rebuttals kind of like this, but I don’t know anybody who does full on rebuttals like I do towards anti-Catholic videos. I just don’t. If you want to see us increase the frequency of these things, be sure to consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. Now without further ado, here is an excerpt from my rebuttal to The Strongest Argument Against Catholicism.
Were other places that had bishops before Rome did, which is really interesting. One of the most interesting pieces of evidence-
Yeah, that’s interesting. It should make us very skeptical of the idea that there was no bishop in Rome when there were bishops in all the other churches that Ignatius of Antioch is writing to. I’ll let Jerry talk about, Doctor Walls talk about Saint Ignatius of Antioch.
Jerry Walls:
That is often cited in this regard is Ignatius and his seven letters. What’s fascinating is in these seven letters, there’s like at least 40 references to the bishop. I mean, he’s really obsessed you might say with episcopal power, with bishops’ authority and the like. But here’s what’s fascinating. All of these 40 or so some references to the bishop and his importance and his authority occur in just six of the letters. There’s only one of them where you do not have a mention of a bishop.
Again, it’s very striking and this is one of the pieces of evidence that historians find very striking. The one, the letter written to Rome is the one where there’s no bishop mentioned. Others, other churches, he mentions the bishop, but in Rome, where you supposedly have the Bishop of bishops residing, he doesn’t mention a bishop.
Now, Roman Catholics attempt to explain this as well. He didn’t mention it because he was trying to protect the bishop. He was afraid that if he mentioned him, he would endangered him, things like that.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
I kind of worry that that’s a kind of argument from silence.
Jerry Walls:
Exactly, and it’s highly speculative and no evidence whatever to support it other than your ape or dogmatic commitment to papal theology.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Well, no. I was saying that the argument that you gave about Ignatius not including letters to bishop or including bishops’ names and everything in his letter to Rome, that kind of sounds like an argument from silence.
Jerry Walls:
How so? I’m not sure I’m getting it. He mentions bishops in every other letter. He’s almost obsessed with the authority of the bishop. There’s like 40-some references scattered throughout these letters. But when he writes to Rome, where supposedly the Bishop of bishops lives, he doesn’t mention a bishop.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
Well, I think it would still fall under the heading … I don’t think that every argument from silence is necessarily a bad one. I’m just saying that it kind of falls under that heading. If you could build an argument that says, we would expect him to say this or mention these people, if we can build that expectation, then the argument, whatever you call it doesn’t matter. If the argument is good, it does-
Jerry Walls:
Exactly. I think the way he talks about the bishop in the other six letters is precisely what leads you to think if there were a bishop in Rome, especially a bishop as important as Roman Catholics say, he would certainly be mentioned. That’s what I’m saying.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Cameron is absolutely right here. This is an argument from silence, and it is an incredibly weak argument from silence. I have never been impressed with this argument, and it really boggles my mind even that someone like Eno or Duffy or even Catholic historians would buy into this kind of argument. Because here’s the thing. Okay, so the bishop of Rome, the bishop is not mentioned in the letter to the Romans, what he’s mentioned in the other Ignatian correspondence. But if the letter to Rome is different in highly relevant aspects than the other letters saint Ignatius writes, then we have good grounds for thinking that it would be different and maybe the bishop would not be mentioned.
Let me give you a few examples of those differences. First, the other letters that Ignatius writes to like the Trallians, or the Smyrnaeans, or the Ephesians, whoever it may be, he’s always correcting them saying, “Obey your bishop. Obey your bishop. Obey your bishop. Don’t fall into schism. Don’t fall into sedition, whatever it might be. Obey your bishop.” He’s correcting them. But then when he writes to Rome, he simply says … He doesn’t correct them at all. Instead, he does something he doesn’t do in any of his other letters. He heaps effusive praise onto the church at Rome. He says the church at Rome is worthy of praise, worthy of obtaining whatever you desire, worthy of being deemed holy. He says the church at Rome presides in love over the other churches.
Now, that Greek word presiding that Ignatius uses, he uses it in another letter to the Magnesians. There to the church at Magnesia, he says, “Your bishop presides in the place of God.” He always uses the word presiding in a leadership faculty in the church. Just as the bishop of Magnesia leads the church at Magnesia, the church of Rome presides or leads over the other churches.
Well, he only says the church at Rome. He doesn’t say the bishop of Rome, Trent. Why doesn’t he do that? Well, we should be skeptical here. We should be highly skeptical of the idea that there was no bishop at Rome, because for Ignatius of Antioch, if you did not have a bishop, you were not a church. You’re not a real church without a bishop.
Here’s what he says to the letter to the Trallians. Saint Ignatius says, “In like manner, let all reverence the deacons as an appointment of Jesus Christ and the bishop as Jesus Christ, who is the son of the Father, and the presbyters as the Sanhedrin of God.” Oops, Sanhedrin. Let me fix that there. “An assembly of the apostles. Apart from these, there is no church.”
When Ignatius writes to the Trallians, he says, “You got to have deacons. You’ve got to have presbyters.” The deacons are an appointment by Jesus himself. The presbyters are kind of like the Sanhedrin, if you will. They’re like the council of elders. “But you’ve also got to have a bishop. You’ve got to have deacons, bishop, presbyters. Apart from these, there is no church.”
For Ignatius, if you don’t have these three offices, you are not a church. In particular, you’ve got to have a bishop, because you need to obey the bishop. Just as Jesus Christ obeys the Father, you’ve got to obey your bishop. Apart from these, there is no church.
But then why does Ignatius of Antioch, he heaps all of this praise on the church at Rome? If Rome had no bishop, it wouldn’t even be a real church. What he’s telling them in this letter, he’s saying, “Don’t rescue me. Don’t try to come after me. Don’t try to intervene.” Ignatius is being taken to Rome for martyrdom at this point. His letter to Rome, the Roman church is short. He’s simply saying, “Don’t come and rescue me. That is all. I don’t want you to … Don’t try to intervene. Don’t put yourselves in danger.” He’s appealing to them to not do that. Guess what? If they weren’t a real church, he could have said, “Don’t bother intervening in my affairs, because you’re not even a real church anyways. You don’t even have a bishop.” He doesn’t do that though. He never undermines them at all.
There’s a simple argument here. If, for Ignatius, to be a real church you’ve got to have a bishop, and if the church at Rome is worthy of praise and emulation and is such a great church, then the church at Rom would need to have a bishop as well.
Okay, but what about the argument from silence? Why doesn’t he mention the bishop at Rome? Why doesn’t he mention a bishop at all in his letters to the Romans? Well, here’s the thing. Ignatius also doesn’t mention presbyters in Rome or deacons in Rome either. In fact, he never mentions anyone in Rome by name at all. Well, that’s weird. Should we follow Doctor Walls and say because Ignatius never mentioned the deacons, he never mentions priests, he never mentioned Christians by name in Rome, therefore there were priests, there were no deacons, there were no Christians there? No, not at all.
In fact, that’s a really curious absence, omission from Ignatius’ letter. Why would he not mention deacons, priests, bishops, or anybody by name in the city of Rome? Well, Jerry Walls, he kind of laughed off that idea that Ignatius is trying to protect people, but that makes perfect sense. All the other letters that Ignatius was writing were to churches in Asia Minor, which is now modern day Turkey. Rome was I think the farthest away church he was writing to.
He’s under guard. He said that the Roman centurions are like angry leopards who mete out punishment. They’re very harsh. Imagine if they got ahold of a letter from him saying, “I greet you, Bishop of Rome So-and-so,” which he does in his other letters, or, “Give my regards to this believer, So-and-so.” Aha, I’ve got names now. I can go arrest people. It makes perfect sense.
I have this picture up here of Richard Bauckham’s book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. In this book, Bauckham makes the argument that in the gospel of Mark, Mark leaves the names of many people out. He refers to them only by a title or a vague description. He doesn’t refer to people by name because in the early church, these people would have been in danger from Roman authorities. That’s an argument Bauckham, who’s a Protestant scholar, makes for Mark saying that Mark purposely left out some names to protect people from the Romans.
If Mark did that, it makes perfect sense Ignatius would do that. The fact that Ignatius doesn’t mention the bishop of Rome doesn’t prove there was no bishop there any more than the fact that … Jerry Walls says, “Well, there were just a bunch of elders there.” Well, Ignatius never mentioned the elders. He never mentions the presbyters. That doesn’t prove there were no presbyters. He never mentions a person. The only person in the letter to the Romans that Ignatius mentions is Crocus, who was back in Ephesus, not in Rome. He doesn’t mention anybody else in the church by name. It makes perfect sense to me that Ignatius doesn’t mention this in order to protect people. If this is the best argument you’ve got to show there was no bishop in Rome, it is a colossal failure of an argument of silence from my opinion.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
A lot of people in their lifetime … I’m still keeping an eye on it as I can, as you’re getting through the basics of the argument. One of the things that they’re saying, we just went through some of the evidence. We went through Ignatius. What’s some more evidence? Besides the fact that these historians, you say that these historians, most historians side with you, what are some more key pieces of evidence that these historians appeal to?
Jerry Walls:
Well, again, other witnesses who were writing about the church at Rome, you’ve got Clement who lived in the late 90s probably. I’ve already mentioned Ignatius. The Shepherd of Hermas. Then you’ve got Justin Martyr who lived in the later part of the second century. All of these people were observers of the church of Rome. All of them were participants in the church of Rome. All of them described the leadership of Rome in this same sort of way, as multiple persons. Again, there’s often an interchange between elders and bishops. They use those terms more or less interchangeably. You don’t have any kind of a clear sense with most of them of anything like a bishop. But again, used interchangeably, and where you’ve got all these witnesses there, but there’s not a single exception among these people that would support the traditional papal theology.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so notice once again traditional papal theology versus the doctrine of the papacy. That’s going to come up, especially when I quote these other Catholic scholars who firmly agree that the papacy is a divine institution, but they disagree about how it arose.
Just like the Christian scholars would agree the Trinity is foundational for Christianity, but how Christians came to understand the Trinity, when you read the early church fathers, they do not have the vocabulary that is necessary to fully explicate the Trinity, not until later ecumenical councils. Yet ,they still believed in it. It’s only people like anti-Trinitarians, like Jehovah’s witnesses, who will impose a certain rigid framework of reading on them to try to get the early church fathers to say something that they didn’t mean.
But even here with the papacy, all we’re getting still are just more arguments from silence, citing these other figures. Let’s look at one of them. Let’s look at a Clement, First Clement, written some people say the late 90s, but it actually could have been earlier. It could have been in the 60s based on certain clues within the document.
If it was written earlier actually in the 60s, then Clement may not have actually been the chief presbyter or bishop of Rome at the time that he wrote it. He might’ve been a corresponding secretary for the church at Rome writing on behalf of the church at Rome. Maybe he was just the most eloquent writer that they had, and so they tasked him with this of composing a letter on behalf of the church at Rome. But it’s clear then when we look at First Clement about apostolic succession and the unique sea of Rome, very clear what we get here.
In First Clement 44, it says, “Our apostles also knew through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is especially striking if this is written in the early 60s. “That there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason therefore, in as much as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those ministers already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry.”
Does Clement talk about a 27 book Canon of the New Testament? Does he talk about Sola Scriptura? No. I thought that was the foundational, sole infallible rule of faith? He doesn’t mention any of that at all. Instead, he talks about authority being found in the apostles, but after their death and the death of the people they chose, the successors of the people they chose, that’s where your authority is going to be found.
Philip Schaff, who is a 19th century church historian, very anti-Catholic, very critical of the Catholic Church, here’s what he says about the church at Rome and the leadership it had in the early church. He says that, “The letter of Clement gives advice with superior administrative wisdom to an important church in the East, to Corinth. Dispatches messengers to her and exhorts to order and unity in a tone of calm, dignity, and authority.” Clement was written in response to a deposition, a deposing … Sorry, not deposition. A deposing of elders at the church in Corinth, that they were basically kicked out of office and Clement and Rome, the church of Rome, intervenes in this affair.
What Schaff, who was an anti-Catholic Protestant, says, “As the organ of God and the Holy Spirit, it’s a tone of calm, dignity, and authority.” This is all the more surprising if Saint John, as is probable, was then still living in Ephesus, which was near to Corinth then Rome. Here Rome is being sought out, even if the later dates of Clement being written, even if you have a living apostle at that time, because Rome has special authority. Schaff even says this is one of the first exercises of papal authority.
Bernard Green in his scholarly work, Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries, is published by I think T&T Press, so it’s an academic work. He says this about the leadership of the church at Rome during this time on page 96. He says, “It might plausibly be suggested that the presbyters who led the church at the end of the first and beginning of the second centuries in Rome always needed some kind of president for them to act coherently as the leaders of one church.”
This would be roughly analogous to how you think about on the Supreme Court there are nine justices, but there is also a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who has important duties and honors that the other justices do not have. They’re all equally justices, but one of them is a chief justice who has special authority. He doesn’t just veto everybody else. He’s not a dictator, but he has special duties that are unique to him as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That might be a rough analogy to understanding how the church at Rome was organized in the late first century if there was no first century bishop. Which still we haven’t seen arguments that they’re not. We still haven’t seen a compelling argument that there was not, except for the fact that Ignatius never addresses a single bishop.
Now in Clement, it does use the plural we. For example, we compel you rather than I. Now, of course, if Clement where the corresponding secretary he’s writing on behalf of the whole church. That’s not surprising. If Clement were the bishop of Rome, if it was a later date and he’s the bishop of Rome writing, “We implore you. We desire this,” that could be the royal we, the royal we so to speak. In fact, you look at papal documents going all the way up to the 19th century, even Popes I think in the early 20th century use the royal we, speaking not, “I say this,” but we as being like an entire royal court if you were, the overseers of the … being the overseer of the church, the bishop of Rome along with the other bishops.
But I lean towards the view that this may have been written more in the 60s when Clement was a corresponding secretary who had this particular job among the elders in Rome. In fact, The Shepherd of Hermas talks about how an angel tells Hermes in The Shepherd of Hermas, a first century document, “Send a copy of this letter to Clement, for his role is to send these to the foreign churches.” That adds more evidence to that.
But if you have elders working together with different tasks, it really would make more sense if there was a chief elder among them to provide unity so they could actually function as an organic whole. Then what would arise from that, what Green and Sullivan and other Catholic scholars who don’t deny the papacy take from this, is that the office of chief presbyter eventually came to be called the office of the bishop. We’re all bishops. We’re all priests. A bishop is a priest. A bishop is a priest, right? That’s what he is. We’re all bishops. We’re all priests. But then eventually, it came to be seen the chief presbyter, we’ll just call him the bishop. We’re all bishops in a sense.
I mean, the term bishop can be applied analogously even to Christ. In 1 Peter, it says that Jesus Christ is the bishop or overseer of our souls. You could say that priests are all overseers or bishops in a sense, but in the early church, the title bishop came to be settled upon in many of the churches to the chief presbyter who had a particular authority from the apostles, or something like that.
Cameron Bertuzzi:
All right, so here is another comment from Jay Shy. He says, “Please Dante Trent Horn. He wrote articles refuting your arguments. I would love to see Cameron host a debate with Trent.”
Jerry Walls:
I would just say this. I mean, what I find striking about this comment is the reliance on a popular apologist over against a world-class historian who’s a Roman Catholic who was on the the Pontifical Historical Commission. I find it striking the reliance upon popular apologists rather than on serious scholarship. Again, I think that’s very telling.
In fact, I think a lot of Roman Catholics are sort of like younger creationists. They’ve got their younger creationists who say, “The world’s only 10,000 years old, and here’s the evidence for it.” They followed those people rather than the leading scientists in the world. That’s what I think is striking, and that’s why in this discussion today I cited people who are authorities in papal history. These are not popular apologists. They’re papal authorities. You can, I guess, follow whoever you think makes the most sense, but I think it’s striking that these leading historians themselves are the ones who make this case.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, I’m not sure if Doctor Walls is really familiar with my work. If he is familiar with my work, then I would infer from this answer that he doesn’t consider it to be serious scholarship, that it’s on par with young earth creationism. I don’t know what it takes to be a serious scholar. I do have three master’s degrees and I’ve written nine, going on 10 books now that have been well received. I’ve also published in peer reviewed academic journals. I don’t know. Maybe he means that. Or it’s quite possible Jerry Walls has never read my work and he just assumes that my defense of the Catholic faith is similar maybe to other popular Catholic apologetics that he has come across, which is not a wise assumption to make.
But I would enjoy interacting with him. I’d be happy to do a debate with him on the papacy if he is interested in doing that. Maybe we could set that up either on Cameron’s channel or on Matt Fradd’s channel, Pints with Aquinas. We’ll have to see about that.
But this analogy about young earth creationism, this idea that my work as a Catholic apologist, I’m like the young earth creationist and the Catholic historians are the real scholars and they say that the papacy is false, which they don’t, which ad nauseum they don’t. They just put forward another formulation of the doctrine, one that I would agree with when it comes to the gradual development of the episcopacy, by the way.
Here’s the analogy I want to make that I think is very appropriate here between creationism and this debate about the papacy. Let’s take with creationism we would have three groups. We would have the young earth creationists who say, “Yeah, I know the Bible contradicts the scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old, but guess what? The scientific evidence is wrong, and the Bible is right,” is what the young earth creationists would say.
Then you have the theistic evolutionist, and Doctor Walls is one of these people. He would say, “Well, no, it’s only a certain reading of the Bible that contradicts the scientific evidence. You can have the scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old, and if you read the Bible in a particular way to see that it’s not necessarily affirming as obligatory for Christian belief, that the earth is only thousands of years old.” If you look at it in that way, which Doctor Walls does as a theistic evolutionist, then there’s no contradiction.
Then you have the atheists who would come along and say, like the young earth creationists, they’d say, “The Bible contradicts the scientific evidence, but guess what? It’s not the scientific evidence that’s wrong. It’s the Bible that’s wrong.” The atheist a lot of times will say to the theistic evolutionists like Doctor Walls, “Doctor Walls, you’re just interpreting the Bible to save your belief, and you’re just doing that to get out of a jam, and you know it, and you’re dishonest, or you’re poor scholarship,” yada yada. I’m sure Doctor Walls as a theistic.Evolutionist would not enjoy being told that, because he would probably say, “No, I’m not. There are good reasons to believe the Bible is not literally affirming a six day creation or 1,000 year old creation.”
Actually, there were church fathers, like Augustine for example, who would hold Doctor Walls’s view. I’m sure he would go down that line when dealing with the atheist, and he would tell the atheist, “Hey, I’m the Christian here. I’ll tell you. I can tell you, here’s what the Bible say, and don’t tag me over here. I can read both of these things, the scientific evidence and what the Bible says, and there’s harmony here, and you’re trying to find a contradiction where one doesn’t exist.”
That’s the analogy. Young earth creationists, theistic evolutionists, and atheists. When it comes to the papacy, each of these three groups has a counterpart. The counterpart to the young earth creationist would be the zealous Catholic apologists. They would say, “Yeah, Vatican I contradicts the historical evidence, but the historical evidence is wrong, and there was all of this, everything taught about the papacy,” and they put forward this kind of grand hypothesis in spite of what the historical evidence may say.
Then there would be the cautious Catholic apologists who would be analogous to the theistic evolutionists, who would say, “No, only a certain reading of Vatican I contradicts the historical evidence.” When you read Vatican I and understand properly what is being infallibly taught and what is not being infallible taught and what is being asserted in different ways, you can see that Vatican I does not assert as grand a hypothesis as a more zealous Catholic apologist, who’s like the young earth creationists Walls is talking about, puts forward.
The cautious Catholic apologists myself would say, “Well, only a certain reading of the First Vatican Council contradicts historical evidence. There’s actually no contradiction there when you look at the historical evidence and the magisterial documents, when you interpret them in the proper light.”
But then you have Protestant apologists who are analogous to the atheists. Just as the atheist comes along and says, “The Bible and science contradict. But guess what? It’s the Bible that’s wrong,” the Protestant apologists will come along and say, “Vatican I contradicts historical evidence. But guess what? It’s Vatican I that’s wrong about this, and the church is in error when it teaches the doctrine of the papacy.”
That’s what’s so frustrating when I see Doctor Walls doing this, that in this approach here as a Protestant apologist, he is acting like the atheist, that I’m sure he doesn’t enjoy dealing with, who try to say that he doesn’t understand the Bible or he doesn’t understand scholarship. I would just implore someone like Doctor Walls or other people who hold this view, don’t act like the atheist. Don’t act like the atheists would say, “There’s a contradiction, so definitely it’s flat out wrong.”
Instead, if you are willing, especially if you are a theistic evolutionist or someone like that on the Protestant side … Sorry, I’m going to bring this up here. If you can say, “Look, the scientific evidence for the past and the biblical evidence, what the Bible teaches, are not … they may appear contradictory to some people, but when you study scripture and see what it’s teaching, you see there’s no contradiction.” There were even older church fathers like Augustine who held to this view, so it’s not a view we just came up with to save the Bible 150 years ago when Darwin was around.
If Doctor Walls is willing to say that for the Bible and the doctrine of creation, then he should give Catholic apologists the same flexibility to say, “Look, we can read Vatican I and historical evidence on the papacy to show there is no contradiction here.” Also, this is not a view we came up with 150 years ago to get around historical studies of the papacy, because as I showed in my citation of Ludwig Ott and he cites Saint Jerome, the gradual development of the episcopacy was something that was known by the early church fathers or speculated by some of the early church fathers, so there’s no contradiction.
Really, when it comes to being … I am not the young earth creationist here. I’m more like Doctor Walls. I’m like the theistic evolutionist, the more cautious Catholic apologist. Ironically, Doctor Walls, in the approach he takes, he is being like the atheist critics that approached the text in a very rigid way, seeking contradictions instead of trying to seek understanding. I would just implore him and others in that particular camp to not operate in that way.
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