In this “guest dialogue” episode, Trent shares part one of the five-part dialogue Jimmy Akin recently had with the Protestant apologist Steve Gregg.
Speaker 1: Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Well, hello, and thanks for stopping by The Counsel of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. You know what we’ve been trying to do here on the podcast is invite on guests who disagree with an aspect of the Catholic faith and have gracious, meaningful dialogue with them, that our end goal is to generate, obviously, more light than heat, and to help share the truth of our faith with other people and be a model for how to do that. That’s why I think these dialogues are important.
Trent Horn: I’m going to continue doing them. I’ve got a lot of great guests lined up here over the next few months. I’m hoping to do a series, actually, with really prominent atheists over the next summer as part of a book that I’m working on to return to the subject of atheism. More on that in the near future.
Trent Horn: What’s great is that here at Catholic Answers, we’ve got all kinds of people who are pros at apologetics and defending the faith, people who are very skilled at engaging in these dialogues, so I think that you’re edified not just by the dialogues I have with people who disagree with the Catholic faith, but also hearing other people who can model that very well. One of those people who is the best at that is my friend, senior apologist here at Catholic Answers, his name is Jimmy Akin. He’s going to talk to us a little bit about a dialogue he recently had that you can find out about here at Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Jimmy, welcome to the Counsel of Trent.
Jimmy Akin: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Trent Horn: You recently sat down with a Protestant apologist, Steve Gregg. That was put together in I think it’s like a four-hour-long compilation called Jimmy Akin vs. Steve Gregg: Debating Differences, Finding Common Ground. How did this come about?
Jimmy Akin: Well, I think discussions, debates can be very productive, and the trick is finding someone it’s productive to have such a discussion with, because there are loads of people it’s not worth debating, for one reason or another. That’s a key reason that I don’t do more debates than I do, is because of the difficulty of finding good partners. But I knew Tim Staples had debated Steve Gregg some years ago, and we have that set available if people want to get it. It’s called Staples vs. Gregg. I thought, you know, Steve Gregg is a really thoughtful guy. He’s an Evangelical. He’s not in all respects a typical Evangelical. He has his own views on a variety of different subjects, but-
Trent Horn: But you could almost describe any Evangelical that way.
Jimmy Akin: Well, yeah. He’s a very thoughtful guy. He works well on audio. He has his own radio program. So I arranged a meeting with him. I drove up the coast a little bit and met with him. We had lunch together. It was a very cordial conversation. We got to know each other a little bit, and decided to proceed forward with the discussion.
Trent Horn: Yeah, and so how did you frame the discussion? How did you plan it going into it? What was your ultimate goal with it?
Jimmy Akin: I wanted to look at certain topics, and I know that he wanted to look at certain topics. I wanted to cover some of the basics. I wanted to make sure we took a look at the issue of authority. How do we form our doctrine? Is it sola scriptura? Is it something else? I wanted to look at the subject of salvation, and there’s a lot more common ground there, potentially, with different groups than is often recognized.
Jimmy Akin: I know he wanted to cover certain things. He wanted to talk about the intercession of the saints and things like that. We basically, the two of us, proposed topics that we’d like to cover, and then we discussed them.
Trent Horn: If you’re interested in getting this CD set, for this episode, we’re going to share part one of the CD set. There’s actually five different discussions that are about 40 to 45 minutes in length. You’ll get a sneak peek here on the podcast of part one, which is authority. What is the role of Scripture and tradition?
Trent Horn: If you’re a premium subscriber, I’m going to give you a sneak peek at another part of the dialogue series, so consider supporting the podcast at trenthornpodcast.com. You get access to that bonus content, other bonus content, and you help keep the podcast going so we can have other dialogues with great guests, and hopefully bring on… What I’d love to do in the future, which would be fun on the podcast, is I would love playing the role of moderator and bringing you in, or Carlo or Tim, and someone else, and then I can, instead of being out on the field, I can play ref and then watch other people play every now and then, because we all have different ways we approach these dialogues and issues, and I think it’s good for people to see, even if it’s the same subject, to see how we approach them differently.
Jimmy Akin: By the way, also want to let people know that we do have the set available for listening on CD and, I believe, download. They can get it at shop.catholic.com. If they just type in Akin, A-K-I-N, and Gregg, G-R-E-G-G, Akin vs. Gregg, they’ll get it.
Trent Horn: Yeah. The full title is Jimmy Akin vs. Steve Gregg: Debating Differences, Finding Common Ground. But if you go to shop.catholic.com and just type in Akin, A-K-I-N, and Gregg, with three Gs, G-R-E-
Jimmy Akin: One at the beginning, two at the end.
Trent Horn: Right, so G-R-E-G-G. Akin and Gregg. Type it in at shop.catholic.com. You’ll get the set. I recommend that you get the whole set. It’s a treasure trove of learning how to dialogue with our Protestant brothers and sisters, because we desperately need more of that. A lot of times when we get in these dialogues, Jimmy, it seems like we have more we agree on than we disagree on in some respects.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. Also, what I find really helpful about these is Gregg is a real gentleman, and he’s seriously intellectually engaged. There are some discussions you listen to and it’s clear these people are just interested in getting out their talking points. They’re not thinking through what their dialogue partner is saying. They’re not trying to enter into the thought world of the person they’re talking to, and they’re not trying to interact with that world. They just want to declare what they want to say, and they’re not interested in thinking through things from the other person’s perspective. But Gregg-
Trent Horn: They just want to win.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. Gregg is very good about that. Steve Gregg is not only gentlemanly in his approach, but he also intellectually engages with the material I’m presenting to him. That I find very helpful.
Trent Horn: Now, is he a… He’s local, I assume.
Jimmy Akin: He’s here in Southern California.
Trent Horn: Is he a pastor or an author? He has a radio show.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah. He’s written. He has written, so he’s an author. He also has done a lot of pastoral work. He’s kind of a multipurpose guy.
Trent Horn: Do you think sometimes that… Like we said, there’s a wide variety of Protestants we can discuss with. Do you find that in some variants of Protestantism it’s easier to have dialogues and find common ground than other variants like-
Jimmy Akin: Oh yeah. The level of anti-Catholicism in a particular strain of Protestantism will largely determine how much dialogue it’s possible to have.
Trent Horn: Which ones do you think we can actually get a lot of fruitful dialogue fairly easily out of?
Jimmy Akin: Well, it depends on the individuals, because if an individual is really closed to alternative points of view, then it’s going to limit what you can achieve. But in terms of finding common ground that’s very substantial, Lutheranism. Now, if you’re talking about certain strains of Lutheranism that still want to say the pope is the antichrist, maybe not so much, but if you’re talking to other groups of Lutherans, we actually have quite a bit in common. They would agree about the role of baptism in salvation. They’re not going to be interpreting faith alone in a way that excludes baptism.
Jimmy Akin: The major Lutheran organization, followed by the major World Methodist and Reformed organizations, signed a joint declaration on justification with the Catholic Church. Obviously, that’s one of the two founding principles of the Reformation. If we’re achieving common ground there, that’s very significant.
Jimmy Akin: The other founding principle, sola scriptura, is going to be something that, with groups like Anglicans, some Anglicans, and some older, more traditional Protestants, including even Presbyterians sometimes, will recognize a greater role for the church fathers and for tradition. On the other hand, you’ll have other groups, like Pentecostals and charismatics, who are open to ongoing private revelation.
Jimmy Akin: So with different groups, you’ll find different aspects of sola scriptura are understood in a way. Even if they still use the formula, they’re open to Catholic viewpoints on a variety of these different issues, even if they don’t understand them quite the same.
Trent Horn: They’re beginning to see the value of Christian history to set up these guardrails to understand doctrine, whereas there was a time where a lot of Evangelicals didn’t give a whiff about the church fathers. Now they’re starting to see the value of that, to put these guardrails up.
Trent Horn: It’s funny you mention Luther, because I remember in my debate with James White a few years ago, I was very… It was at a Calvinist conference. We were debating whether salvation could be lost. I tried very hard… I did not have the Catechism or anything Catholic in my presentation. My key witness that I cited routinely was Martin Luther about salvation being lost, and I think James, he was funny, he said, “Was it the old Luther or the young Luther?” I’m like, “It’s Luther all the way.”
Jimmy Akin: Luther all the way through, yeah. In fact, Lutherans today will typically adhere to Luther’s position that salvation could be lost.
Trent Horn: A Lutheran emailed me. He said, “I know that you’re Catholic, but I loved your presentation with White because you basically articulated the Lutheran position on this issue, and I really enjoyed that.” I think it’s about, yeah, when we…
Trent Horn: Before we move into the dialogue with you and Steve Gregg to share with others, what are some tips you can offer people when they have these conversations with Protestant friends? How do they keep the conversation moving? What’s some general tips?
Jimmy Akin: First thing I would say to anybody is, particularly if you are talking with someone for the first time about this, if you don’t know them, you haven’t had prior conversations on this topic, or even if you do know them, but you just haven’t discussed this subject before, ask questions, and ask them not Socratically, for purposes of challenging the person’s position; ask them diagnostically, to understand the person’s position; because, especially, Protestantism is so intellectually diverse, you cannot assume that because someone is a Protestant, they’re going to believe a particular thing. We even mentioned how Lutherans will, some of them, “Oh, the pope is the antichrist,” others, “No, the pope is not the antichrist.”
Jimmy Akin: You have to start by understanding the person’s position, and that means asking questions, not for purposes of challenging them, but just to learn what their viewpoint is, so that you can understand it accurately. Then identify areas of common ground, and point those out, because by pointing them out, you show goodwill and you also show areas we don’t need to talk about further. That saves time in moving the discussion forward, because if we both agree, “Hey, we both agree on this. Even if we say it a little differently, we agree on this point, so we don’t need to detain ourselves by talking about that,” that lets us move on to issues where there are more substantive differences of opinion that we need to talk about.
Jimmy Akin: Then, obviously, in the course of doing those, exercise good turn-taking in the conversation, and be gentlemanly or gentlewomanly. Be as kind and do your best to generate as much light as you can and as little heat as you can.
Trent Horn: You may be tempted to want to generate heat if you’re asked a question you don’t know the answer to. You can just say, “You know, I need to think about that more,” or “I know people who’ve thought a lot about that. Let me go and get an answer from them.”
Jimmy Akin: “I need to do further research on that.” Easiest thing in the world to say.
Trent Horn: Absolutely. Helpful to do. I want to recommend, all of you, go and check out Jimmy’s CD set at shop.catholic.com, Jimmy Akin vs. Steve Gregg: Debating Differences, Finding Common Ground. If you’re not sold yet you want to get it, I think you will be after you hear the rest of this episode, part one between Jimmy and Steve, authority, what is the role of scripture and tradition. Definitely check it out at shop.catholic.com. Search Akin and Gregg, G-R-E-G-G.
Trent Horn: Jimmy, thanks for coming by.
Jimmy Akin: My pleasure, Trent.
Trent Horn: Here is part one of Jimmy Akin and Steve Gregg debating differences and finding common ground.
Cy Kellett: Hello, I am Cy Kellett, and my usual day job is as the host of Catholic Answers Live radio program, but today I have the great privilege of hosting a series of discussions between Steve Gregg and Jimmy Akin on issues of import to Christians of every stripe.
Cy Kellett: Steve Gregg is a Christian teacher, preacher, musician, and cartoonist. He founded the Great Commission School, which he directed for 16 years. Steve is a longtime radio minister who now hosts The Narrow Path radio ministry. He’s the author of All You Want to Know About Hell and Revelation: Four Views.
Cy Kellett: Jimmy Akin is a convert to the Catholic faith. He’s a senior apologist here at Catholic Answers. He blogs at jimmyakin.com. He’s the author of books such as The Fathers Know Best, The Drama of Salvation, and A Daily Defense.
Cy Kellett: Welcome, Steve Gregg.
Steve Gregg: Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett: And welcome, Jimmy.
Jimmy Akin: Thank you so much. I was jazzed. This weekend, I was looking at Steve’s website and discovered you got a couple of your comics online. That’s something else we have in common. I trained for years to be a comic book artist.
Steve Gregg: I think we have a lot in common.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah.
Cy Kellett: You have a series of topics that we’re going to cover. This morning, we begin with authority. Where do we find authority? In parentheses there, scripture and tradition. This is a perennial conversation between Protestant Christians and Catholics and, well, Christians of all stripes. We’ll begin, Steve, with you, with an opening statement about authority in the church.
Steve Gregg: Sure. Well, I’m here coming from a non-Roman Catholic perspective, and therefore, like most Protestants, I take what most people would call a sola scriptura view, but mine is a little modified in that I don’t take my beliefs so much from the book because it’s a book; I take my beliefs, as much as I can, from those who speak for God under inspiration. That would be the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.
Steve Gregg: Insofar as we have any preserved written words, teachings from those sources, I believe they are from God, and they are inspired by God in a way that subsequent church leaders have not been. I don’t believe that any of the church leaders of the later first century or second century or beyond had the same kind of authority to speak as the apostles had. In that respect, I don’t follow the idea of apostolic succession either, which we’ll discuss another time.
Steve Gregg: My understanding is that God spoke through chosen spokesmen. He inspired the prophets in the Old Testament to speak His exact words. The apostles’ authority I think rests on something a little different than that kind of inspiration. The apostles were not prophets. Paul distinguished between apostles and prophets. He was an apostle, as were Peter and John and Matthew and people like that.
Steve Gregg: The apostolic teaching has its authority not so much based on some kind of an inspiration like the prophets had, but on the fact that Jesus commissioned them as His spokespeople. He authorized them to lead the church and to speak authoritatively for the church as, to my knowledge, He has done with no other people, that the 12 apostles in the early church held an authority that was unlike that of any others in the Jerusalem church, and then, of course, Paul and his companions among the Gentiles. Peter and James and John recognized Paul and his companions having a different sphere of ministry to the Gentiles, and they, Peter, James, and John, according to Galatians, were sent to the circumcision, at least initially. I believe they all went to Gentiles eventually, the ones that lived long enough.
Steve Gregg: The point is that we have in the writings of apostles or of their legates, their-
Jimmy Akin: Associates.
Steve Gregg: … associates, like Luke or like Mark, we have the preserved teachings of the apostles, who were appointed by Jesus Christ to speak for Him. Jesus said in John 13:20, “He that receives Him that I send receives me.” Of course, an apostle is a sent one, and He was speaking to the apostles. I believe he’s saying that those who receive the words of an apostle are receiving as if it was His own, and therefore if we have authentic writings from apostles, and I believe we do, then those writings hold an authority that belongs to the apostolic office.
Steve Gregg: Now, the Jews had, of course, the prophets. They had the law that was given by God through Moses. But in the course of Jewish history in the Old Testament, the Jews developed an idea that Moses has given not only a written Torah but also an oral Torah, so that the modern Orthodox Jew holds that there’s the written law given by Moses, the 613 laws, and then there’s a lot of other things that became what Jesus called the Traditions of the Elders, what the Jews in His day called the Traditions of the Elders; later, they became the contents of the Talmud. The Jews believed that the rabbinic teachings were authoritative. At least, the Pharisees believed that the rabbinic teachings were authoritative like those of Moses himself.
Steve Gregg: I believe the church went the same direction in its history. It had the Scriptures from God, and then it had what’s almost equivalent to an oral Torah in the church, which is the traditions, developed first from the consensus of church fathers and the magisterium and so forth.
Steve Gregg: I believe that the Jews made a mistake in adding to the law of Moses. The Old Testament says do not add to God’s Word lest you be found a liar. That’s what it says in Proverbs 30, Verses Five and Six.
Steve Gregg: And I think the church made a mistake in elevating the oral Torah, so to speak, the traditions of later teachers after the apostles, to the level of Scripture also. In that, I differ from the Roman Catholic, which holds that, of course, the official traditions of the church, which are approved of the magisterium and the popes and so forth, are equivalent to Scripture as an authority for normative orthodoxy and church teaching and practice.
Steve Gregg: I don’t think any traditions that have come from men after the time of the apostles have the same authority as Scripture. I believe we can learn from them, just as I can learn from anyone today I listen to, but I don’t believe anybody speaks with the authority of the apostles today. That’s my position.
Cy Kellett: Steve Gregg, thank you very much. Jimmy Akin with a response?
Jimmy Akin: Coming from a Catholic perspective, I would say that the primary source for our understanding of God is the revelation that He’s given us, and He reveals Himself in more than one way. He reveals Himself through nature, and in the Protestant community that’s sometimes called general revelation. He also reveals Himself in a more direct way, such as through prophets and so forth. That’s in the Protestant community sometimes called special revelation.
Jimmy Akin: It’s from God’s revelation of Himself, what He shows us and tells us about Himself, that we derive our knowledge of God, and so that’s where we need to get our theology. Theology is reflection on God, seeking to understand God based on His revelation. Theology needs to be done, I would say, by revelation alone.
Jimmy Akin: Another way that revelation is sometimes described in the Bible is as God’s Word. The word revelation isn’t as common in Scripture. Normally, the same reality is spoken of in Scripture as God’s Word, what He discloses about Himself, and God’s Word takes many different forms in Scripture. People who’ve read John’s Gospel will know that the central form in Scripture is Jesus Himself, the incarnate Word of God who reveals the Father to us.
Jimmy Akin: In addition, God’s Word is also present in creation. We read that God spoke the world into existence. In the Psalms, it talks about how the heavens were made by His Word. So in addition to God’s incarnate Word, there’s God’s created Word.
Jimmy Akin: Then there’s God’s Word expressed in human language, and that happens in more than one way. God communicates in human language both in oral form and in written form. We see that happening both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
Jimmy Akin: In fact, the oral proclamation of God’s Word precedes the written proclamation because writing only came into existence at a certain point in history. It doesn’t go all the way back to the dawn of the human race. We have records. We can tell roughly how far back it goes.
Jimmy Akin: God’s Word has always been present in human history, but originally it was passed down in oral form. We see that, for example, in the Book of Genesis. Genesis is the first book canonically, and it describes the earliest periods of Israel’s history, but it wasn’t written during the time it describes, during the time of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and so forth. They were following God, they had God’s Word, but it was an oral proclamation of God’s Word. Genesis and the other books of Scripture hadn’t been written yet. We don’t see them consulting written books of Scripture, so they passed down God’s Word in an oral form initially.
Jimmy Akin: The word for passing something down in Latin is tradere, from which we get tradition. Originally, the mode through which God’s Word was passed down to us was through tradition. That was the mode it operated in during the period of the patriarchs. It was eventually written down under divine inspiration.
Jimmy Akin: We saw the same pattern replicating in the New Testament, where initially Jesus begins preaching His message, it is based on things that we find in the Old Testament, but it also goes beyond those, so there’s new revelation that Jesus is giving. He commissions His disciples to preach that, and they go forth and do so. Eventually, again under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that tradition, that oral proclamation of the Gospel and of divine revelation, begins to get written down and becomes what we know as the New Testament.
Jimmy Akin: Coming from a Catholic perspective, I would say that one thing we would agree on is we need to do our theology based on divine revelation alone, based on God’s Word alone, but we have typically, between Protestants and Catholics, a somewhat different understanding of the way in which God’s Word has been passed down to us. As a Catholic, I would say that it’s passed down both in an extra-scriptural form and in a scriptural form. I would say that Scripture is unique. Between those two forms, it’s actually the primary form, and that’s because it alone is written under divine inspiration.
Jimmy Akin: When Abraham or someone passes down the Word of God to his son, say he’s teaching Isaac about God, he may or may not repeat God’s words exactly, and so he may pass on the content of the tradition without the exact wording of it being chosen by God, whereas in Scripture, it’s God-breathed, according to St. Paul, every word is chosen by God on some level, and so it preserves the exact Word of God in a way that tradition doesn’t. Tradition preserves the content without the exact phrasing, assuming it’s a true tradition. Of all the expressions of God’s Word, Jesus is the most important, as God’s incarnate Word, and then Scripture, as God’s inspired written Word, is the most important as an expression of human language.
Jimmy Akin: Now, Steve, you pointed out that rabbinic Judaism holds that there’s an oral Torah, and Jesus was critical, as you know, in the Gospels of the Pharisees and their traditions. So I would say absolutely, not every tradition is a good one. There ware erroneous traditions that were in circulation in different schools of Judaism. The Sadducees, for example, had a tradition that there is no such thing as the afterlife or angels or spirits. Well, that tradition was wrong.
Jimmy Akin: The Pharisees had the Corban tradition, where rather than supporting your elderly parents, you could donate what you would’ve given them to the temple and somehow still retain the use of it, and thus get around the obligation of supporting your parents. Jesus was critical of that in the Gospels. He’s said that’s a tradition of men. That particular tradition, He said, makes void the Word of God, so that was a bad one. Another Jewish group, the Essenes, they were the presumed authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they had their own set of traditions.
Jimmy Akin: There are traditions that distort God’s Word or that add to God’s Word or that are contrary to God’s Word, but coming from a Catholic perspective, I would say in Scripture we see that God’s Word is also passed down through tradition, and it’s commended in the New Testament. In First Corinthians 11, St. Paul commends the Corinthians. He says, “I commend you for keeping the traditions just as I have delivered them to you.”
Jimmy Akin: In Second Thessalonians, He talks to the Thessalonians, He says to “keep all of the traditions that you received, whether by word of mouth or by our letter,” so He has both oral and written forms in mind. We see in Second Timothy, just as Paul is about to die, He writes to Timothy and He says, “Take what you’ve heard me teach and communicate that to other faithful men who will be able to teach others also,” and so we see Paul arranging, and He confesses in this letter he’s about to die, he’s arranging for, after his death, the proclamation of God’s Word to be transmitted in an extra-scriptural form through subsequent generations.
Cy Kellett: We’re pretty… Go ahead.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah, so I was just going to say that’s a basic summary of how I would look at the situation.
Cy Kellett: Steve?
Steve Gregg: Yeah. As I said, my belief is that it’s the apostolic tradition that matters, and that would be what they wrote and what they spoke. In other words, I’m not against the belief that Paul didn’t write down everything he taught, and that much of what he taught in person he intended to be taken as seriously as what he taught in writing. Again, I’m not deifying a written form of revelation. I believe that God revealed Himself in the Old Testament through prophets, in the New Testament through apostles. When Paul talks about how Timothy and the Thessalonians and the Corinthians should follow the traditions that he gave them, I assume that means what he is passing down to them from himself, or he got them from other apostles, and therefore we’re talking about apostolic teaching.
Steve Gregg: You are right, not all traditions are good. Some of them do nullify the Word of God. The Corban tradition of the Pharisees, I’m not really so sure the Corban teaching that they gave was wrong; it’s their application that nullified the Word of God, because the Old Testament did say you can say something is Corban and it becomes the Lord’s. But they were applying that to say, “Well, if you don’t want to help support your old parents, then just dedicate it to the Lord, and then you don’t have to obey your parents or don’t have to honor your parents.” Jesus said, “Therefore, you’re using your traditions to nullify the Word of God.”
Steve Gregg: My thought is we know that the Scriptures written are the Word of God. The New Testament written is the apostolic teaching. That’s in a written and permanent form that may be sometimes hard to understand, like Peter said, but Paul is saying but at least it can be worked on, and people can look at it and it’s the same as it was back in the days of the apostles, with, obviously, some variance in the manuscripts. But I do believe that, regardless of how many variants there are, the books have come down to us substantially unchanged, the teachings have, and that being so, I believe that we can use the Scripture to judge anything else that claims to be apostolic tradition.
Steve Gregg: Now, I believe the Roman Catholic Church, and even before the Church, had the Roman bishop as its leader. I believe that the churches began to adopt traditions that are still in the church, but were not in the apostolic teaching. I think you find it as early as Ignatius when he begins to talk about a bishop over the churches, where in the New Testament the word bishop is used interchangeably with elder. You can see that when Paul speaks to the elders in Ephesus in Acts Chapter 20 in Verse 28.
Jimmy Akin: We’ll talk more about that in our second discussion.
Steve Gregg: Sure. But the point is that Paul said, for example, that an elder must be the husband of one wife, or a bishop must be the husband of one wife. Well, that tradition has changed, and it’s contrary to what Paul said. It’s not an embellishment. It’s not an increase on what Paul said. It’s an absolute contrary to what Paul said about bishops on that matter.
Steve Gregg: I believe that in the early church, Paul appointed, and Barnabas and others, appointed bishops or elders in every church. That is, every church would have local eldership, and that changed. We don’t know when it changed. But Ignatius, of course, in the early second century, testified to it being in place that you have to have the bishop present to approve of everything, to take communion, to baptize, or to teach or have a meeting, or to marry.
Jimmy Akin: Could I ask a clarifying question?
Steve Gregg: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: I want to understand your position on when you say that later Catholic practice regarding bishops is contradictory to what St. Paul said about a bishop having one wife, are you saying that it’s contradictory because he mandates bishops must have a wife, or something else?
Steve Gregg: I believe that when Paul gave the qualifications for bishops in First Timothy Three and Titus One, that he was guiding his apostolic legates, Timothy and Titus, in the appointment of bishops, that they should follow this criterion for choosing someone to be among the leaders of the church. Now, I say among the leaders because I think every church had multiple elders, not one, and that the elders were a group of men who were, I think, to be model Christians. Everything that Paul says they should be, with the exception of the marriage part, is something that every Christian should be, not a striker, having a good testimony with those outside, not given to wine, and all that.
Steve Gregg: What Paul says a bishop should be is really what every Christian should be, with the exception that not every Christian is required to be married, but Paul did include that the man should have a wife and children who are faithful, and this would be how we would know, because he manages his family well, we know that he can manage the church well, Paul said.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. I would simply note, and then I’ll let you get back to your point, but I would simply note that many scholars, including many Protestant ones, would say that when Paul says a bishop must have one wife, he means not more than one wife, so not someone who is a polygamist-
Steve Gregg: Of course.
Jimmy Akin: … or things like that, but since Paul and Timothy and Titus themselves were unmarried men, that he’s not mandating that they have a wife.
Steve Gregg: Right. See, I believe that Paul was an apostle, Timothy and Titus were apostolic legates acting in Paul’s name. They were not pastors. They were not priests. They were not bishops. They were appointers of bishops. They were the ones… It was Paul and Barnabas the apostles who first appointed elders in every church, and I think he later sent Timothy and Titus to churches to do the same work as his agents. Being an apostle doesn’t even require that you be single, but Paul was, and Timothy probably was. Peter wasn’t, and others.
Steve Gregg: The point is that the appointment of bishops is a specific office in the church, it seems to me. It’s distinct, for example, from apostles and prophets and evangelists. Paul said God gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, or shepherds. It’s the elders or bishops who are told to shepherd the flock, in Acts 20:28. Also, First Peter, Chapter Five, he tells the elders of the church to shepherd the flock.
Steve Gregg: The shepherding of the flock is assigned to the bishops and elders, and Paul distinguished between shepherds and apostles. He was an apostle. He didn’t say an apostle had to be married, obviously. In fact, he thought it was a good thing for as many as possible not to be. But-
Jimmy Akin: He recommended it to Christians generally.
Steve Gregg: Yeah, exactly. But because most Christians are called to be married, I think he wanted those who led the Christian community to be men who not only were married, but knew how to do it. They could show this is how marriage is to be done. I think the elders, their first priority is to be examples to the flock. That’s the first instruction given to them, and to feed the flock with the Word of God. This is, at least, their described duties in Scripture.
Steve Gregg: Now, what I’m saying about what Ignatius testifies to in his day, in probably the second or even first decade of the second century, is that there was now in every region, apparently, or maybe every congregation, a bishop, who was to oversee everything, and nothing could be done without him. But having an individual bishop is a change from what Paul ordained in every church to be elders or bishops.
Steve Gregg: There’s just a number of changes that began very early on, even before things that are specifically Roman Catholic in nature, the things that Protestants and Catholics usually argue about. Because, frankly, most Protestants believe in having an individual pastor in a church, which is, I believe, unbiblical too. I believe most Protestant churches are set up in an unbiblical manner, with an individual shepherd instead of an eldership.
Jimmy Akin: I know in our second discussion, we’re going to talk more about the structure of the church. In this segment, I want to focus on the authority question. Certainly, so I think we’ve identified another common ground, which is that traditions that are apostolic are the ones that are binding. We would both agree on that.
Steve Gregg: Sure.
Jimmy Akin: If something is a purely human invention, doesn’t come from the apostles, then it may be good, it may be bad, but it doesn’t carry apostolic authority. So I think we can agree on that.
Jimmy Akin: My question would be whether from your point of view, Scripture is the only remaining identifiable source of apostolic tradition, so that it’s to Scripture alone, as suggested by the phrase sola scriptura, that we need to look to when forming our theology. Would you say that’s an accurate [crosstalk 00:35:32]?
Steve Gregg: I would say it’s the only totally reliable one. I believe that in the church fathers we have repetitions of some of the things the apostles taught, and we have alterations of some of the things the apostles taught. Insofar as the traditions of the fathers are in line with what the apostles taught, then it’s obviously the same tradition that they taught. It’s apostolic. But after the time of the apostles, I don’t think it rests in a man who has a certain office anymore. I think the office of apostle, such as the 12 had and Paul had, I believe that’s a first-century phenomenon.
Steve Gregg: When Judas had to be replaced by Matthias, one of the conditions was someone had to have been with them from the time of John the Baptist until Jesus was taken up. You couldn’t be a replacement for an apostle if you hadn’t been there all the time. Obviously, no one since that generation was there, and so no one really would qualify for a replacement of the apostles, a successor to the apostles.
Steve Gregg: Now, we know from Eusebius, of course, there are long lists of successors to Peter, and frankly there’s lists of successors of the bishops in Antioch and Edessa and Jerusalem and Rome and places like that, and yet there’s no suggestion that the successors in those towns to the first bishops had apostolic authority necessarily. You see, that would make the authority institutional rather than spiritual. Go ahead.
Jimmy Akin: Like I said, we’re going to get into the church and so forth in our next discussion. In terms of sola scriptura, though, which was the point we started with, I come from a Protestant background and I used to employ the principle of sola scriptura, and the way I understood it was basically if you want to claim something is theologically true, you have to be able to back it up from Scripture rather than something else. Now, there may be other things that can shed light on Scripture, help us interpret it, or something like that, like a Greek lexicon, for example, can help us understand the meaning of Greek words. But the authoritative source, and the only authoritative source, that we should appeal to is Scripture alone.
Jimmy Akin: Consequently, if someone had a belief in something, I as a Protestant could come to them and say, “Well, where is that in the Bible?” And if they couldn’t produce a biblical passage supporting it, or set of passages that either stated or implied it, then I would be within my rights to say, “Okay, well, then you shouldn’t be proclaiming that either at all or at least you shouldn’t be proclaiming it as a Christian doctrine if you can’t back it up from Scripture.”
Jimmy Akin: Over the course of time, I began, as I reflected on this, I realized I had a problem with sola scriptura itself conceptually, meaning there was a problem with it, because that itself seems to be an item of theology, that I need to show everything from Scripture itself seems to be something that would need to be shown from Scripture itself. I went to people and I said, “Well, what passages can we use to support sola scripture? Because if we don’t, it looks like it’s going to be self-refuting,” and the answer I got back was “Well, we don’t really have any passages. We just have to take this as our starting assumption.” That I didn’t find very satisfactory.
Steve Gregg: I would not either. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin: One of the reasons I didn’t find it satisfactory was because it’s clearly not the paradigm for theology or the method of doing theology that’s being used in Scripture itself. When the prophets were there in the Old Testament, if you had a question about is this teaching of God, you could go to a prophet. When the apostles were there, you could do the same thing.
Jimmy Akin: Even if you didn’t have access to an apostle, let’s say Paul has visited your church but he’s not there anymore, you still had the body of traditions that he had given you when he was visiting your church, like in Thessalonica, and so you could look to those. Maybe you didn’t even have the New Testament. You may not have even had copies of the Scriptures because most people were illiterate, and Scriptures were fantastically expensive because they were hand-copied, and so you couldn’t look to those.
Jimmy Akin: Now, in setting up for the post-apostolic age, if sola scriptura was to be God’s plan in the post-apostolic age, then we would need to find somewhere in Scripture that sets up a paradigm shift, that says, okay… where you would, say, find Paul writing, “Okay, everybody, we apostles have made a plan where we’re going to write down all of our authoritative teaching, and so once we die, only look to that. That’s where you’re going to find authoritative teaching, is in our writings,” either that or “Forget everything we said. It loses its authority if it’s not written down.” We don’t find evidence of either one of those paradigm shifts.
Jimmy Akin: Instead, we find the apostles, like in Second Timothy, continuing to write Scripture to be passed down, and at the same time instructing that the oral proclamation that helps you understand Scripture, that that also be passed down. It looks like even as the apostles are passing from the scene, they’re setting up a situation that continues the paradigm that’s in use in their own day, where apostolic tradition and apostolic Scripture are both being passed down alongside each other.
Steve Gregg: You’re arguing against a position that isn’t really my position, because I’m not arguing that we have to follow a book. I’m saying we have to argue the apostolic teachings. Now, those happen to be recorded in certain books. I believe the church is based on the apostolic teachings, and we have no certain reference to them that is absolutely flawless other than what they wrote themselves.
Steve Gregg: Now, what people said about them later, what the church even said after he had been there, is not always reliable. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he had spent 18 months teaching them, and he was very adamant that there’s a resurrection from the dead, but of course after he left, there was people in the church teaching there’s no resurrection from the dead, so he had to write another letter… He had to write the first letter, actually, to correct that and many other things.
Steve Gregg: Now, Paul had ministered in those churches and left, and we could say, “Well, the deposit of Paul’s teaching can be trusted to be there in the church because he left and he taught there.” No, it can’t be trusted. That’s why he had to write a correction. The Galatian churches had received teaching from him, but he had practically not gone home yet to Antioch when he heard that they’re starting to teach circumcision, things like that. Now, he had to write a letter to correct that.
Steve Gregg: What I’m saying is you can’t be sure that just because the apostles taught in a church, that that church is going to be teaching the same thing he taught even weeks later, much less a generation or two later, because people run to error by nature, I think. You really need to discipline your thinking from what is actually stated by the apostles and by Christ because otherwise, people tend to get things wrong very quickly.
Steve Gregg: Now, it’s true Paul told Timothy the things you’ve heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, commit those to faithful men who will, in turn, teach others. In other words, make sure that the things I really did teach, and many witnesses have heard me teach them, you know they’re my teachings, make sure that you give those to men who will, in fact, faithfully repeat them, and they’ll do it to others.
Steve Gregg: Now, it’s a wonderful concept. “Oh, these men are so faithful. They would never change a thing. And the people they give it to, oh, they’d certainly never change a thing. They have too pure a conscience. The next guy certainly would never change a thing.” But that’s just not the way history has run.
Steve Gregg: Even the Roman Catholic Church believes, as I do, in amillennialism not premillennialism. Yet in the second and third century, most of the church fathers who wrote anything on the subject believed in premillennialism. We would say, “Whoops, they got something wrong,” and that’s for two centuries after the apostles were gone. In my opinion, amillennialism, the correct view that the apostles taught, was recovered in Augustine’s time, and even Origin I think believed something along those lines earlier than Augustine.
Steve Gregg: The point is that the main spokesmen for the church were not preserving an accurate apostolic teaching for those two centuries. Now, we can say, “Well, since Augustine restored it, we can trust that then.” Well, I don’t trust everything Augustine said. I’m not a Calvinist, for example. Calvinism is Augustinianism.
Jimmy Akin: No, Calvin went beyond Augustine in a few points.
Steve Gregg: True, but the five points, with the possible exception of perseverance, came pretty much directly from Augustine.
Jimmy Akin: Yeah, not possible. Augustine did not believe in perseverance of the saints.
Steve Gregg: Yeah, and I’m glad. I’m glad he didn’t, because I don’t either. But the point is we look at Augustine as sort of a father of the Protestant Reformation and a father of Roman Catholicism. He’s had influence on all branches of the Western church, and yet I can disagree with him about some things. I don’t know if you disagree with him on anything, but-
Jimmy Akin: Sure.
Steve Gregg: … I don’t see him as infallible.
Jimmy Akin: I don’t see Paul as infallible. Paul made mistakes. Peter made mistakes. They-
Steve Gregg: Right. They were fallible men, but they were commissioned by Christ to speak officially for Him. The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss. And they had the authority to speak for the church, for Christ, and the church was to follow what they said because Christ gave them that apostolic authority. “You receive the one I send, you receive me,” Christ said. He didn’t say if you receive the one who was sent by the one who I have sent, who was sent by him, that you’re necessarily going to get the pure deal, but He sent men…
Steve Gregg: Paul said that “Christ chose me because he counted me faithful.” Now, Jesus made a judgment about Paul. He said, “Am I going to make this guy the major apostle to the Gentiles? He better be faithful.” I think Christ knew who was faithful. I think when He chose apostles, He knew what He was getting.
Jimmy Akin: So you’ve made an argument that because, if I understand you correctly, that because people are prone to error, they’re prone to misunderstandings and so forth, that we can no longer rely on anything outside of Scripture to communicate the Word of God to us. Is that correct?
Steve Gregg: Or anything contrary to Scripture.
Jimmy Akin: Or anything contrary to Scripture.
Steve Gregg: Right. Exactly.
Jimmy Akin: Now, if that’s the case, then it still seems to me that you need to find something… That’s, at most, an empirical argument, meaning it’s based on human experience rather than something that’s taught in the Word of God itself.
Steve Gregg: You might not have understood my answer to you. Yeah, go ahead.
Jimmy Akin: Let me keep going with this a little bit. However, it’s based on an assumption that God does not guide his church in such a way as to preserve an identifiable stream of apostolic teaching independent of Scripture, and the church fathers make the opposite assumption from the second century onward, saying, “No, he did.” This is how they combated Gnosticism. They said, “Well, look at the Christian doctrine that’s been passed down through the church, through the succession of bishops and so forth.” This was the key argument against Gnosticism. “It’s not in our Scriptures that are read in the churches, and it’s not in the doctrine that’s been passed down in the churches.”
Jimmy Akin: Now, that didn’t mean there weren’t people who had misunderstandings here and there, but the fundamental substance had been passed down and preserved accurately in the church by the Holy Spirit. There’s then a question, which would also arise in the context of Gnosticism, because Gnostics were writing their own scriptures, like the Apocryphon of John and Thunder, Perfect Mind and things like that, they were coming up with their own scriptures, how do you know which scriptures are the ones we need to look to for apostolic tradition?
Jimmy Akin: It seems to me, and this was something that I said to myself as a Protestant, it was one of the things that led me to becoming Catholic, was the only way I know exactly which books belong in Scripture is because God used the church in history, hundreds of years after the first century, to define the canon. Based on just first-century evidence, you could say certain books belonged in Scripture, like Matthew and Mark and Luke, but there were disputes about other books, like Hebrews and Second Peter and Second and Third John and Jude and Revelation. There were other books that some early Christians thought might ought to go in Scripture, like First Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas and-
Steve Gregg: Barnabas.
Jimmy Akin: Barnabas. So if I’m going to look at some of these books as divinely inspired and authoritative, and not other books, I’m going to include the revelation of John, but not the revelation of Peter, both of which were considered by some to be canonical, then I have to ultimately look to the church to tell me which ones of these are divinely inspired and which aren’t. And the church didn’t make that determination in a definitive way for centuries. There was fluidity about it in the early centuries.
Jimmy Akin: So I had to be prepared to say that God used the church to define Scripture itself for me long after Scripture was written, and that means that God has an ongoing work in guiding and preserving the church in truth that means I not only can, but do need to look to the church to help me clarify matters like these. I can’t just rely on Scripture alone, because without the church, I wouldn’t know exactly what Scripture is.
Steve Gregg: Well, I think your point proves too much because, as you say, the current canon of Scripture wasn’t decided officially by the church until the late fourth century, but there were generations of Christians living under church teaching for those four centuries before it happened and they had canons of Scripture that were less than perfect, which means maybe God didn’t preserve perfect knowledge of which books were canonical, and that had to be figured out by ordinary means, by research.
Steve Gregg: I think that the reason that Second Peter and Jude and Hebrews and Revelation and the Epistles of John, the Second and Third, were held in question is because it wasn’t certain whether they were really apostolic. I think that if they were known to be apostolic, they would’ve accepted them immediately, but that was what had to be researched, and they had to research that by thinking, “Well, okay, these churches in the East thought Paul wrote it, Hebrews, and these churches in the West didn’t. What’s the evidence? How far back can we get information about this?” They sorted it out the way that anyone could today if they had the time and wanted to do so.
Steve Gregg: In my opinion, having taught all the books of the New Testament verse by verse many times in the school I ran, I’ve had to look at the evidence for the Petrine authorship of Second Peter and the evidence against it. And I believe that from the evidence available, within the book and historically, that it’s a good choice. It’s a good claimant to Petrine authorship. Now, there are people who don’t believe that, to their loss I think, but I do believe that an open-minded person could reach similar conclusions, if not identical.
Steve Gregg: I’m not so sure what I would think about Jude if it wasn’t already in the canon. I don’t have any objection to Jude, but I’m just not sure, and of course the early church wasn’t sure, what to make about Jude either, why it would be apostolic. But I have no issue with it, really.
Steve Gregg: In other words, of all the books in the New Testament that I think I wouldn’t be able to prove on my own that it belongs there from the evidence, Jude would be maybe open to question, but it was open to question for several centuries. The church, therefore, before the later councils in the later fourth century, they didn’t accept it. They didn’t accept Revelation. They didn’t accept Hebrews. That means that the saints under the leadership of that church did not have an authoritative full canon.
Steve Gregg: You see, I hope they weren’t, nonetheless, led astray into false doctrine because you can have virtually all the true doctrines of Christianity without those books. Certainly, those books have something to offer. They give us more than the other canonical books. They add to it, but none of the major doctrines of Christianity would’ve been lost if those books had never been recognized.
Steve Gregg: The truth is I don’t accept the canon of Scripture because a group of people in Carthage in, what, 396 or 397 decided that’s the group of books I should believe. If I’m going to believe them, why couldn’t I believe the councils before that had smaller or different? If these councils are infallible in their decisions, why can’t I accept the decisions of earlier councils that didn’t accept all 27 New Testament books? Why can’t I think that Barnabas or the Shepherd of Hermas could be included?
Steve Gregg: Because on my own, I can see that they weren’t written by any known apostles, likewise the Gnostic Gospels and Gnostic apocrypha of various books that are out there. One reason we know those aren’t authentically written by apostles is because the second and third-century church fathers told us so, and they were early enough to know. Irenaeus knew about these Gnostic Gospels; now these are heretical. We know that he was close enough to the originals to know that, hey, these are lately written. These aren’t written in the apostolic age.
Steve Gregg: In other words, we can use the same evidence that later councils used to decide which books are really apostolic. I’m not thinking of the canon as a magical list that some infallible group decided on; therefore, I’m going to agree with them. I’m looking for truth, and that truth is going to be found in identifying, with as much certainty as possible, which books were given to us by the apostles of Jesus Christ to be the norms of our faith.
Cy Kellett: We’re approaching the time when we need to make closing statements. I’m loathe to interrupt such a fine conversation.
Jimmy Akin: Why don’t you sum up your view, and then I’ll sum up mine?
Steve Gregg: Okay. Couple of minutes? That’s fine.
Steve Gregg: Well, first of all, we both agree that apostolic authority is what the church needs to be guided by. We don’t agree about how many different sources that are totally reliable of apostolic authority we have, but we do agree that the writings of the apostles themselves accurately bring apostolic authority through the church. Christ preserved His truth in the church by preserving the writings of the apostles. That’s a miracle in itself that the apostles’ writings have survived as much as they have, although a couple letters of Paul to the Corinthians may have disappeared, but they must not have been important to be preserved. Therefore, we can say that apostolic authority exists in the church through the teachings of the apostles, which are preserved in their writings.
Steve Gregg: Now, in the church, there are also many other things besides apostolic authority, many of which think they are. That’s why there’s 4,000 Protestant denominations. All the Protestants think that their group is presuming the true apostolic doctrine. Roman Catholics think they are. Eastern Orthodox thinks they are. The Coptics think they are. The Assyrian Church of the East, they think they are.
Steve Gregg: And they’re not all identical in their beliefs, although they do hold, all those groups, hold the basic beliefs of who God is, who Jesus was, what was done for our salvation and so forth. I think all denominations and branches of the church hold to that. But what remains is for us to study as well as we can what the apostles actually wrote to decide which traditions of which groups are closer to what the apostles taught, and not just to assume that one stream of leaders through history got it right all the time. That would be my position, sort of like a sola scriptura, but it’s not really about the Bible; it’s about the apostolic writings, which happen to be in the Bible.
Jimmy Akin: Okay. I would say that we need to do our theology based on God’s Word alone, and coming from a Catholic perspective, I recognize that based on the paradigm that’s established in both the Old Testament and in the New Testament, God’s Word is communicated both in inspired writing and through other means, and I need to accept both of those.
Jimmy Akin: I recognize that people are prone to error. They were in the Old Testament. They went after false prophets. They were in the New Testament. They went after false teachers. They were in the age of the church fathers. They went after heretics and people like the Gnostics. But God also guides His church in a way that preserves it in truth. Paul writes Timothy that it’s the pillar and foundation of the truth. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead the disciples into all truth.
Jimmy Akin: There is a function that the church performs in maintaining the church in truth, and so I don’t need a precise canon in those early centuries as long as I can appeal to things like the apostolic tradition and the church to settle urgent questions. But if I were coming from a Protestant point of view, I would need to have a very crisp and clear knowledge of exactly what the Scriptures are if they’re the only authoritative source I have, because if I include even one book in the Scripture that doesn’t belong there, that’s a big problem theologically because I’m going to be treating something that’s merely human as if it’s God’s own Word.
Jimmy Akin: The only way I have of knowing exactly which books belong in Scripture, coming from that point of view, is if the church tells me. So I concluded, as a Protestant, that I had to look to the church to tell me this, that I was, in fact, accepting the canon of Scripture not based on independent historical research I had done, which, as you know, sometimes we’re dealing with very small amounts of evidence. I was, in fact, trusting the church, and I decided to simply trust the church more.
Cy Kellett: Steve Gregg, Jimmy Akin, thank you so much for an excellent discussion. Next in this series of discussion, we discuss the nature of the church.
Trent Horn: If you enjoyed that dialogue, remember this is part one of the five-part dialogue series that Jimmy actually did with Steve, which is available at shop.catholic.com. If you want to check it out, go to shop.catholic.com, search Akin vs. Gregg, G-R-E-G-G. Also, if you’re a premium subscriber to the podcast at trenthornpodcast.com, we’ll have another bonus episode featuring a clip from Akin and Gregg just for you all. You can check that out if you’re a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com.
Trent Horn: Thank you, guys, so much for being with me this week. I’ll leave that with you for the rest of this week. Hope you enjoy your time, and of course I hope you have a blessed day and a very blessed Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for in our faith, and I am thankful for your support. Please pray for the podcast to grow and reach others. Have a blessed day and a blessed Thanksgiving week, everyone.
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