Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer revisits the problem of essential doctrines and why Protestant apologists all fail to answer it.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. and I recently found myself the target of a three and a half hour long video accusing me of all sorts of nastiness, a video supported by some of the better known Protestant apologists on YouTube, folks like Gavin Orland, redeem Zoomer, the other Paul, and so on the subject matter, my recent video arguing that the one question that unravels Protestantism is which doctrines are essential. So today I want to explain why that question matters and then show why none of the accusations and responses are actual rebuttals to the argument. So let’s start with why the argument works and why it’s important. First, against the Catholic Church, which argued that we needed the interpretive authority of the church, the Protestant reformers of the 16th century argued that scripture alone is the infallible authority and scripture is all clear. This is called Sori Torah and the clarity or perspicuity of scripture.
I’ve been referring to this throughout as the Protestant view of scripture since it’s not just the Lutheran or Calvinist view, it’s a pretty standard view of scripture across denominational lines. For instance, the Book of Concord, which is Lutheran, talks about how scripture is the only standard by which all teachers and doctrines are to be judged. The Westminster confession of faith, which is Calvinist says the whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his meaning, God’s own glory, man, salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture. And then the London Baptist Confession of faith of 1689 says the holy scripture is the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. So this is enough of a common Protestant belief that you have, for instance, the book Co-authored by a bunch of different reformed theologians, solo S scriptura, the Protestant position on the Bible.
So to the extent we can talk about anything as a commonly held Protestant doctrine, this comes pretty darn close. Additionally, there is this second doctrine, the clarity or a promiscuity of scripture that is closely linked to it. The Presbyterian theologian, Archibald Alexander Hodge, son of the famous Charles Hodge, talks about how in order for scripture to be the sole and infallible rule of faith, in other words, in order for Sola s script, this Protestant doctrine to be true, there are a few things that also have to be true, and one of those things is that scripture has to be perspicuous. Now again, perspicuity is just a fancy name for clarity, and so I quoted in the original video I did on this subject, Barry Cooper of Gospel Coalition who says, it’s the idea that God’s word is clear about things that are necessary to be understood and obeyed in order for a person to be saved.
The Bible’s teaching on salvation can be understood by anyone and everyone. So there are different ways. This has been articulated by different denominational traditions within Protestantism, and the original statements on it were kind of outlandishly bold and had to be kind of dialed back. So originally, Martin Lutheran bondage of the will talks about how the external clarity of scripture, nothing, whatever is left obscure or ambiguous. Now obviously no one who’s spent any real time delving through scripture could hold to this for very long because you’re going to hit those parts where you say, I just don’t know exactly what this passage means and none of the other passages are helping me understand what this one means. So the Westminster confession advance is a more modest form of the claim that those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are clearly propounded.
If they’re not in one place, they are in someplace else. So clearly in fact that not only the learned but also the unlearned can attain to a sufficient understanding of them using what they describe as they do use of ordinary means. So these are cross denominational beliefs. Summing up again what I’m calling the Protestant view of scripture. So that’s number one again, soul of s scriptura. The Bible alone is the so and fallible rule of faith. And number two, purity of scripture. At least all of the essential doctrines are presented in scripture unambiguously. They’re capable of being understood by the unlearned as well as the learned. So this means as a consequence that if you are a believer of good faith, if you are someone who is a member of the elect, if God has cast his favor upon you, if you’re not just acting in bad faith or willfully blind to God, something like that, and you’re using the due use of ordinary means, which is a pretty low bar that the unlearned could reach, you’re going to know all the essential doctrines.
So that’s the Protestant argument writ large. In a nutshell in response to that, here is my really simple straightforward argument that somehow despite multiple response videos no one seems to have responded to, and it goes like this premise one, if the Protestant view of scripture is correct, sincere believers will all agree on the essential doctrines premise. Two, sincere believers do not all agree on the essential doctrines and in the earlier videos I give tons of examples of that conclusion. Therefore, the Protestant view of scripture is not correct. So that’s it. If you’re right about the nature of scripture, it’s all clear and it’s all we need, then it’s going to follow that everybody who is a believer and of good faith is going to come to the same beliefs on at least the essential doctrines. What we find is Protestants good faith, seemingly Protestants don’t agree with one another.
Forget Protestants, don’t agree with Catholics or Protestants, don’t agree with orthodox Protestants, don’t agree with Protestants on the essential doctrines. In fact, they don’t even agree on which doctrines are essential. Now, I want to specify here what the argument isn’t and you’ll see why it’s really important. A lot of people have been making hay of straw men. They’re just attacking these beliefs that are not the argument that I just laid out and are instead arguments that I’m not arguing and have not been arguing. So let’s talk about the arguments that I’m not making. Number one, I’m not saying any system in which people disagree is automatically false. That’s a ridiculous position, and you’re right, you could destroy that position because it’s so silly. Number two, Protestants disagree on things and therefore Catholicism is true. Now look, denominationalism is a scandal, but that’s not the argument I’m making.
Number three, Catholics are less divided than Protestants and therefore Catholicism is true also not the argument I’m making as you could come up with your own religion where it’s just you and your wife or your friend or whoever and you have a long list of very specific doctrines and you might have complete unity on a weird laundry list of doctrines. That is not my point at all. My point is sola scriptura does not reliably and safely get you to orthodoxy in the sense of small like Christian solid beliefs. How do we know that? Well, because of the massive disunity that we see among people who try to follow that roadmap. Like if you had a map and someone said, oh, this map is so clear, but then 20 people tried to follow the map and they ended up in 20 different places. You might reasonably say maybe the map’s not as clear as people thought it was, but instead you find people just attacking again this total straw man that my argument is simply you have disunity and therefore Protestantism is false.
Notice that’s not the claim I’m making. It’s you promised clarity and we don’t see clarity. And moreover, I want to stress that this argument is specifically about how Protestantism is making this false promise that it can’t keep. This doesn’t automatically prove Catholicism, and I didn’t try to claim it did. You’ll notice that the title of the original video in question here is simply called the One Question that unravels Protestantism. It’s not called Here’s Why Catholicism is True or Catholics, we all Get along with each other, ignore what you’ve seen in the media. No, that’s not it at all. And so I’m presenting what I think is just one simple question that shows a real glaring problem within Protestantism that if it worked the way it says it does, we wouldn’t find the amount of disunity that we find on essential doctrines. Now in response to that, as I alluded to Javier, pero, I believe is his name, did a three and a half hour, technically three hour, 23 minute response video to it, any calls at a rebuttal, but I’m going to actually push back on that a little bit because he doesn’t actually rebut any arguments I make.
Now that might sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’ll challenge you when we get to the end of this video or if you have a lot of time on your hand and you want to go watch his video to go see if any of the arguments I actually make, get rebutted and I’ll give you a little clue. You’ll notice if you’re watching the YouTube version of this that I’m wearing a very attractive shirt in the thumbnail of my original video, and he uses that same shirt in the thumbnail of his so-called rebuttal, but you will be hard pressed to find. Well, frankly, much of me at all in his rebuttal video, he tells you a lot what he claims I say and believe, but it’s usually not true. The first time I appear in any way, shape or form myself where I’m actually getting to say my own words instead of him caricaturing, the words he would imagine I would say is an hour and 17 minutes in, and it’s not from the video he says he’s responding to in fact the first time and it’s on an unrelated video on baptism.
Then by two hours and 42 minutes, I think I might have skipped one because there’s a lot there, but two hours and 42 minutes in, he finally gets into the second video I made on this topic, but the original video, the one in the thumbnail, the one that he claims he’s responding to, it doesn’t appear at all. Literally he makes a three and a half hour long video responding to a video I made without ever quoting me. Now, there’s a gazillion clips in his video, but none of them are from the person he claims he’s responding to, which then gets to the second thing, he labels it rebutted and rebutting Joe Hess Meyer. Now for reasons that’ll be clear pretty soon I’m going to use the legal sense of the word rebuttal, which is also I think the colloquial sense, which is that you’re using evidence or arguments in order to counter disprove or contradict the opposing party’s evidence or argument.
Somebody says whatever, and you say, no, that’s not true, and here’s why. That’s a pretty low standard. That’s all a rebuttal is I say London is a great place to travel and you say, no, it’s too expensive. You’ve answered my argument, it’s a great place to travel and I really enjoy it. Maybe I give some reasons for it, and you respond by giving some arguments as to why the thing I said wasn’t true. Now, you would imagine in three and a half hours he would’ve found plenty of time to do this, but amazingly he doesn’t remember. My argument is that if the Protestant deal of scripture is correct, sincere believers will agree on the essential doctrines. He doesn’t agree with that, doesn’t disagree with that, he just doesn’t talk about it. The second premise is that sincere believers do not all agree on the essential doctrines.
To the extent he says anything on it, he seems to grant that and that leaves in the conclusion therefore, the Protestant view of scripture is not correct. Now, I don’t know after having watched that entire video if he agrees or disagrees with that because if he disagrees, he hasn’t given us a single reason to believe that this argument doesn’t hold. So what has he done? Instead, you might be wondering, how has this guy managed to fill three and a half hours of time, yours, mine, and ours, if it’s not actually engaging in the argument, and I would say it’s by poisoning the well. Now, if you’re not familiar with that term, I discovered in preparing this that the phrase axiom, whatever you want to call it, poisoning the well comes from St. John Henry Cardinal Newman and his alogia, pro vitaa where he’s defending his faith against columnist charges and he says in there that he scorns and detest lying and quibbling and double tongue practice and slimness and cunning and smoothness and can’t and pretenses quite as much as any Protestants hate them, and I pray to be kept from the snare of them.
That’s a good place to start like, Hey, I intend to engage in good faith and I hope you do as well. It’s very easy in a polarized world to assume that people with whom we disagree must be like wicked in their wrong on purpose. And I want to be clear, I’m not consciously in that camp and I pray not to be, but says Newman, all this is just now by my present subject is my accuser. What I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his and his concluding pages is to cut the ground from under my feet to poison by anticipation the public mind against me, John Henry Newman, I would cosign and say Joe Meyer and to infuse into the imaginations of my readers suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say and reply to him. This I call poisoning the wells. It’s a military image, right?
If you are a retreating army and there’s an advancing army coming in, you’ll put poison in the water supply so they get depleted, but it’s a vicious kind of tactic. It is not a manly way of fighting as Newman puts it. And notice it is important that if you’re going to poison the well, you do it upfront because if you jump into the argument and people see, oh, you don’t actually have a good response, you can’t really do it like that, right? You have to begin, well, for instance, as Pavier Pero does the first nine and a half minutes of his response are just personal attacks. He literally in the chapters has an entire section called Joe’s Rhetorical tricks in which he falsely with no evidence accuses me of all manner of false tricks. So let’s dive into a couple of them. I just want to show, because I think this point, the fact that so many Protestants think this is a good response and it’s paper thin intellectually, I think points to a problem they have in responding to this one simple argument. So let’s begin with his, again, rebuttal and heavy quotations.
CLIP:
I do want to maybe apologize ahead of time to you guys if I get a little bit fired up during this video just because I want to shoot you guys straight and this case that Joe Hess Meyer puts forth, and if it’s the O of a lot of his videos, it’s just filled with what I would call purposeful obtuseness, what I would call tricks, and ultimately it doesn’t make for what feels like the most a robust discussion or a discussion that’s actually focused on what matters and on the substance, but rather is focused just on rhetoric and rhetorical bluster.
Joe:
Alright, so he is out the gate swinging, and I just want to point out, look, I’m making a pretty simple argument. This argument is either true or false. You don’t need any rhetoric tied to it. I’m not trying to move your emotions. I’m trying to point out the fact that factually speaking, the reformers and their Protestant successors have promised that the nature of the Bible is such that ordinary people can read it and come to the right conclusions on clear doctrines and they haven’t and they can’t. It doesn’t work the way they promised without a magisterium. It hasn’t and doesn’t. There’s no bluster, there’s no intentional obtuseness there. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but I don’t see it. I was going to make an angle joke I thought would be a cute joke, but I decided this was not the right time. In any case, what he’s doing here isn’t answering my actual argument, right?
He’s actually the one engaged in rhetoric. He’s poisoning the well. Now interestingly, he has unwittingly confirmed something I said and in my last video on this topic, which is that if you take this view of scripture, then you become more inclined to see any disagreement not as a result of a good faith like two. Well-intended Christians read the Bible differently, but you have to think somebody is being obtuse on purpose. This sounds really nice, I think on the surface as a doctrine, but it doesn’t really work in practice. What it does in practice is it gets rid of good faith, theological disagreement. Here’s what I mean by that. If somebody disagrees with me and I think scripture is all clear in this way, then they either aren’t doing their very basic homework, the due use of ordinary means and they’re lazy or they’re not a member of the elect and they’re wicked.
There’s not a third possibility as there is for Catholics and orthodox and cops that we have a good faith disagreement. Now to the extent that he specifies what he views as a rhetorical trick, it’s that one of the clips I showed of people who follow the Protestant view of scripture and end up in these false conclusions and contradictory conclusions is from a guy who denied the Trinity. Now, I flagged that at the time. I didn’t try to sneak it in there, but according to him, he gives a whole dialogue that I never actually said that really apparently triggered him.
CLIP:
He opens up one of his examples citing a unitarian and saying that Oh, as he was researching Protestants on the essentials that he was found that so curious to see Unitarian Protestants. I think even that just from the jump should be very frustrating. It is very frustrating Protestants that are good faith listening to videos like Joe’s.
Joe:
So there’s two things to note there. First, if you go back and watch the video, you’ll see I didn’t say Unitarian Protestants. I say nothing like that. What I do point out is that there are people like the guy I quoted in the video who believe in so scriptura, but who read the Bible using the Bible alone and don’t believe that it teaches the Trinity and in fact think that it doesn’t teach the Trinity. And then I asked, yeah, I’ve had this happen before where I’ve actually talked to someone who says they’ve trusted in Christ believe in salvation by grace alone, but they deny the trinity. The thing is though, it seems like all three of those men are talking about cases of what we would call invincible ignorance, somebody who is not consciously rejecting the actual Christian doctrine, they’re rejecting a false version of it or they’re affirming a false version of it thinking they’re affirming the true version of it.
But what about someone who as the standard I laid out before, knowingly intentionally rejects the doctrine of the Trinity? And so Mike Winger, who I mentioned earlier argues that some forms of that it might be okay, you could affirm non Trinitarian heresies like modalism. So the point that I’m trying to make isn’t Protestants aren’t Trinitarian, it’s that people using the Protestant view of scripture, so script Torah and believing in the clarity of scripture can and have come to at least three different conclusions. Number one, the doctrine of the trinity is true and it is essential for salvation. Number two, the doctrine of the Trinity, while true is not essential for salvation, you can consciously reject trinitarianism in favor of heresies like modalism that reject e trinity. Or number three, the doctrine of the trinity is actually false and wicked and is derived from paganism and believing in it in peril salvation.
Now you can find Protestants who will defend the first two and the only reason you can’t find Protestants who defend the third one is because we’re saying they don’t count, because they defend the third one, but they’re using sola script for to get to all three of those answers. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If you want to say they don’t count because they don’t agree with me on essential doctrines, I think you’re missing the point of the argument, but fine, that doesn’t sit well notice also, by the way, in that last clip I carefully distinguished, even when you have people like James White, William Lane Craig and Mike Winger who make things sound like they’re saying belief in the trinity is not essential. I’m careful to try to caveat, give them the benefit of the doubt and say it sounds like they’re talking about invincible ignorance. Someone who unwittingly denies the Trinity. Contrast that with how Javier PMO describes what I did,
CLIP:
Especially when you have Joe showing you all these clips of Protestants disagreeing, and so all we’re missing in reality over this back to back. Can Christians do this? Can Christians do that? No nuance allowed. He may not have said those words, but when he plays clips of Protestants trying to say, Hey, there’s a difference between as someone who is an obstinate heretic and someone who maybe just isn’t being obstinate, but they just don’t fully understand the intricacies of something like the Trinity Joe is like ahaha, so this must mean that the Trinity is not essential.
Joe:
Now you saw the clip yourself, so you know that what he’s saying is just objectively not true. I didn’t say the words he said, I didn’t suggest anything like it. I said the exact opposite. I said The position of James White, William Lane Craig sounds like the Catholic position. This is invincible ignorance. I’m not saying, ah ha, these guys don’t think that it’s an essential doctrine. On the other hand, Mike Winger then proceeds to say he thinks someone could be consciously Im Modalist, could intentionally reject the Trinity and that it’s not an essential doctrine. He could still be saved. That at least looks like a contradiction. But notice he is making it very clear this is a conscious willful rejection. This isn’t me playing. Gotcha. I’m asking the question, can someone knowingly and intentionally deny the Trinity and Javier PMO is not going to give an answer to that and then gets upset that I can point out people who will give an answer to that and they give opposite answers. I don’t see what’s tricky about that. This isn’t like, in other words, I’m giving them every benefit. The doubt you can see that in the clip and he’s just putting words in my mouth that are the opposite of the thing I actually said and did, which is curious if he’s got a good argument. He then goes on to make a really fascinating argument about Gish gallops. Here you go,
CLIP:
And I don’t know about you, but I feel like a lot of the time this sort of Gish Gallup tactic of this rapid flurry of yes or no questions is done in order to overwhelm the viewer and to keep Protestantism on the defensive. I feel that way. That is exactly what it is. That’s exactly what Joe hes Meyer is doing.
Joe:
Now, if you’re not familiar with the term Gish gallop, here you go. It’s another accusation of bad faith
CLIP:
For anyone not aware of what a Gish Gallup is, it’s a dishonest debate tactic where you focus on the quantity of arguments rather than the quality of arguments with the goal of wasting your opponent’s time. Basically, a debater utilizing the Gish Gallup tactic is taking advantage of the fact that live debates have very serious time constraints and thus the galloper will make too many arguments for his opponent to possibly refute within said time constraints.
Joe:
So you’ll notice two things. Number one, as the title of my video said, the one question that unravels Protestantism, I’m not trying to overwhelm you with questions. I’m trying to present one argument and give enough examples to show what I mean when I make the point that sincere believers don’t agree on essential doctrines. I chose 10. There are numerous more doctrines that Protestants don’t agree on and don’t agree whether they’re essential or not. I just chose this 10 in response to it. Remember, the whole point of a GCal is in a timed debate. When you have a 10 minute opening talk, you can throw out so many unrelated points that you can overwhelm your opponent without developing any argument. I take one argument and develop it in response. He doesn’t have a minute time constraint. He’s not overwhelmed or shouldn’t be. He has three and a half hours to answer one argument. The fact that he fails to do that is not because one is too many
CLIP:
And I feel that way. That is exactly what it is. That’s exactly what Joe Meyer is doing. In fact, this is actually a very common trick that’s used in the courtroom, and the reason I mentioned that is because Joe Hess is trained as a litigator and having a literal lawyer like Joe Hess Meyer badgering, if we picture the scene of Joe Hess Meyer as the litigator in this situation and he’s badgering the silent Protestant witness on the stand with back to back loaded questions and maybe the witness stutters a little bit or they’re not exactly sure how to answer, maybe they try to answer and oh, he cuts ’em off with another question, right? It can take a while to unpack these things and especially when their questions are loaded and it’s a yes or no, it can be a minefield to try to navigate.
Joe:
Look, I wasn’t like my cousin Vinny, the kind of law I did, even though it was litigation, it was like corporate litigation. We weren’t doing tricks where we’re badgering witnesses. I don’t even understand how you can badger a silent witness when they’re saying yes or no or the analogy doesn’t make any sense. Nevertheless, I would just be like, oh, okay, cheap shot. But he actually spends a lot of time developing the fact that he thinks I’m engaged in a courtroom trick from cartoon criminal law that I’m not engaged in, and I don’t know any reputable lawyer who even would do, but here you
CLIP:
Go. A trick is used by an attorney who knows you’re telling the truth and the truth hurts his case. The attorney tries to make it appear that you’re lying or incompetent or tries to make the facts different from what they are. Tricks are something you have to face almost every time you testify. If you learn to recognize and deal with them, you can rest control of your testimony away from the defense attorney and back into your hands, yes or no. One trick used by defense attorneys is to ask you questions that require an explanation, but then they try to limit your answers to a simple yes or no. They orchestrate these questions in such a way that your answer will create a false impression. Don’t fall for it.
Joe:
Again. If he thought that he could only give a one word response video, I don’t know how it took him three and a half hours, but that clearly isn’t what I was doing. You’ll notice I’m asking one question, which doctrines are essential, which is not by the way a yes or no question, but I want to know what doctrines are essential and how do you know that? And I even go to great lengths to explain. I get that the word essential can be used in a bunch of different ways, hold in common, and that actually gives us right to the question that I think unravels the promise of the Protestant reformation. And that question is this, which doctrines are essential. Now, depending on the conversation you’re in, the person you’re speaking to may have a different idea of what that means. I want to give five different ways of phrasing that question all which are slightly different, but they’re getting to the same nucleus of the same idea.
So you’ll notice I’m doing the opposite of the yes or no trick. That’s maybe because although I’m previously a lawyer, I went on from that and studied philosophy and theology and in philosophy in particular, you learn to nuance questions that rarely are things just so simple of yes or no. It often means, well what do you mean by that? And so as I said in the video, I actually belabor the point by giving five different forms of the question and I highlight someone might mean as ential one thing and not another. And in the video, in the original video, the one he allegedly responds to, even though he never quotes from it, never plays a clip of it, never gives an actual presentation of my argument. In that actual video, I talk about how people even use the term essential differently. And as you already saw, I distinguish between thinking something is not essential in the case of invincible ignorance and you’re accidentally a Trinitarian heretic as opposed to intentionally denying the Trinity, all of the distinctions I’m not making, allegedly I’m making.
So that fortunately is the end of the poisoning, the well sort, but that’s his strongest stuff. He comes out gunning against me personally because he has no apparent argument against the argument I actually make. And in the rest of the video, you realize that the argument I’m making just flies completely over his head. He doesn’t get it at all or just refuses to engage with it. So I’m going to reiterate what that argument is so you can see, okay, as we’re going think, which premise is this responding to? And you’re going to answer time and time again, none of them. This isn’t a response to anything. You can respond without rebutting, right? If someone says, oh, I don’t like that shirt you’re wearing, you say, well, your face is ugly. You’ve technically responded, it’s not a rebuttal. It doesn’t defend your shirt. I give that to say he’s responding, but he’s not rebutting.
He’s not engaging with the argument. The argument, again, I know I’m belaboring it, but I’m doing this because somehow a lot of Protestants saw two prior videos on this and didn’t understand this argument. Number one, if so, scripture in this clarity of scripture are true. All sincere believers, if they’re guided by the Holy Spirit in the sense of being elect and they’ve used the due use ordinary means, which is a pretty low bar, will agree on the essential doctrines according to Luther, they’ll agree on everything, but we don’t even need to go that far. So if your view is a Protestant of scripture is correct, everybody else who is a well-meaning follower of that same mode will agree on the essential doctrines. But second point, of course, that is not the case. The conclusion there is obviously you believe something false because if you believe something true, we would see a different reality than we see.
So that doesn’t tell me again automatically that Catholicism is true. It doesn’t tell me the mere presence of disagreement disproves any system. There’s nothing like that. I’m not saying Catholics are more or less divided than Protestants. That is just not the argument. The argument is the reformers promised you a certain result and they couldn’t deliver. Like if somebody says, pray this prayer for five days and you’ll be rich and you pray it for five days and you’re not rich, and I point that out to you, you’re not answering that when you say, well, you’re also not rich. True, not the point. So with that in mind, you’ve got the real argument. You’ve got the straw man arguments. Let’s see which ones he’s going to engage with
CLIP:
From the very beginning, the sort of title of Protestant and Protestantism. This umbrella category was meant to be an amalgamation of an array of vastly different institutions. Vastly different confessions of faith. Vastly different is groups of people that are not institutionally united.
Joe:
Okay? So he is upset that I use the term Protestant. Now, leaving aside that the argument I’m responding to is not as specifically Lutheran Calvinist, whatever, but it is a cross Protestantism kind of concept, solo scriptura. It’s one of the uniting principles of Protestantism. It’s also kind of rich to hear someone bemoan the use of the term Protestant when the next video I see from them is the case for Protestantism, a conversation with Gavin Orland, you can’t make a bunch of you should be Protestant videos, and when I say you shouldn’t be Protestant, you’re like, what does Protestant even mean? It’s such a vague term, but look, to the extent he’s engaging with the argument at all, it’s only by granting the argument he thinks he’s rebutting. I’m going to quote him here. He says from the very beginning this and then he rambles a little bit, this title of Protestant and Protestantism, this umbrella category was meant to be right, an amalgamation of an array of vastly different institutions, vastly different confessions of faith, vastly different groups of people that are not institutionally united.
That is exactly my point that while agreeing on a method of interpreting scripture, solo s scriptura, they have wildly different theological outcomes. In other words, sincere believers do not all agree on the essential doctrines within Protestants. That is exactly the point that I’m making, but that’s not the point he understands or is apparently responding to. He seems to think I’m making the argument that well, Catholics are good and Protestants are bad because Protestants are disunified, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m not even saying Protestants are bad, I’m just saying these promises about how scripture is going to operate are obviously false and Protestants should stop believing in so s script and the clarity of scripture because they aren’t true, they don’t work. So in response to this, because he’s still arguing against a fake strawman argument instead of my actual argument, he then makes a point, well, a Mormon could say LDS Mormonism is more united than Catholics Orthodox and Protestants all mushed together.
And I would say, yeah, sure, that’s fine. That’s true. That’s not responding to my argument at all though. Does that prove therefore solo scriptor is true? No, you’re just beating up on a poor straw man that is just not, this is not going well. If you think that’s a response to my argument. So he then is going to say, well, if you’re going to use this umbrella term of Protestantism, a real recognized term that speaks to a group of people who have common belief systems, so scriptura ide and the like, therefore he should get to use an umbrella term of just a ridiculous term that he calls ecclesial.
CLIP:
So here you go. But if we’re going to use umbrella categories, we must use them when making apples to apples comparisons. So let’s compare apples to apples, right? We’re going to proceed in this video by delving into what a lot of us apologists who fall into the Protestant umbrella would call the ecclesial list umbrella.
Joe:
So this was my first time hearing anyone try to group together a bunch of unrelated and somewhat related Christian groups as Ecclesia list. So if you haven’t heard that, I hadn’t heard it, here
CLIP:
You go. And so the Ecclesias umbrella here may be define something like this. Those churches and the respective traditions, which each claim to be the one true church and which believed the infallible rule of faith for the church is not restricted to scripture alone.
Joe:
So it should be clear is that this is not apples to apples at all. The definition he gives elsewhere, I didn’t play the whole thing of Protestant, and the one that most people have on some level in their mind is that theological movement originating in the reformation. That’s largely based around the five Soleil. So scripture alone, faith alone, that kind of idea given, remember my argument is specifically on one of those commonly held beliefs about sola scriptura and it’s related doctrine of the clarity of scripture. In other words, the umbrella term of Protestantism is grouping together people who have one thing that they actually share in common, a common methodology, a common methodology that I want to reiterate if it worked would produce one conclusion and doesn’t, which is why they’re all in different denominations and theological movements and the like in response to that.
Well, so actually let me pause there. It would be ridiculous to say, well, Protestants and Muslims or Christians and Muslims all believe in a holy book, and therefore I’m going to put book believers into a category and say, look, solo script is false because the Quran in the Bible disagree. That’d be a dumb argument, right? Hopefully you can see solo scriptura doesn’t work because two people following it come to different conclusions is a coherent, logical argument apparently un rebuttable. But the Bible in the Quran contradict therefore solos script is false, is a dumb argument. And so if your argument is, oh, well look, Catholics and Orthodox disagree about the Philly Oak way because one accepts the magisterium of the Catholic church and another rejects it, you’re making very much the same argument as saying this, Muslim doesn’t believe in the Trinity, he doesn’t accept the Bible.
That doesn’t disprove the Bible. That just shows when you don’t agree on the interpretive authority, you’re likely to have interpretive disagreements. My point was that Protestants who do agree on an interpretive authority, so the S script clarity of scripture, don’t agree on the results either. That’s a problem in a way that a Catholic and Orthodox who don’t agree in an interpretive authority disagreeing, yeah, of course we don’t, right? That follows from what Catholics believe. The idea that someone who doesn’t have the magisterium wouldn’t come to the same conclusions as someone who does is built into the Catholic idea of the magisterium. So calling us ecclesial lists to try to put us together just misses the thing you’re trying to critique, bro. But it gets worse than that because he doesn’t just group together Catholics and Orthodox and cops. He is also going to be like, why not just throw in Mormons? Why not just make this completely a bad faith argument?
CLIP:
You’ll remember earlier when I pointed out that Joe Hess Meyer, just being honest, disingenuously used an example of a non Trinitarian, I believe oneness Pentecostal as a Protestant, right? Well, if we wanted to play the same game, who could fit under the ecclesial list umbrella as we’ve previously defined it in this video, Mormons,
Joe:
Right? So this is the thing that makes it hard to respond to this video because I don’t know how much of it is intentionally bad faith and how much is just in failure to be able to present a sistic argument or respond to a syllogism, but obviously saying Mormons don’t agree with Orthodox, who don’t agree with Catholics, does not disprove that the Pope is the successor to Peter. And by the way, I don’t even make an argument in the first two videos that the Pope is the successor of Peter. I don’t even make an argument that you need to be Catholic. I just show the Protestant reformers and Protestant sense made false promises about the nature of scripture, which we call Sola s script and the clarity of scripture. We actually say promiscuity, but I stumbled over it every time, so I’m just going to say clarity.
Okay? So let’s turn to the final kind of category which is broadly lumped together of false prophets, damsel and math problem. I’m going to give you his kind of story, his analogy, and then I’m going to go from there. So his story, he’s imagining damsel in medieval times. I dunno why, whatever, it doesn’t matter who is faced with two suitors and she’s only allowed to choose between these two suitors, that’s going to be really important. You’ve got to force a choice between Catholics and Protestants, and then he’s going to say, well, look, the suitor, that’s obviously the Catholic one, points out to the damsel. Oh, this guy doesn’t have all these attributes, doesn’t have money in land and all this stuff. And then she’s like, oh, do you have that? And he’s like, oh, no, I don’t either, and this is supposed to prove therefore something. This is a defeater for Catholics and Protestants, I think is the kind of jargony way that he’s talking about this. Well, here he, I’ll let him explain it in his own way.
CLIP:
I think we can all tell why the argument fails and why it falls flat, right? Because see, how ridiculous situation is it? I’m sorry, just be honest here. It’s ridiculous. The man’s argument was you must not pick him because he cannot offer you X, y, and Z benefits If this argument actually holds, then he himself, the guy making the argument would be disqualified from being picked as her group. His own argument would invalidate his claim. And if it’s true that the damsel must in fact be married and that it is true, that it is only these two men that she can choose from, then an argument that is supposed to delineate between the two men that are the only options in the pool, but which actually would invalidate both of them if the argument holds is a useless argument precisely because the entire task at hand was trying to pick from the pool of established choices. He’s like body
Joe:
Slamming strawman at this point because look, there’s so many things wrong with this. Number one, let’s use his two damsels imagery. You got a Catholic and a Protestant, they’re both let’s suitors for the damsel of the soul. And the Protestant one is making false promises. Hey, if you go with me, you’ll have perfect clarity on all of the essential doctrines using scripture alone because scripture is just all clear and you just use the do use of ordinary means. And the Catholic suitor is like, Hey, that’s not true. He’s lying to you. The Protestant doesn’t actually say, oh no, I’m not lying. He is like, yeah, sure, but you also can’t provide that if you’re the damel in that situation, you should be like, okay, you are a con artist. You just lied to me flagrantly, and when you were called out, you just tried to pass the buck onto the other guy.
Now, to be clear, I’m talking about in the story, I’m not accusing Javier Pero of being a con. I think he just completely missed the point. Again, he is just dunking on the false argument that my position is like Catholics are more unified and he’s convinced that I think we have an infallible list of infallible doctrines, which I don’t think and didn’t claim he’s getting that from a response I made to Gavin that he didn’t understand. Not super important, but maybe just to be very clear here, he spends a decent time in the video saying like, oh, you don’t have an infallible list of infallible doctrines. We don’t need an infallible list of infallible doctrines. That’s not part of the claim I’m making at all. I mean, just completely missing the point. What we can say is, Hey, you know that stuff about how if you just have scripture alone, you’ll be able to come to these conclusions.
You can’t come to the conclusions reliably. The second thing to notice is in his story, he keeps stressing how you have to choose one of the suitors. Trent Horn talks about this in one of his recent videos. He calls it the You Lose. So I win fallacy. A lot of Protestant apologetics is just having some facile and kind of superficial take on like, oh, look, KALX are wrong about this, and they haven’t delved deeply on it. But the whole point is they’re trying to say Catholics are wrong and therefore Protestantism is right. And you see him doing that here. And I want to be clear, I’m not doing that in the original video. I’m not saying Protestantism is false and therefore Catholicism is true. I’ve made that very clear. Hopefully numerous times I’m simply showing the Protestant case is not true. I’ve got other videos laying out the Catholic case, but I didn’t mix those two together.
And so to the extent that he’s responding to my pro Catholic case, I didn’t make such a case in the video. It’s right there in the title. The one question that unravels Protestantism, it’s not the one question that proves Catholicism. There aren’t just two suitors. An orthodox person could say the Catholic and the Protestant are wrong. A Muslim could say that. A Mormon could say that, an atheist could say that. The question here, you cannot in the modern world defend Protestantism by being like, well, we reject Catholicism that might’ve worked in the 16th century when everyone was basically Catholic or Protestant in Western Europe. You need better arguments or you’re just going to lose people to non Christianity. So once more, my argument is that the Protestant view of scripture and uniquely the Protestant view of scripture presents this claim that sincere believers are going to agree on the essential doctrines.
That’s not something Catholics believe, right? As I pointed out, Catholics believe you can read scripture and even be like growing in relationship with God and still be getting important things wrong because we don’t have a vision of scripture or the nature of solo scripture or any of this stuff that would preclude. So we are fine affirming someone using the due use of ordinary means might come to the wrong conclusion because we were never meant to be guided by scripture alone. So if you’re tracking, there are two things that make the disagreement over essentials uniquely bad from a Protestant view, where it isn’t from Catholic Orthodox Coptic view. Number one, the traditional Protestant view on the clarity of scripture is that scripture is so clear you wouldn’t expect to find these, and yet we do. And number two, when these disagreements come up, there is no infallible church that can settle the disagreement.
And so you just have people going from Presbyterian to Baptist and Baptist to Presbyterian, and it never gets solved. Alright? That was from the prior video. So this is the third of three videos I’ve done on this subject. He claims he’s responding to the first one. He doesn’t touch it. He actually quotes a little bit from the second one saying no, he at least saw some of it in that I explain why all the arguments he’s going to go on and make after that would be bad arguments to make because Catholics and Protestants are not in the same boat on this question. Nevertheless, his entire argument is, I’ve got a double standard, because neither Catholics nor Protestants can achieve the false problems of the Protestant reformers. It’s not a double standard. That’s just maybe you guys believed bad stuff about scripture. So I’m going to give two analogies here.
Number one, there are these obnoxious viral math problems where it’s like, oh, here’s this simple looking problem with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and invariably it’s structured in such a way as to be intentionally a little bit confusing. And people very confidently jump in the comments and they come to very different conclusions. But many of them are convinced the question is easy because they don’t get that. This would not be a viral math problem if it was like three plus four is what we dunno. So they are very confident and they jump in and despite their confidence, they’re actually wrong and they don’t understand that the question is more difficult, maybe because of the way it’s worded or there’s something funny with the question. Now, obviously scripture isn’t intentionally trying to trick you in the way viral math problems are, but you have all of these Protestants who are very confident that they know what scripture says and they don’t seem to notice the other Protestants who are saying different things.
So Javier Perma wants me to only focus on his denomination where it’s a self-selected group of people who’ve all answered seven to the same math problem. And it’s true. If you self-select as a denomination of people who only say that the answer is seven, then you’re going to be like, look at how united we are. But only because you’ve artificially blocked out everyone else who used the same method and came to different conclusions. That’s why I’m looking at all of Protestantism and frankly everyone following solo scriptura, even if you don’t want to call them Protestant, because it shows that your method doesn’t work. Second, one analogy I want to give is if you promise that you can foretell the future, and I point out that you can’t and your response is, well, you can’t either. You’ve missed the point. That just doesn’t answer the objection.
The point is you’re making promises you can’t keep. The fact that you might be making promises I can’t keep is not an argument against me. This is not a defeater. We’re not on the same playing field now. No, you’re making false claims and I’m pointing out that your claims are false. In this case, a false claim is that if we just use scripture alone, the clarity of scripture is such that we’ll all come to the same conclusion on essential doctrines. Not true. We have 500 years of proving it’s not true, or we can watch a couple videos. So final thoughts, because my having been a lawyer is relevant. I was reminded of an old lawyer’s adage that just goes, if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law pound the table.
So in a weird way, I’m kind of heartened that so much of the response has been weird, personal attacks on me, or attacking obvious straw men that aren’t my argument and refusing to even play clips from the argument you’re claiming you’re responding to because it’s just pounding the table. And I think if there was a good rebuttal, then there would be some pounding of the law, pounding of the facts. And again, I want to be really clear, I’m not just trying to pick on this random guy who made a three and a half hour video. I’d never heard of him before. I wouldn’t have even responded. But a lot of Protestants I do know in this space, including ones that I have some respect for, acted like this was a good response. And I think it’s an embarrassingly bad response if you understand what the debate is actually about.
You can see, think back to the original thing that started this. Martin Luther makes claims like this. If you speak of the external clearness of scripture, nothing, whatever is left obscure or ambiguous, could you, after watching this debate come away believing he’s telling the truth about that? Now, I’m not saying he’s intentionally lying. I’m saying his method of scripture, which is really foundational to his theology, is broken. It does not work, which is why I’m left believing that the best Protestant, ap AP can’t answer this argument for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.