Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer responds to Dr. Gavin Ortlund’s claim that Roman Catholics disagree about the essential doctrines of Christianity as much as Protestants do.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to explore the question of whether or not Catholics can know which doctrines are essential ones we have to all agree on and which ones aren’t. You may remember two weeks ago I suggested that a simple question that unravels many of the false promises of Protestantism is the question which doctrines are essential and how do we know? Now, many of you responded by trying to answer that question, but many others responded by deflecting the question, pushing it back onto Catholic, saying, well, you guys can’t solve the problem either. Now, I don’t think that’s true. I also think that’s just a deflection. I was gratified to see Dr. Gavin Orland had replied to the episode because I know he’s someone who’s written an entire book on what he calls theological triage, trying to help other Protestants figure out which doctrines are essential and which ones aren’t essential. But in listening to his reply, I think he also just deflects the critique without really answering it. So I’m going to play the critique in his entirety and then point out three things that I think he’s getting just fundamentally wrong.
Gavin:
What are the essential doctrines of the Christian faith and why can’t Protestants agree upon this? This comes up all the time. Joe Meyer put out a video on this recently. Others have made this argument in the past, and I’ve thought about this in the past a lot because I’m interested in this whole question. I’ve written a book on the idea of triaging issues, but I think the essential point I was thinking about making a video response, I thought, you know what? I’ll just make a short because I think the essential neutralizing consideration can be made very briefly. And so just on my way back from Home Depot here, I’m being safe. I’m not using my phone with my hands here while I’m driving, but essential point is this. The non Protestant traditions don’t have a list of essential doctrines either. They do not agree on the essential doctrines of the faith. It’s not in Roman Catholicism, for example. There’s no list of essential doctrines in the catechism or in the creeds, and if you ask 20 different Roman Catholics, what are the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, you get 19 different answers. At least I know because I’ve done this. So I think there’s a lack of self-awareness in this criticism. Roman Catholics do not agree on the essentials.
Joe:
Again, I’m grateful to Gavin for applying. I do think though he’s missed the mark in three important ways. Number one, his entire response is committing This popular logical fallacy I’ve been alluding to was called the two Quay fallacy. I see it a lot online and I want to address it head on. Second, I don’t think he’s recognizing the way this poses a problem for Protestantism in some unique ways that it wouldn’t for Catholicism or orthodoxy or Coptic Christianity. And third, I think he’s also just factually wrong. In fact, I know he’s factually wrong because the Catholic church has clear things that have anathema attached to it, have clear defined dogmas, have clear things with the weight of infallibility behind them that are clearly labeled as essential dogmas, and then other things that were clearly given explicit permission to freely debate. Now, it may be true, you’re not going to find out what those things are and aren’t by asking 20 random Roman Catholics, but there are better ways to answer that question, and I’m happy to introduce you to some of them if you’re not familiar with them.
But let’s look first at the logical fallacy. This logical fallacy is called the quique fallacy. Now, quique is just Latin for U2, so it’s the U2 fallacy. I was trying to think of a good U2 joke to make there, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Peter Van Vliet in his book on logical fallacies gives the example of a mom telling her daughter not to smoke, and the daughter replies, why should I listen to you? You started smoking when you were 16, but as Van Veep points out, the mother may be inconsistent. She might even be a hypocrite, but that doesn’t invalidate her argument. Liars, manipulators, and even hypocritical parents can create good arguments. So if the critique is true, it doesn’t matter if the critic is a hypocrite for reasoning, this comes up all the time as Christians, if you call out immorality in the broader culture, people are quick to respond.
Well, you’re also a sinner. That may be true, and maybe it’s even morally wrong for me to point out the speck in your eye without addressing the log in my own, but it doesn’t mean there’s not a speck in your eye. So likewise, if I tell you you’re a Protestant, I say, Hey, your church is burning down, and you say, well, you Catholics, your church is burned down too. That doesn’t put out the fire burning down your church does it. It just doesn’t address the actual problem. That’s what makes this fallacious as a response. It’s not an essential neutralized consideration. At best, it’s mutually assured destruction. But second, it’s not even that because this is a problem for Protestantism in some unique ways. This is where I think that both Gavin and many of the other Protestants who’ve responded are just fundamentally missing the point.
So let’s assume for a second that what he was saying is actually true. Let’s say the Catholic church never defined dogmas or doctrines and we really had no idea which things were and weren’t essential doctrines. Ordinary Catholics didn’t, ordinary Protestants didn’t. Well, in that case we might have to say, well, scripture is definitely not clear to either of us about what the doctrinal answers are, but only one side. The Protestant side teaches what’s called the perspicuity of scripture, the all clarity of scripture. Now, again, I addressed this explicitly in the earlier episode, but just to briefly summarize, this is the Reformation doctrine that you don’t need an infallible church. You don’t need an infallible pope because those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded that not only the learned but the unlearned in a due use of the ordinary means may attain under a sufficient understanding of them.
So in other words, from scripture itself, using the due use of ordinary means you can figure out what all the essential doctrines are. This is an important part of Sola s script working and what are the due use of ordinary means? What does that reference to? It’s not a theological deep dive. Remember, this is something for the learned and the unlearned alike. The Westminster Shorter catechism says it’s the word sacraments and prayer. So if you’re a regular churchgoer and you are receiving the word sacraments and you’re praying well, you’ve got everything you need to know the clarity of scripture. That is what the Westminster Confession teaches. That’s what the Westminster Shorter Catechism Teaches. And so modern Protestants can redefine all of that, but only by gutting this historic Protestant doctrine. And another important detail there is these things are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
So that’s going to be an important thing. 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. And to be clear, look, sometimes theological problems are because one side is being lazy or wicked. They love sin more than they want to know what the Bible says, but we don’t have to jump to one of those two bad faith kind of conclusions as Catholic as an Orthodox has copped.
Protestantism is uniquely in this corner where the problem that other Protestants disagree about what r and r and essential doctrines is really problematic because if scripture is all clear, then the reason they’re disagreeing isn’t because of some opacity in scripture. It has to be because they’re lazy or they’re wicked. That is all that is left if you understand this doctrine. Now, interestingly, Gavin tries to head this off, not in this video, but in a comment on the video that he posts. He pins a little comment, he says, to anticipate comments, disagreements about essential doctrines. No more disprove the perspicuity of scripture than the existence of atheists disproves the perspicuity of God’s existence as a word in Romans one 19. But look at that in context. That response sounds good at the surface, but in Romans one, St. Paul is really clear. The existence of God is noble from reason alone.
You don’t actually need the virtue of faith to realize there must be a God. But he says in the verse right before the one Gavin cites that he’s talking about the wickedness of men who by their wickedness, suppress the truth. In other words, St. Paul is saying some people are refusing to know this basic thing that God exists because of wickedness. So it sounds like he doesn’t explicitly say this, but because Gavin cites to this passage, Romans one, he looks at the next verse, verse 19, which talks about the knowability of God’s existence. It sounds like he’s saying that the disagreements about essential doctrines among Protestants is like this, that Protestants who disagree with him are like atheists who denied the existence of God. Now, he hasn’t explicitly said that Maybe he’d like to clarify that, but if he’s getting out of the problem of the security of scripture, I’d love know how because that would be one way how if you are convinced scripture is all clear and the only reason anyone disagrees in the need, they’re wicked or lazy, that is logically valid.
I think it’s a ridiculous position, but it’s logically valid. So let’s put some meat on the bones. The Lutheran believe that infant baptism is an essential. The Lutheran church was very sined. The second largest Lutheran body in the US says baptism through the word creates the faith necessary to receive salvation for infants. And they quote Galatians three, verse 27, as many of you have been baptized, have put on Christ. Now, Gavin was baptized as a baby, but in 2013 he writes an article for the gospel coalition about how he changed his mind on this. He was baptized in the Church of Scotland. His father was a Presbyterian theologian and minister. His brother Ray Jr. Was a Presbyterian who then became non-denominational and now I think is still non-denominational, but is working with the Anglicans as like a theologian. I don’t know. It’s confusing. My point there is some major theological disagreements exist between those groups, and these are people who I think Gavin trusts and respects enough to know they’re not just wicked or lazy and both in his family and in these denominations.
And Gavin, prior to his own change of mind when he was Presbyterian before, was that just because of his wickedness and laziness? I don’t think so. I think there are good faith disagreements. Now, I think the fact that there are these good faith disagreements and no mechanism to solve it is a problem within Protestantism. But again, a unique problem within Protestantism that doesn’t exist in Catholicism. 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 or 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 more on that in a few.
I want to get to the third thing that gets wrong because Gavin is just factually wrong. It is not true that the Catholic church has no more list of essential doctrines than Protestants do. That is just factually untrue. Now, it is true when we talk about essential doctrines, it’s different things we may mean, but what I’m meaning here is which false views are heresies or which things do you have to believe upon pain of heresy, if you want to put it that way. The deeper question of whether someone goes to hell for believing a certain thing from a Catholic perspective is a harder question to answer because for heresy to be damnable, it has to be obstinate. It has to be intentional. It can’t just have gotten something wrong in a theology quiz and then you go to hell. You have to be intentionally rejecting something God has revealed.
So we can say which things are objectively false on essential doctrines. We cannot tell you the nature of the person’s heart because only God can do that. So I hope that is clear. Sometimes I think Protestants think we’re being shifty when we’re really just trying to be nuanced, that we can say which things are objectively heretical, but we can’t say therefore you’re going to hell because God knows whether or not you’re a heretic on purpose or an accident. To that end, it is not as if there are not clear books that talk about the different levels of teaching authority in the church and which dogmas and which propositions are different levels. If you want a 500 page plus example of that, Ludwig T’s book Fundamentals of Catholic dogma does all that. But I’m not going to even look at a book of popular theology. I mean 500 plus pages, a book of theology by a private theologian.
I’m going to look at what the church has directly said. So most recently, Pope John Paul II created a profession of faith to be professed by anyone who is going to take up any kind of capacity, the ability to speak for the church. So by all means bishops and priests, but also if you’re going to be like an official theologian, anything where you are speaking on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, we have to first make you promise you’re not a heretic. And in that there’s three paragraphs that distinguish between three levels of authoritative teaching at the top level are divinely revealed doctrines in which we pray with firm faith. I also believe everything contained in the word of God, whether written or handed down in tradition, which the church either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal magisterium sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed.
What does that mean? Okay, well, fortunately, Cardinal Resinger as the head of the congregation production of faith, this is of course the future. Benedict the 16th explains which kind of things we’re talking about here, which things have been definitively laid down. Number one, he says the articles of faith of the creek, but that includes things like baptismal regeneration. Number two, the various Christological dogmas and Marion dogmas. So all of the times the churches has infallibly like invoked the authority of the church to define things about the nature of Christ or about Mary, the assumption, the immaculate conception professional virginity. Third, he says the doctrine of the institution of the sacraments by Christ and their efficacy with regard to grace. This was known as xara, that the sacraments aren’t just mere symbols, they actually do something by divine power. Fourth, the doctrine of the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic celebration.
So it’s not enough to just say the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but also that the mass is truly a sacrifice. Fifth, the foundation of the church by the will of Christ. Sixth, the doctrine of the primacy and infallibility of the Roman pontiff. That is the Pope seventh, the doctrine of the existence of original sin eight, the doctrine on the immortality of the spiritual soul, which means you don’t have soul annihilation upon death and on the immediate recompense after death, you don’t have soul sleep. Ninth, the absence of error in the inspired sacred text of scripture is inerrant 10th, the doctrine on the grave immorality of direct involuntary killing of an innocent human being. You cannot be a non heretical Christian and say murder is okay or say abortion is okay. Those are 10 very clear things that have been listed explicitly by the relevant authority in the church as essential doctrines, right?
You can’t deny those. What happens if you do? Well, Inger says these doctrines require the ascent of theological faith by all members of the faithful. Thus, whoever obstinately places them in doubt or denies them falls under the censure of heresy. So if you were to intentionally obstinately deny these things, you’d be publicly labeled as a heretic. That’s the top tier right beneath that you have definitively taught doctrines. This is a little more confusing. The first one is just the really straightforward stuff. The church has very clearly spoken on these issues, and these are things that scripture in many cases is extremely clear on. The second one are often applications of revelation. I’ll show you what I mean in the professio fide, the profession of faith you pray. I also firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the church regarding teaching on faith and morals.
Definitively proposed means that proposedly with the definition, not just like there’s an expectation but something that’s been defined. What are some examples? I’m going to skip over where Inger talks about the history pre Vatican, one of papal primacy and jurisdiction because it’s complicated. I don’t think you need that because it’s already, this is a top tier kind of issue. The history is interesting, but I think he was nerding out a little bit there. But second, he talks about male only ordination to the priesthood. Now that’s true. There isn’t just a thou shall not have women priests lying in the New Testament the way there’s thou shall not kill. But what there is is Christ showing us that the apostles are male only, and this doesn’t appear to be a mistake. And you have a 2000 year tradition. And so as John Paul II points out, and Ratzinger here reiterates the ordinary and universal magisterium, the ordinary and universal teaching of the church has infallibly settled this question.
So it is impossible for there to be women priests. He then points out that euthanasia is in a similar category in a strange way, meaning there’s no scriptural denunciation of euthanasia. There’s no apparent scripture awareness of euthanasia. But if you understand what the gospel teaches about life and death issues, then you can see why euthanasia is wrong. It’s an application, but it’s a sure application of gospel teaching. You can’t get the euthanasia question wrong without revealing you’ve got something else deeper wrong. Make sense? Likewise, you can’t get the male only nature of the priesthood wrong without getting something deeper about holy orders wrong. Likewise, he’s going to point out things like prostitution and fornication. If you’re getting those things wrong, you’re getting something deeper about sexuality wrong. Those are on that second tier. Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to say you believe in the authority of the Pope and also reject the election of the Pope.
So even though these things aren’t, there is no passage in scripture that says Pope Francis is the Pope, but someone who just insists on denying the Pope has run afoul of something that it can be known with certainty. And likewise, ecumenical councils, likewise, Anglican ordinations. And so here again, if you Anglican ordinations is a complicated one. I’m going to basically skip past it except to say that when Anglican switched from having a Sacra dole priesthood to having a ministerial Protestant style one, the Pope Pope Leo the 13th explicitly said this, invalidated apostolic succession, their sacraments were no longer valid in terms of holy orders because they changed the right and the intent. Again, if you understand what the church has always believed about the sacraments, then you can apply that to a particular case. Hopefully that’s clear. But the point is those are these second tier things.
These are still essential, but we don’t claim them to be as directly revealed as a thing in the first tier. Beneath that are things where the church has spoken, but in a non definitive way here, there’s a greater degree of Christian liberty even among Catholic theologians. And so for this, the theologian or a church official or whoever who’s professing faith professes, moreover, I hear what’s called religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman Pont, the Pope or the College of Bishops enunciate when they exercise their authentic magisterium, their authentic teaching authority, even if they do not intend to proclaim these teachings by definitive act. Again, definitive means like defining when the bishops are teaching on a certain subject. Maybe they don’t take the trouble of actually giving an actual dogmatic definition, or if the Pope does, maybe he’s not given an actual definition, but he’s invoking his teaching authority in some way, shape or form, for instance, an encyclical.
We still listen to that and give it a high degree of respect. It still has a great deal of weight with us, but we don’t claim that it’s infallible. We don’t claim that it’s impossible to disagree with it. Now, this is coming from Vatican two, which talks about how this should be showed to the Pope even when he is not speaking infallibly and likewise to the bishops. So how do we know which things fall in this and kind of what level? What’s the Pope’s mind and will on this? Well, we’re told we can know that from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine or from his manner of speaking. Now notice there, these are time for the Pope is speaking on a doctrine and particularly, even though I keep saying speaking, it’s saying document. So what’s anticipated here is not an off the cuff sort of interview where we have to parse through every word and what did the Pope mean by this or that.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about things like papal and cyclicals. We might those to parse what does he mean by this or that. But there we’re trying to understand the mind and will of what the Pope is saying so we can respect that. That does not preclude that you might individually disagree with certain things on this third tier because it is not invoking infallibility. So beneath all of those three tiers are of course a wide range of things where the church has not spoken in any kind of definitive way, and which it would be impossible to say the mind and will of the Pope on a certain matter or the mind and will of the bishops on a certain matter because it’s just been left open to theological dispute and speculation. So I would say it’s actually fairly clear to distinguish between essential and non-essential teaching from a Catholic perspective.
The last thing I want to do is give what I hope is a helpful analogy. Imagine two countries, country A, they write a constitution and say, okay, here’s the Constitution. We think it is so clear that you can just sort it out among yourselves. We’re not going to bother creating a court system, spare an Article three because we don’t need it. If you have a dispute about the meaning of the constitution, talk to one another about it and then you’ll figure it out. Country B, for whatever reason has the exact same Constitution, maybe seven books longer, it doesn’t matter. But in addition says, okay, if there are disputes, we’re going to create a judicial system with a supreme court that can settle these questions when they arise. Now, imagine you come back 200, 500, 2000 years later, which of these countries do you think is going to be running as a single country?
Country eight doesn’t have a chance. Of course, it’s going to break up into a bunch of smaller factions. Of course, you’re going to have secession in civil war and everything else. There’s no way of resolving problems when they arise. Country B might still have plenty of problems, might have plenty of dispute. The court systems might be hearing cases all the time. But the point is that problems can actually get solved when they arise in a way that doesn’t just involve secession or schism. Well, so here, if you hear Catholics making this point and what you hear is that Catholics never have theological disputes, you’re mishearing. That is not the point at all. Catholics absolutely have theological disputes, have a couple of Catholics over for dinner and you’ll find one. What we have instead is a mechanism when theological disputes inevitably arise as they do for Catholics as well as for Protestants.
The difference is not one of us is less contentious than the other, or we are thinking less about this for anything like that. No, no, no. The disputes are going to arise in both cases. The difference is Catholics have a mechanism to settle theological disputes. We are not still debating whether the Trinity is true or not, and it’s not because someone had some killer proof text. It’s because the church settled the question. Among Protestants, you have on the fringes of Protestantism, groups like Oneness, Pentecostals who just reject the Trinity outright. You’ve got groups that don’t believe the Trinity is true, and then you have a lot of other Protestants who don’t think getting the trinity wrong is an essential doctrine. That’s a problem in itself. So this is the mechanism problem. So here’s the example I’d give you, and I really am closing here and Acts 15.
I give this example before, but I think it really helps to eliminate the issue. Some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, unless you’re circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. Okay? So there it’s somebody introduced a false theological opinion on an essential doctrine of salvation. Very explicitly they said, here’s something essential. You need circumcision for salvation. Then Paul and Barnabas debate them. Now, think about the due use of ordinary means. They don’t just have a theological debate with their neighbor. They have literally the Apostle Paul explaining to them why they they’re wrong and it doesn’t settle the issue. They continue to be wrong. What is needed to settle. The issue is that Paul and Barnabas and some others go to Jerusalem, to the apostles and the elders and the Council of Jerusalem authoritatively settles it. How do we know it’s authoritative?
Because they say it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, they’re invoking divine authority, something no Protestant church can do to settle this issue. The point I’m making here is Catholics and Orthodox and cops believe in the same model of the church that the New Testament lays out for settling theological questions. We are not in the same issue on the essential non-essential problem. Protestants are in this problem because they don’t have, number one, an infallible church, or number two, any means by which they know which things are the allegedly clear essential doctrines and which ones aren’t. So I don’t think it works to try to push this back on Catholics or Orthodox or cops because our churches are not burning down on this question in the same way Protestants are for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.