Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer exposes one fatal flaws in Protestantism that unravels the whole movement.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shamus Popery. I’m Joe Hess Meyer and I want to explore a question today that I think unravels a lot of the false promises of the reformation, the kind of promises the Protestant reformers made, but neither they nor their successors could really deliver on. To get there though, I want to start with some common ground popular maxim you may have heard just goes in essentials unity in non-essentials, liberty in all things charity. It’s a beautiful expression and it’s one that I think most Catholics and most Protestants would say, yeah, that’s a great principle to strive for and it gives us an actual framework in which to talk about theology. Which things should we agree to disagree on, which things are not worth dividing the church over, and which are things that are absolutely essential things that we really have to hold in common. And that actually gets 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 could say, well, which doctrines must Christians agree upon? Or what do I have to believe to be a Christian? What do I have to believe in order to be saved or negatively? Which incorrect views are acceptable and which incorrect views are heresy? Fifth and finally, which incorrect views are acceptable and which incorrect views are damnable? Hopefully framing it that way makes it clear why we care about this. The point here is not just to gate keep Christianity, the point here is that we care about doctrine for the fact that some false teachings may imperil your salvation.
So which doctrines are essential? And also how do we know? So in part one of this episode, I want to explore that. How do we know which doctrines are essential from a Protestant perspective? This is an episode I’ve been planning to do for a while, but I saw a really fascinating conversation on Facebook. I didn’t jump in for reasons that are going to be very clear. A Protestant Facebook friend of mine who I don’t know in real life said recent conversation had me curious Protestants only, what do you think is a bigger deal? A sofie. That’s the doctrine of justification by faith alone or B, the Trinity. Now the Protestants that I saw responding to that said the Trinity, but he replied that he thought Sofie was more important because it’s foundational to what the gospel even is. And the Godhead, while important is ultimately an interesting intellectual point, not an indicator of a regenerated heart.
It was kind of a fascinating thing. I saw what he considered essential and non-essential, but sofie, this Protestant distinctive was actually more important to get right than the Trinity like understanding who God is. That seemed very backwards, but I want to understand kind of the thinking that goes into that. And so one of the people who’s been asked this question of essentials and non-essentials is someone I actually have a tremendous amount of respect for who is a Protestant William Lanere. But I think if you listen to his answer, you’ll see several red flags that this is not a good way of trying to do theology and we’ll explain why as we go, we’ll see what the problems are, but here’s Craig in his own words.
CLIP:
I think the centrality of certain doctrines compared to others will be evident in a couple of ways. One will be by the emphasis placed upon them In the biblical text, for example, the existence of God is just everywhere, presupposed and affirmed throughout the Bible. This could hardly be a peripheral doctrine. By contrast, the doctrine of baptism is rarely spoken of in the biblical text.
Joe:
I thought this was a really bizarre answer, partly because I think the example he gives is pretty bizarre because it seems to be the baptism is spoken of quite a lot. Now, sure, not spoken of as much as God’s existence is spoken of, but what doctrine meets that standard. But if you look at the New Testament, baptism is mentioned several times in ways that make it sound pretty essential. For instance, in Mark 1616, when Jesus is talking about how you’re saved, he says He who believes and is baptized will be saved. That makes it sound essential. There are only two things on that list. In one Peter 3 21, after describing Noah and how he and his family were saved on the ark through water, he says, baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you. And then he goes into how in Acts chapter two at Pentecost, when the crowd listening is cut to the heart and say, brethren, what shall we do?
Peter says, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. And then he goes on from there and we’re told that he testified with many other words and exhorted them, saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation. So those who received his word were baptized and then it says, and they were added that day, about 3000 souls now added to what added to the church that makes it look incredibly important and very central essential, even both for church membership and for salvation. It would be hard to find a doctrine more obviously connected to those two things with a very short list. Things like faith, the existence of God, the cross are all connected with church membership and salvation. Not a lot of other things are on that list, which is why I find Craig using that as an obviously non-essential, unimportant rarely mentioned.
Doctrine seems obviously wrong. Now I’m just scratching the surface here, right? A lot of Christians talk about being born again Christians, but when Jesus talks about what it is to be born again in John three, in response to Nicodemus question, he says, you have to be born again of water in the spirit or else you can’t enter the kingdom of God. Now that sounds like water baptism is doing something that’s really essential in some way in Acts 19, they encounter a group of believers who have never heard of the Holy Spirit and the response St. Paul gives is into what then were you baptized into what were you baptized? They say John the baptism. And Paul distinguishes it from Christian baptism by saying, John baptized what? The baptism of repentance. So whatever baptism is, it appears to be something more than the symbolic baptism of John the Baptist and something that seems pretty important because when he finds out they haven’t been baptized, he gets some baptized and we’re told when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they spoke with tongues and prophesied.
All that’s to say is it doesn’t appear to be what color shirt was St. Peter wearing. It’s not something in incidental sort of detail. It seems to be pretty important. So I don’t think frequency is actually that good of a test to use. One example we’ll talk about more in a little bit. Think about the trinity. The Trinity, most people would consider extremely important for Christianity. And yet there’s no one verse that just talks directly about the Trinity. It’s actually much easier to find verses talking directly about baptism than about the Trinity. It doesn’t follow that. Therefore, baptism is more important than the Trinity. There are actually several because a lot of times if you think about the New Testament, there may be particular issues that have come up. The so-called Judaizer heresy. Do you have to follow the mosaic law? For most believers today, they’re not even tempted to go follow Levitical laws, but there’s a lot written about that in both the old and the New Testament. So defining the importance of adoption by how frequently it gets mentioned seems at best a pretty imperfect rubric. But that’s only the first standard he has. Here’s his second one.
CLIP:
But in addition to that, it’s not just the number of times that it’s mentioned, but it is how deeply ingrained it is in the structure of one’s beliefs. If a belief if abandoned would greatly affect the Christian faith, then you know that you’re dealing with a doctrine that is right at the core of our web of beliefs. For example, if you were to deny the atoning death of Christ, it’s hard to see how anything could survive of Christianity. What would be left if it were not true that Christ died for our sins? By contrast, if you deny that in the Lord’s supper, we actually consume the body and blood of the Lord, I don’t think that would have much impact at all upon the Christian religion.
Joe:
Again, I find the standard understandable, but the example is bizarre because from the perspective of everyone who believes in the Eucharist, it’s absolutely essential. The Second Vatican Council describes the Eucharist as the source in summon of the Christian life, a phrase echoed by the catechism in 1324 and explains that all of the work of the church is bound up with the Eucharist and oriented toward it. And that in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the church, namely Christ himself, our Passover, our Passover lamb. So understandably, if you think it’s just a symbol, maybe you say what’s the importance? But if you don’t think it’s a symbol, it is absolutely essential. It’s absolutely vital. And that was how the early Christians understood it as well. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in response to a group probably gnostics warns the Christians of Smyrna to avoid them because as he says, they abstained from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ.
So he didn’t think it was an unimportant incidental detail that had nothing to do with the Christian life. He viewed it as a standard for Christian communion. And so the Christians were warned to have nothing to do with them. And then he warns that those who speak against this gift of God that is the Eucharist incur death in the midst of their disputes and he views it as damnable and says it would be better for them to treat it with respect that they also might rise again. My point here isn’t to show that Ignatius knows more about John, his teacher and what he taught in John six than William Lane Craig does. I think that is true. That’s not my point here. My point here is if you’re defining an essential doctrine in such a radically different way that the earliest Christians idea of what essential doctrines were are your examples of obviously non-essential doctrines, something is really wonky there.
And frankly, even if you don’t believe in the Eucharist, you should be able to see that because if you don’t believe in the Eucharist, then the fact that there are a group of people worshiping what you think is just bread and wine should also be at the level of an important doctrinal disagreement because it looks a lot like idolatry then. But as for that kind of web that William Lane Craig talks about Saint Eu when he’s defending bodily resurrection argues that of course bodily resurrection is real because we’re nourished with the body of the Lord, meaning in the Eucharist, if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you’ll rise again. He’s using that promise from John six in saying, therefore we know that we’re going to rise again. And so he warns again, gnostics to either alter their opinion or cease from offering the Eucharist and he says, our and is in accord with the Eucharist.
And the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion. That’s super early on, right? Iran ans the guy who just said that he’s the one who tells us Matthew, mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels. So we’re dealing with about 180 in the case of sitting Ignatius about 1 0 7. My point here is the early Christians viewed this as absolutely essential. And so they would’ve presumably thought this is very much at the heart of the web. And so to just say, well, we know it’s not essential, not at the heart of the web is kind of begging the question, you’re assuming the conclusion rather than giving any principled way to get there to see the Eucharist is an unimportant doctrine or baptism is unimportant and that we should instead care a lot about a different theology of the atonement. So that’s just the first thing I wanted to throw out there.
I think there’s a problem that when you ask Protestants, well how do you know which things are and aren’t essential? The mechanisms don’t seem to work. And I’m just using Craig as someone who I think is generally well respected, who seems obviously wrong here. But the next thing I want to do is look at 10 particular doctrinal questions. These are 10 different doctrines, big and small, although which ones you consider big and small. That’s literally kind of the point which of these things are essential? And in each of these cases I’ve tried to find people within the kind of broad world of Protestantism, usually evangelicals, but there’s been a few maybe outside of that I had a lot of clips to work through, so I may not have done this perfectly. And sometimes people use the term essential to mean different things. As I said before, there’s five different ways we could phrase that question that have different implications.
Nevertheless, the point here is there certainly seems to be on almost every major doctrine, one group of Protestants saying, Hey, this is an essential doctrine we all have to agree on, and one group of Protestants saying this is something we can agree to disagree on. So it’s not just that they disagree on the doctrine, it’s that they also disagree on whether the doctrine is important or not, whether it’s essential or not. So as we’re going through this, I just say three things. Number one, remember that the point here is not to figure out which side of the dispute is right, whether you agree with the doctrine or not. Instead we want to be looking at well is getting that doctrine right essential to Christianity and to salvation and how do we know whether it is essential or not? And then third, as we’re talking about these issues, be thinking of people who are intentionally rejecting whatever the position is or intentional.
There’s not the people who think they’re affirming it but have a confused understanding. We’re not talking about cases of accidental ignorance, we’re talking about cases of intentional rejection. So in cases of intentional rejections where two groups of Christians just absolutely knowingly disagree with one another, which of these things does it matter enough that we would say this is an essential we all have to be unified in? So number one, can Christians celebrate Christmas? This actually, I stumbled upon this clip while looking up things related to Protestant theories of the true church and it was a list of things to watch out for to know if your church is a true church or not. And here’s the first criterion given.
CLIP:
Are all of these churches part of the same church that Jesus started? Is your church the true church? You should know. I’m going to ask you some distinct easy to answer questions. You will know by your answers whether or not your church is teaching the same thing Jesus Christ taught and commanded his church to teach and observe. Number one, does your church teach you that God is honored when we observe Christmas and Easter?
Joe:
So literally the first essential he came up with was does your church celebrate Christmas and Easter? And you might be wondering why in the world? Well, because the guy speaking is a guy by the name of Mike Shabby, I believe that’s how you pronounce his name from United Church of God, which is an offshoot of Herbert Armstrong’s church. They’re kind of a weird fringe group. This is not mainstream evangelicalism. And I’ll explain why and I’m going to also explain why I started with them in just a second. But before I get there, why do they think it’s super important to know whether you celebrate Christmas or Easter?
CLIP:
Don’t mix truth with pagan rituals like Christmas and Easter. Those celebrations are an abomination to God. He is not honored by it no matter how you try to spin it. So if your church teaches and you observe these holidays, you are not in the true church of God, the one that Jesus Christ started. You have been deceived.
Joe:
So he’s convinced that Christmas is of pagan origin and therefore it is gravely sinful to celebrate it. And if you do, you’re not even in the church, you’re just deceived. That is absolutely essential from that point of view. Whereas other Protestants like Mike Winger are going to say No, none of that is true. So here’s winger saying you absolutely can celebrate Christmas and it’s not a pagan origin.
CLIP:
Now, is anything wrong in and of itself with celebrating the coming of Jesus of Jesus? I don’t think so. In fact, I think we have a biblical case to say that it’s a good thing to celebrate. For instance, it was celebrated in the scriptures. They celebrated it. It was a great thing. The Magi show up from a distant land following the star, they show up to meet this newborn king.
Joe:
So winger’s point, and he’s right here by the way, is that this is not something of Pagan origin, this is something of Christian origin. He then goes on to debunk the idea. This comes from old Pagan mythology with December 25th. I’ve done videos on that. My point here is just, is Christmas something we can agree to disagree on? One side’s going to tell you yes, one’s going to tell you no. What makes this more controversial? And the reason I hesitated even to start with my shabi is because United Church of God, although you’ll find plenty of Protestants who are very uncomfortable with the idea of celebrating Christmas and think it’s sinful and even pagan too. But I started with a guy who I know is not a Trinitarian on purpose. Here’s why. So in the fundamental beliefs of the United Church of God, they make it clear that they believe in soul of script.
They believe that the Bible is the supreme and final authority in faith and in life and is a foundation of all truth. They also profess belief that those who by faith accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior have their sins forgiven by an act of divine grace, but they don’t believe in the Trinity. And so the question is, well, somebody who believes in Sola script Torah, and I can’t exactly tell from their website, but seemingly believes in something like sofie, are they saved? Is that kind of belief enough if they consciously reject the Trinity and they preach against the Trinity all the time claiming that like Christmas the Trinity is pagan? So how would Trinitarian Protestants respond to this question? Can Christians reject the Trinity or not? Now you’ll find plenty of Protestants like Catholics who will say this is something that is absolutely essential. You cannot reject the Trinity without imperiling. Your eternal salvation here, for instance, is Frederick Clement of by the book Ministries.
CLIP:
You see, the Father is not the son, the Son is not the spirit and the Spirit is not the father, but each are God individually. So why is this important? Simply put, because the Bible teaches it. Someone said if you try to explain the Trinity, you will lose your mind, but if you deny it, you will lose your soul.
Joe:
But William Lynn Craig actually argues that the Trinity, while being central to theology, is not a salvation issue necessarily, that you could deny the Trinity and still be saved.
CLIP:
And sadly, there may be people in our churches frankly who do not understand and believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, but nevertheless, they are believing in Christ as savior and believing that he is divine, that he’s the Lord. And so I don’t think that belief in the Trinity is essential to salvation.
Joe:
Now, James White was really upset by that clip because he didn’t think Craig did a good enough job stressing the centrality of the Trinity, but then he ends up saying something very similar that the Trinity is itself central, but a lot of Christians unknowingly deny the Trinity and that might be okay. Now remember that’s almost exactly what Craig just said, and then here’s James White while trying to critique him, ending up in the same
CLIP:
Place is the Trinity essential? Of course, it is definitional of the Christian faith. Is it possible for a Christian to be ignorant about aspects of Trinitarian theology? Well better be because probably all of us are.
Joe:
So both Craig and White are taking the example of Christians who think they’re affirming the Trinity, but actually if you press them on it, they have a heretical understanding of the trinity, but they don’t know their heretics. Matt Slick takes the example of what about somebody who thinks they deny the trinity, but then it turns out that they have a bad understanding of the Trinity and so they’re rejecting a false vision of it.
CLIP:
Can someone be saved while denying the Trinity?
When people ask me these questions, I say, technically yes, but they have to understand what I mean by technically because you could have someone technically who could be regenerate and has been taught some bad stuff and just doesn’t understand the doctrine of the Trinity. 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.
Joe:
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 that there aren’t three persons in the Trinity. It’s just one God in three different roles. So he makes it as a speculative case, but here he is making that argument.
CLIP:
I could be wrong here. In my personal opinion, I think modalism is wrong. It’s incorrect. This is the idea that the father becomes a son becomes a spirit. I think that’s wrong. I’m not sure that it’s damning, so I’m not really sure what I think about that.
Joe:
Maybe the most telling thing in that was that winger acknowledges he doesn’t know whether it would be damnable or not to be a modalist. That seems like an important thing not to know if it’s an essential potentially Damnable doctrine or not. I admire, I appreciate his intellectual humility and not saying more than he can say, but I think it speaks to a weakness within Protestantism if you can’t say whether someone can deny the trinity with impunity. But let’s turn now from the trinity to the virgin birth. And the reason I want to do this that by the book’s ministry that I mentioned earlier by the book ministry talks about the very first essential doctrine all Christians need to affirm is the idea of the virgin birth.
CLIP:
Now, one of the first doctrines that is a must for a person to be a Christian is the virgin birth.
Joe:
Now you might say, well, why is it so important to affirm the doctrine of the virgin birth? And here’s how Frederick Clement, the guy who heard speaking explains that
CLIP:
You see, if there is no virgin birth, there is no sinless Christ, no sinless Christ, no atonement, no atonement, no forgiveness, no forgiveness. We all die in our sins. You cannot remove the virgin birth from Christianity without the virgin birth. Christianity itself collapses like a house of cards.
Joe:
On the other hand, William Lane Craig says, none of that is true that you could deny the virgin birth without denying the rest of Christianity and that the house of cards wouldn’t crumble
CLIP:
Even if he had had a human father, he still would’ve had a divine nature which he possessed from eternity past before He assumed a human nature as well, nor is the virgin birth essential to the sinlessness of Jesus.
Joe:
And so William Lynn Craig is going to conclude that denying the virgin birth is not a matter of essential doctrine at all. This is a non-essential,
CLIP:
So the virginal conception is inherent to the biblical view of Jesus, but it’s not essential to his deity or sinlessness in the way that some may have thought.
Joe:
Okay, let’s change gears here and talk about baptism. Now, I already talked about this a little bit up top, but it seems from the biblical evidence that the early Christians really thought baptism was quite important and in fact, you can read early Christian writings where they talk about this a great deal, but what about modern Protestants in the world of Protestantism? You’re going to have a wide range on this. So if you take those of the Lutheran persuasion like Pastor Jordan Cooper, he’s going to argue that we have to say at least in some sense that water baptism saves you
CLIP:
Ultimately when we look at the various passages that talk about baptism, never do we have a text that speaks about baptism as something symbolic. We have texts like one Peter three that baptism now saves you. I saw in the comments, I checked the chat before this and people are like, baptism doesn’t save you. Jesus saves you. Well, you have to say baptism saves you in some sense because that’s what scripture says.
Joe:
Meanwhile, other Protestants adamantly reject the idea that baptism is in any way necessary for salvation.
CLIP:
The belief that baptism is necessary for salvation is also known as baptismal regeneration. It is our contention that baptism is an important step of obedience for a Christian, but we adamantly reject baptism as being required for salvation.
Joe:
Speaking of baptism, if you’re going to get baptized, does it matter if you get baptized by immersion meaning going all the way in the water or is it okay to be baptized with water being poured upon your head? For instance, on this issue, you’re going to find Protestants who don’t just disagree on whether immersion is necessary but also who disagree on whether it’s commanded by the scripture and is really an important doctrine. I don’t know. I’m going to say it as a caveat here. I don’t know how many immersion only Protestants are going to say it’s literally essential since most of the immersion only Protestants. I think it’s just a symbol, but they nevertheless speak as if it’s a symbol we are commanded to do and we are acting in grave disobedience if we don’t do it. So I will leave it to your judgment whether this is something that even the only folks think rises to an essential doctrine. It sort of sounds like they do, but I don’t want to overcommit here in case that’s not what people mean by it. Nevertheless, here’s Todd Friel speaking as if this doctrine is essential
CLIP:
And that brings us to the method of water baptism. How should it be practiced? There are at least four reasons. Just hear me out on this. My Lutheran Anglican Methodist friend, there are at least four reasons to believe New Testament water baptism demands immersion.
Joe:
My point there is he speaks of it as the New Testament demanding this to be the case, whereas someone like John MacArthur is going to say, this is absolutely not an essential doctrine. We do not need to be quibbling about the manner in which somebody got baptized.
CLIP:
There are some doctrines that are not necessary for salvation. One of them that comes to mind might be the form of baptism. Some sprinkle, some poor and some immerse. That’s not a salvation issue, biblically speaking.
Joe:
Moving on. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order I put these in. By the way, what about the historicity of Adam and Eve? This is one of those issues that is really hotly debated. You’ve got creationists, young earth, old earth, theistic, evolutionists, you name it. How important is it to believe? I’m not even going to get into all of those issues because there’s a lot of contentious issues that divide Christians on those topics. What about just a simple question. There literally was an Adam. There literally was an eve. So on the one hand, Ken Keithley argues that we have to affirm some sense of a historic Adam and Historic Eve.
CLIP:
I may not agree with someone’s particular position on the age of the earth or how they arrived at a historic atom, but I think that it is essential that one has a historical atom in order to have a historical fall.
Joe:
So I thought that was pretty interesting. He makes the argument seemingly that the age of the earth and all of that’s non-essential, but that there is a historic atom that’s like one man and the historic Eve that’s one woman is essential because it’s tied to the fall and to original sin as in Adam all sinned as in Christ all are made alive. That kind of theology does seem to presuppose there are two original parents. What made it really interesting to me though is that after affirming that this is an essential doctrine, seemingly something that requires unity, I find out that Kenneth Keithley also is the editor of a book called Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve, in which he includes people like Kenton Sparks who is an evangelical who denies the historic Adam and Eve, and so actually here is Ken Keithley explaining Kent and Spark’s theology, and I know that’s potentially confusing, but the guy you just heard saying, it’s essential for Christians to affirm the history of the city of Adam and Eve is writing a book in which one of the featured authors that he’s editing denies that thing that he claimed was essential
CLIP:
Kenton’s position. I think that he will not be offended by me saying that he would probably be representative of the most progressive or left-leaning view of evangelicalism in that he does not view the historicity of Adam and Eve as essential. In other words, he would understand the first chapters of Genesis to be theological fiction.
Joe:
As I say, I just thought it was kind of interesting that on the one hand he seems to be saying All Christians need to affirm this. On the other hand, he’s saying, here’s a guy who doesn’t affirm it, who he still regards as a fellow evangelical and one that he worked on a book with on these different perspectives one could take on Adam and Eve. That kind of book is very popular within especially the more scholarly circles within Protestantism and there are popular versions as well. I dunno how popular you’d really describe this as, but Zondervan has an entire 32 volume series called the Counterpoints Library where it’s mostly Protestants debating major topics and taking just a variety of views and then agreeing and disagreeing with one another. And the views include the historical Adam Hell, biblical Inerrancy, baptism, divine Providence, evolution, the rapture women in ministry, eternal security, the Canaanite genocide, and as they say much more.
The question I pose, but obviously I’m not going to belabor this by going into all of those different issues, is which of those things are essential? Which ones is it not just okay to agree to disagree and write a book exploring the different reasons you’ve gone in different directions, which ones actually require you to have Christian unity on? I think that’s one of the questions that any Protestant watching this should be seriously considering. Once again, I’m going to pivot pretty radically and go from the beginning of the Bible to the beginning of life and as can Christians be pro-choice, and I’m just going to play these two clips side by side because I think they speak for themselves.
CLIP:
Can you be pro-choice and a Christian? Oh man. Okay, so this is a hard question. What I would say is you can be pro-choice and be a Christian. I think that’s a plausible thing to be, but it’s not biblical to be pro-choice. If you’re a Christian,
A pro-abortion advocate cannot be a Christian. A pro-abortion advocate cannot be a Christian. It’s not possible to be a pro-abortion advocate and be born again. There is no such thing as a regenerate pro-abortion advocate.
Joe:
So there you have it from pro-life, Protestant evangelicals that you definitely can or definitely can’t be pro-choice and a born again Christian. I think it’s fair to say that this is an issue that either is or isn’t essential, but you’re not going to necessarily get clear answer from asking Protestants about it. This actually raises a broader question because the issue of abortion falls into this strange realm of moral issues that is hard to know where they fall in the essential non-essential doctrines. And so this is one of the questions Trent Horn asks Ali Best Stucky about recently when he was on her show and I was really interested in her response.
CLIP:
I think that there are issues like the L-G-B-T-Q issue that is not the gospel, but it gets to the heart of the gospel,
So it’s still essential.
Now, there would be people who probably disagree with this. Now do I think that you can be wrong on this and still be saved? I think that we are all going to die being wrong about some things. I don’t think that your view of L-G-B-T-Q is what grants you or what prohibits your salvation.
Joe:
So yeah, I mean you can see where this is coming from within Protestantism when you take a view of sofie where the right thing to get is the belief and the sort of ascent to the right ideas, and I don’t mean to reduce sofie to that, but it becomes a lot of what do I intellectually affirm and then how do I put my trust in Jesus in that? And so it becomes a lot harder to see how you square that with how you live your life because there’s this big emphasis on faith and not works, which can make it sound like belief and not actions. Now, I don’t think that’s what a sophisticated Protestant is going to say, but I think there is this lingering question that how do the moral claims of the gospel fit in? Are they essential or not? Could someone just say, I disagree with your interpretation about homosexuality, abortion, you name it and be fine.
And a certain realm of Protestantism, evangelical conservative Protestantism seemingly has to say, we have to agree to disagree. As long as we’re both affirming Jesus’s lordship and those things, then the moral stuff is just treated as not even secondary, but just absolutely non-essential that is hard to square. It seems to me with a series of biblical texts that just seem to say how you live is really important for your salvation. When the rich young man asks Jesus, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life after Jesus questions? Why do you call me good? He goes on to tell him the commandments, do not kill. Do not commit adultery, do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not defraud honor your father and mother. He focuses exclusively on the commandments that involve how one acts towards their neighbor. It’s a fascinating kind of answer.
He then will tell him to come follow me, which is the other part of the 10 Commandments, the service of God. But it is fascinating that he leads with telling him about the need to take care of his neighbor. Likewise, when he’s talking with the last judgment, Jesus describes how the king will say to the sheep, come a blessed of my father inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink and so on. And likewise, if you don’t do those things, you will not go to heaven. That sounds like an essential doctrine if doing it or not doing it impacts whether you do or don’t go to heaven. That sounds essential. That is definitionally what we mean by an essential doctrine. Now you might say, well, doesn’t St Paul contradict all that in Romans?
Well, in one interpretation in Protestantism, he does. St. Paul in their hand in Romans chapter two doesn’t seem to think so because he says that God will render to every man according to his works. And you might say, hang on, that’s just about heavenly blessing for those already saved. That’s not what Paul thinks. He says to those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, notice it’s not, don’t believe the truth. It’s that they’re factious, they’re forming denominations, they’re forming schisms, they’re dividing and they’re not obeying the truth, not a matter of belief, but action. They don’t obey the truth, but obey wickedness. There will be wrath and fury that makes it sound like human behavior is essential in the Christian life, not just what do we believe, but how do we respond to the truth?
Do we obey it or not? In Galatians five, he puts it a different way. He talks about the works of the flesh, things like immorality, impurity, life consciousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, ascension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing in the like. And he says, I warn you notice that he’s warning that Christians of Galatia, I warn you as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. That sounds like these are essential doctrines that getting moral theology right is not just a nice bonus on top of getting dogmatic theology, right? That getting moral theology right is critical to living a Christian life that results in you becoming the saint God meant you to be. Okay, while we’re talking about scripture, ease the idea that the Protestant Bible, the 66 books, the Protestant Bible, this is the Bible and that’s it. Is that an essential doctrine or to put it a different way, is that a 2000 year old essential doctrine? Because you’ll find Protestants who when asked to define the essential doctrines that everybody’s believed in for 2000 years will start by claiming the 66 books of the Protestant Bible for instance, right here,
CLIP:
Let’s talk about five basic doctrinal truths that every Christian believes. Now, Christianity has been around for a long time and certainly there are a lot of fringe issues. There are a lot of areas of doctrine where Christians and churches debate and discuss, but there are at least five basic things that every Christian Church for 2000 years has understood and believed. Here they are. Number one, the Bible is God’s word. Christians have always believed that God’s word, what we have, the 66 books of the Bible, the way we have it, that those books were inspired by God, that they’re authoritative in our lives, that they should guide us in our everyday living.
Joe:
But as you understand anything about the history of Christianity, you’ll know that for most of the 2000 years there was not a 66 book Protestant Bible. It did not exist as a thing. Here’s the Museum of the Bible briefly kind of alluding to the fact that the differences in biblical canons between Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox date back to the fact that there wasn’t a settled canon of scripture like a list of books at the time of Jesus. So this was a confusion that’s actually more than 2000 years old.
CLIP:
The widespread Jewish agreement about the law and the prophets before the birth of Christianity explains why the differences between Christian Bibles in the Old Testament today are limited to a small percentage of books. The differences that remain were inherited before the TaNaK became the single official version of the Jewish Bible.
Joe:
So hopefully that’s clear. There was no 66 book Bible. So if you’re claiming for 2000 years, one thing all Christians could agree on was the 66 books of the Bible. That’s historically not true Related. While we’re on the subject of scripture, what about the doctrine of sola scriptura? This idea that scripture alone is the word of God, scripture alone is the infallible and errant rule by which we judge all other Christian doctrines. Here’s John MacArthur pointing to that as kind of the thing we have to get right in terms of essential doctrines, like the number one thing he mentions,
CLIP:
The authority of scripture is an absolutely essential doctrine because if you do not believe in the authority of scripture, then you don’t know that you can trust what it says and all is lost. So the most important of all doctrines is that the Bible is the word of God and it is absolutely authoritative and ernt. So that’s where it starts to believe the Bible is the word of God and only the Bible is the revealed word of God. That is number one.
Joe:
So in MacArthur’s view, like the thing Christians have to get right is this doctrine of so the scriptura, but what’s really striking is this is not a doctrine that the early Christians believed in, at least in any kind of clear way. For instance, EU of Leon, I mentioned before the guy who tells us Matthew, mark, Luke, and John are the Fort Gospels. He’s read in 180. He talks about how if every church has the ability, if they want to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world and to reckon up, those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the churches what we call apostolic succession. So he’s appealing not only to scripture but to scripture and tradition in apostolic succession, and he’s specifically going to trace the list of every pope. In fact, you don’t have to just look at the early Christians, you can look at the period of the reformers.
So the historian Henry Howorth, when he’s talking about Andreas Carl stat’s thesis from 1518, he says that they went far beyond what anyone had hither to affirmed as to the supremacy of the Bible over any pronouncement of Pope or counsel or church. Now that is a position that many Protestants take for granted. Only the Bible is worthy of that kind of trust and authority, so of course it’s going to trump the Pope or the council and the church. But what Howorth is pointing out is this was virtually unprecedented, if not unprecedented. The nearest we’re going to get to it is some writings, fairly obscure writings from the 15th century, the 14 hundreds. So if this is the kind of number one essential doctrine for all Christians to get right, it is striking that no Christian seems to have gotten it right in a clear and unambiguous sort of way until the dawn or the eve of the reformation. Nevertheless, we could ask, and I think it’d be interesting to hear from you in the comments below, is Sola scriptura an essential doctrine or could someone like say EU believe in scripture and tradition as being divinely protected?
While we’re on the solos of the reformation, this is probably the biggest one I’ve saved this one for last for a reason. May Christians believe in justification by faith. Now, I’ve worded that very intentionally because for many Protestants when you’re talking about essential doctrines, it turns out there’s really only one, and that is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And so there’s this 1840s, maybe 18 41, 18 43, I saw different dates on it, a book written by an Anglican priest called the Forest of Den. He’s an Anglican from what’s called the Contrarian Movement. St. John Henry Newman before he became Catholic was part of this Oxford movement. So it’s very much high church Anglican trying to restore the Catholic roots of Anglicanism, and it’s written in the form of a dialogue and in the dialogue it’s between Maurice and Arnold. Maurice says, I would unite in one church all such as hold the great essential doctrine of justification by faith and no others.
So it’s just a one pronged test. If you believe in sofie, you’re in the church. If you don’t, you’re out. It is the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls, and it really doesn’t matter if you believe anything else, just justification by faith. And Arnold responds that he believes in justification by faith, but he thinks there are other really important doctrines like the trinity, the resurrection, the incarnation of our Lord and others which have been held by the church from the beginning. And then all of those are great doctrines, meaning those would all be viewed as essentials. Now, you might be wondering why do so many Protestants end up having a kind of one prong test like Maurice does in this story? Well, the reason because it’s easy to make the case that justification by faith is the gospel if you work through Galatians in a certain way and read it in a certain lens, the reason goes something like this.
In Galatians one, St. Paul tells the Galatians that he’s astonished to see them quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel. And then he says, even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be a curse. Let him be anathema as we’ve said before. So now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that what you received, let him be a cursed. So clearly there is a sense in which the Galatians are falling for or Paul is worried they’re falling for a different gospel. And one of the things Paul warns him against, he warns ’em about a lot of things. Remember the works of the flesh? That’s one of the things he warns about in Galatians five.
But another thing that he warns them about is a bad view of justification, and he tells him, we ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law, this is the mosaic law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, even though we’ve believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. So a plausible reading of Galatians, we don’t have to get into whether it’s even right or wrong, but certainly a plausible reading of Galatians is that those, the so-called Judaizers who believed you had to uphold the Mosaic law in order to be saved are preaching a different gospel than what St. Paul is preaching. And this is in a cursed kind of false gospel that certainly looks like an essential doctrine.
Now, Catholics and Protestants alike would agree with St. Paul. Here we would say we are justified by faith and not works of the law. No Catholic who knows their stuff, believes that we’re justified by works of the law. That’s not a thing. Nevertheless, since the time of the Reformation, there have been plenty of Protestants who say it is not good enough to affirm justification by faith that is inadequate, even though it’s what St. Paul does. You instead have to affirm justification by faith alone, which we’re told is what St. Paul meant to say. And so famously, Martin Luther includes the word alone in Romans 3 28 by his own authority. He just adds the word to the Bible. Well, Albert Moer Baptist theologian, who I believe was the president of the Southern Baptist Conference, but I may be mistaken about that, he talks about how on his podcast, this is a very old clip, but I wanted to play it because I thought it was really fascinating. After Pope Francis was elected, he was reminiscing on Pope Benedict the 16th and lamented that Benedict believed in justification by faith and that this was too bad because he should have instead believed in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Here’s Muller in his own words.
CLIP:
First and Evangelicals must affirm that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is an essential because that is the very definition of the gospel itself, and there is nothing more core, central and essential than the gospel. The reformers were absolutely right in saying that any understanding of justification, even the understanding that justification is by faith and something else is another gospel is anathema to the gospel of Jesus Christ that the only way of understanding salvation by grace alone through faith alone is defining justification as the scripture defines it, and that is justification by faith alone. Benedict the 16th very famously affirmed as he was writing about the Apostle Paul justification by faith, but he would not add that crucial word alone, lacking the word alone. That means justification by faith that works in synergistic mechanism with our own righteousness or attempts at righteousness and efforts to gain merit.
Joe:
I mean, as a Catholic, I want to just point out that he’s objecting to the we’re justified by faith, and then he views that as violating the essential doctrine, which is that we have to say we’re justified by faith alone. So he’s actually objecting to the language St. Paul uses and affirming the language that James rejects in James 2 24. It’s a pretty fascinating position that it’s not enough for us to say we also believe we’re justified by faith. We have to go beyond that as a matter of an essential argument. She says it’s the definition of the gospel. But I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of justification theology except to say this as Tony Lane, the great English scholar points out in the past. Some Protestants have boldly claimed the supportive tradition for their belief in justification by faith alone. And he points out that James Buchanan in 1867 claimed that the Protestant doctrine was held and taught by some of the greatest writers in every successive age.
But then Lane said, no historically qualified writer would make any such claim today. And then he appeals to Alistair McGrath, the brilliant historian he teaches at Oxford and Cambridge. He’s also a Calvinist theologian. Alistair McGrath has argued that there are no precursors of the Reformation doctrine of justification. Now, you’ll find people who disagree, but at the very least you have to say if the gospel is justification by faith alone in the Protestant understanding of that, then there were few or no Christians prior to the Reformation because there are few or no people who believed in that doctrine. I mean, scholars will debate particular individuals, right? But it clearly was not the mainstream Christian view until after Martin Luther comes on the scene, and even today is only the mainstream Christian view in the small minority of Christians by comparison, who consider themselves Protestants. Now, Albert Mueller is willing to bite the bullet and say, yep, basically there was no church. The reformers had to look for it and actually kind of establish Jesus’ church for him during the reformation. Here he is laying out that theology.
CLIP:
The reformers did not split the church the reformers sought to find and to establish and to form the church for whom Christ had died. When they spoke of the marks of the church, the first mark was the preaching of the gospel and understood it was a positive and a negative mark where the gospel is preached the gospel, this gospel justification by faith alone, the gospel that saved Luther’s life and saved him for eternity. This gospel where this gospel is preached, there is a church where this gospel is not preached. There is no church. That’s the issue. There is no church. This is not name calling. It’s gospel fidelity.
Joe:
So Mueller’s view and their Protestants take this view is that the reformers didn’t split away from the church because there was no church, which is a fascinating view. I regularly hear from Protestants when I say, this looks like restoration. This looks more like Mormonism than a reform. And they say, no, that’s a misunderstanding. Well, here’s Mueller defending basically that because every church on Earth taught something contrary to the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, Martin Luther treats it as a novel doctrine. He’s stumbled on to the truth of Alistair McGrath talks about how it doesn’t have any precedent and the antecedents prior to the 16th century. The point there is if that’s true, whether individual believers ever believed in it or not, I don’t really care about debating that you would seemingly have to say there is no visible church on earth and tell the Reformation, which is a shocking kind of claim that if your definition of the essentials of the faith is a one prong test, that the entire visible church fails for three quarters of church history.
This is a fascinating understanding of what the essential and non-essential doctrines are. That leads us in to part three, the unraveling Promises of Protestantism. What do I mean by that? That Protestantism is built on a few key promises. One of them being that you don’t need things like church councils and popes living magisterium or apostolic tradition or any of these things because scripture is so clear that we’ll be able to figure out the truth of the message just because of the clarity of scripture led at the individual level by the Holy Spirit. Well, I’m going to give you a couple examples of people defending and explaining this doctrine. Just I want to make sure that you don’t think I’m just putting words in people’s mouths, and this is something that’s easy to get wrong as a doctrine. So let’s start here with Barry Cooper.
CLIP:
Ironically enough, given that it’s not very clear, perspicuity is a word that means clarity or clearness or understandability. So when we talk about the perspicuity of scripture, we’re talking about 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.
Joe:
Okay, so I want to make sure we’re getting that because there are two forms of this doctrine on the Protestant side. Luther’s original form seem to be that all doctrine was just this clear. The modified form that the Westminster confession affirms is that those doctrines necessary for salvation. The essentials are so clear that we have the tools we need to know what they are. And as we’ve seen when pressed protestants don’t know what they are, they don’t agree with one another as to which are and are not the essential doctrines of the faith. And that would seem like it disproves that promise, right? But the second person I want to appeal to here is Dr. Matthew Barrett, because he’s going to refer to Luther’s view. I’m going to let him introduce Luther’s view and then we’ll explain Luther’s view in the Westminster view because they’re slightly different.
CLIP:
Luther very boldly is making a statement to say, no, God has spoken and he has spoken clearly. And from there, Luther would distinguish between what was called the external clarity of scripture and the internal clarity of scripture. External simply means that in its most basic sense in its grammar, in its historical background, scripture can be understood by anyone and everyone believer and unbeliever like. But Luther also said there’s the internal clarity of scripture, which means we need the Holy Spirit to understand not only the saving message of scripture, but to appreciate it, to desire it, and to ultimately be changed by it so that the message we’re hearing, which is clear, can then be embraced.
Joe:
So in the bondage of the whale, Martin Luther is going to make this twofold distinction that Dr. Barrett just described, that there’s an internal clarity scripture, but you need the Holy Spirit to understand even an iota of what scripture is saying. So his claim is that no man sees one iota in the scriptures, but that half the spirit of God for the Spirit is required to understand the whole of the scripture and every part of it. That’s we need the internal level. On the external level, nothing, whatever is left obscure or ambiguous at the external level. If you just take the words of scriptures themselves, they’re so clear that there are no ambiguities in it. That’s his claim. But all things that are in the scriptures are by the word brought forth into the clearest light and proclaim to the whole world. Now, this is going to allow Luther to conclude with the challenge to people who would disagree with this apparently false doctrine because if you say the emperor has no clothes, he’s going to say, well, that just prove your lack of faith.
So he says, therefore, come forward you and all the sofas together and produce any one mystery, which is still obstru in the scriptures. Obstru meaning unclear, but if many things still remain obst to many, this is not a arise from obscurity in the scriptures, but from their blindness and want of understanding who do not go the way to see the all perfect clearness of the truth. So what I want to point out here is that Luther’s claim was not just that essential doctrines and self ethically necessary things were taught with perfect clarity, his original clarity that if you have the Holy Spirit, you just get everything. Now that doctrine is so obviously demonstrably false that all you have to do is put two Protestants in a room and say, Hey, do you guys agree on everything? Do you agree on your interpretation of the scripture in all regards?
And of course they don’t. I recently read someone saying, if two men agree on everything, only one of them has been thinking. The idea is if you’re using your God-given intellect, trying to understand scripture, you and the person next to you may not come to the same personal interpretation of it. Luther at the dawn of the Reformation seem to think with enough time and effort and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we get just perfect clarity about all of this stuff because it already is clear in itself. It’s just that we are too darkened by sin and ignorance to be able to understand the perfect clarity. The sun can be perfectly bright and if I’ve got mud over my eyes, I’m not going to see it. So that was the problem. The problem is if you take that view, then you have to discredit all Protestants.
In other words, if you take this view and then say, but no two Protestants seem to be in total agreement, then you’re having to conclude, well, I guess they’re not led by the Holy Spirit. I guess they’re blind or they lack understanding. And either way, that totally undermines their credibility because someone’s trying to teach you about the gospel and at the same time they have to concede I’m either blind or lack understanding of the gospel. Well, okay, that doesn’t give me a lot of reason to trust in what you’re about to tell me. So the original doctrine is so big and so bold and so outrageously false that it is quickly modified by subsequent Protestants to just affirm the essential doctrines. So the Westminster Confession of Faith says all things in scripture are not a like plan in themselves nor alike clear unto all. So it does not take the extreme view, but it does say yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some places of scripture or other 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 by all means, you have to do some work. It’s not that you’re going to just read them casually and immediately get all the doctrines, they’re more cautious than that. But the promise they’re making is still whether you’re learn it or not, you can read scripture and using the due use of ordinary means you can obtain to a sufficient understanding of those doctrines. If it’s not promising that it’s not promising anything, right? If it’s promising it means this, but it takes some special authority to tell you, it means that, well, that’s the opposite of what Luther is trying to affirm. That’s the opposite of what Westminster is trying to affirm because they’re trying to say, you don’t need the magisterium to explain scripture to you that instead scripture is so clear you can do it yourself because the Holy Spirit is going to lead you if you are one of the elect, if you’re one of the believers.
So the false promises of Protestantism here are twofold. Number one, that since scripture is perfectly clear, at least on essentials, we don’t need apostolic tradition. We don’t need the teaching authority of the church in order to come to a sure knowledge of at a minimum the essential doctrines, even if you take the more modified position of Westminster rather than Luther’s more outrageous position. You don’t need ministerium tradition, anything like that to know correct doctrine about the essentials. Number two, we have everything we need in order to know the essential doctrines. And so if we don’t, that is evidence of either our spiritual blindness or our lack of understanding. Now, the thing I think disproves this is Protestants not only disagree about the essential doctrines, but as we’ve seen they disagree about which are the essential doctrines that you can find wildly different interpretations about which things are and aren’t essential.
Now, my list that I gave earlier was radically incomplete. That was basically just me going around pulling clips from YouTube in the span of time that I gave myself to prepare this video with more time, with more research. I’m sure I could have made a twice as long list and made this a painfully long episode. But the point here I hope should be clear that it has not delivered whether you take it at the level of all knowledge or just essential doctrines. Scripture does not appear so clear that it’s perspicuous in this way, but we can go even beyond that and say that the premises of Protestantism actually do collapse the essential doctrines. And to see what I mean by this, I would point you to a kind of case study in the history of the Presbyterian church in the us. This is from about a hundred years ago, almost exactly a hundred years ago.
In 1923, the general assembly of the Presbyterian church, there’s this dispute within Protestantism between so-called modernists and so-called fundamentalists. The fundamentalists are so-called because they are arguing for a few specific fundamentals of the faith that is essential doctrines. And so the general assembly of the Presbyterian church in 1923 insists that if you’re going to be ordained as a Presbyterian, you have to believe in five things at least. Number one, the scriptures are preserved from error number two, that Jesus is born of a virgin. Number three, that Jesus offers himself up as a sacrifice to satisfied divine justice and to reconciles to God number four, that he rose again from the dead with the same body which he suffered and he ascended into heaven and there says to the right hand of the Father making an intercession for us. And number five, that he shows us his power and love by working mighty miracles and that the miracles are not contrary to nature but superior to it.
Now, that might seem like a largely unobjectionable list for a group of Christians, but it turns into a huge fight, and the response to it is something known as the Auburn affirmation. This is published in January of 1924. So all this is going on at the same time. You have the general assembly publishing these things that had talked about them, I believe in 1921. And so 1924, they published their five things you have to believe in. And then that same year, a group of 150 pastors and elders within the Presbyterian Church in the US write basically a protest letter and then it gets reprinted in May of that year now with 1,274 names with a post print addendum adding another 20 names and the removal of one because that guy realized he didn’t want to be on this list. What I find fascinating, the reason I bring this up as a case study is to look at what their argument is and their argument is essentially that you cannot force Protestants to accept essential doctrines.
Here’s how they explain it. They say the opinion of the General Assembly attempts to commit our church to certain theories concerning the inspiration of the Bible and the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, the continuing life and supernatural power of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, they start off by saying, you know what? We hold most earnestly to these great facts and doctrines. We all believe from our hearts that the writers of the Bible were inspired of God, that Jesus Christ was God manifest in the flesh, et cetera. So they’re claiming we don’t object any of these five things. In fact, some of us regard the particular theories contained as satisfactory explanations of these facts. And doctrines say that’s a great way of putting it. However they say we are united in believing that these are not the only theories allowed by the scriptures. So in other words, that as Protestants, they should be able to read the same scriptures and come to a different conclusion than the one that they viewed would be enforced upon them by the general assembly.
And they say very clearly, we do not desire liberty to go beyond the teachings of evangelical Christianity, but we maintain that it is our constitutional right and our Christian duty within these limits to exercise liberty of thought and teaching that we may more effectively preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, the savior of the world. Fascinating kind of moment in Presbyterian history that ends up leading to a major schism. But the argument there that I want to unpack, I’m going to call it the Auburn two step. It says basically, number one, scripture is divinely protected, but number two, your interpretation of scripture isn’t divinely protected. And so don’t force your interpretation upon me or other people because you could be wrong, even if I happen to agree with you on principle, I have to resist you attempting to force your particular vision on me. But notice if that’s right, you could apply that to all so-called essential doctrines.
You could say, well, maybe Luther got justification by faith alone wrong. Maybe he misread St. Paul, maybe he misread St. James or maybe he read St. James right and wrongly rejected his apostolic authority. The point there is that as a matter of principle, a Protestant who affirms that scripture is all clear and I don’t need creeds and councils and everything else, a magisterium AIC tradition to tell me what I have to believe because those things aren’t infallible and inspired and iner and all this, and scripture has this authority. Well, the logical limit there is to say we cannot dogmatize any particular interpretation of scripture as an essential doctrine. Now, I realize most Protestants don’t go that far. My suggestion here is that liberal Protestantism is seeing a weakness in the Protestant system of belief and is exploiting it really effectively by saying, sure, sure, sure, we agree with those doctrines.
We just don’t think you can enforce it on everybody. And then what happens? Those doctrines become negotiable. At the end of the day, if you don’t know what is or isn’t an essential doctrine, I would suggest that you gut the idea of faith itself. Because if you are trying to make sure that we don’t get all of these things in the way, we just have scripture alone and faith alone, well think about the nature of faith. Belief is a transitive verb, meaning you don’t just believe you believe in something or you believe in someone. So when we talk about Christianity, if we talk about faith, it’s faith in it’s not just faith as some int transitive quality. It’s transitive. You believe Jesus and you believe his message or you don’t. So it makes no sense to say the moral teach and all of this stuff is non-essential.
The essential thing is to believe Jesus. Well, if you’re rejecting his teaching, you’re not believing him though all of those other doctrines, the reasons they matter are because it makes no sense to say all that matters is that you’re following Jesus. Whether you obey him or not is an important, that doesn’t make any sense. So you can’t just gut Christianity and strip the essentials down to justification by faith alone because the faith part of faith alone becomes an empty shell. If you’ve gotten rid of all of the other doctrinal content of the faith, there is fortunately a way out of the Auburn two-step. There is a way out of the kind of dogmatic death spiral that comes from treating scripture is all clear and we just have to agree on the doctrines and we don’t know what the essential doctrines are, and nobody really has the authority to define the essential doctrines. There’s a way out of this because the people making the Auburn affirmation are right, scripture is divinely protected, my interpretation, your interpretation is not divinely protected. And so you and I don’t have the authority to impose our personal interpretation and dogmatic conclusions on one another. But what if someone else’s interpretation is divinely protected? That would solve the problem? And if you read the Bible, you’ll see that’s exactly how the problem gets solved.
I’m going to give you just two passages to close with. First one is in Acts chapter eight, Philip is led by the Holy Spirit and he encounters an Ethiopian man who is in a chariot reading the book of the prophet Isaiah, and he’s led by the spirit to go up to him, join him in the chariot, and he approaches the man and he says, do you understand what you are reading? And the man says, how? Unless someone guides me, he does not say, scripture is all clear. I’m led by the Holy Spirit. I know what all of this means, and it’s perfect clarity. How could anyone possibly not know? No, of course not. He says the opposite. How can unless someone guides me? And so he invites Philip, a representative of the church, led by the Holy Spirit to come up and sit with him and explain scripture to him.
And that’s exactly what Philip does. But the other place I wanted to look was the Juda controversy. Remember in Galatians that false gospel that was being taught, one part of that at least was this idea that’s described in Acts 15 that some men were coming down from Judea and telling the brethren, unless you were circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. When you talk about works of the law, what’s meant there primarily is not good works or good deeds or anything like that was meant primarily there is observance of the mosaic law. Gentiles could do good deeds. No one was denying that. What is instead being talked about and principally in view is this notion of whether you need to be circumcised and maintain the mosaic law. And so how do they resolve it? They don’t just all read scripture and find that it’s all crystal clear to them.
They don’t even just all impose their personal interpretations upon one another. In fact, we read in the next verse that Paul and Barnabas have no small dissension and debate with them and seemingly to no conclusion seemingly even when you’ve got St. Paul on the other side arguing his interpretation, that was not enough to convince the Judaizers. So at that point, Paul and Barnaba are appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question that is to the church, the visible church and specifically the church authority. And then they have what’s often called the Council of Jerusalem where the leadership of the church meets together on a doctrinal question. And then the conclusion is they speak on behalf of the Holy Spirit. In verse 28, they say, it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.
To put it in the terms of this episode, what they’ve done is defined which aspects of the Torah are still necessary, observances and which aren’t. So that question of which things are necessary and which ones aren’t, isn’t a question the individual believer is left adjudicating for their neighbor. That question is something the visible church adjudicates. So by all means, we want to affirm with our Protestant brothers and sisters in essentials, unity and non-essentials, liberty and in all things charity. But I would pause it. I would suggest I would promote that if you don’t have a visible church, you don’t have a mechanism by which you can know which things are essential and non-negotiable, and which ones are things we should leave each other alone about. And final point, this is really important for things like church unity, because if you think your fellow Christian is wrong on an essential doctrine and you have to go in schism and then you find out it wasn’t even an essential, it was something you had Christian liberty to disagree on, that was an unnecessary schism.
And remember those warnings about factions and those not obeying the truth and those committing all these sins of the flesh by going into schisms and party spirit and all of that, we don’t want to do that. So it’s really critical to know which things are essential and which ones aren’t for our own salvation, not just the salvation of our neighbor. I hope this has been helpful to you. I hope I did a good job representing all the various people whose views it’s hard to represent any one person fairly, and I tried to get two dozen people, so hopefully it was fair to everyone involved. I look forward to hearing your own takes and the comments below. If you’ve got some other way of cracking the essential non-essential negotiable, non-negotiable nut, I’d love to hear it. I’m Joe, hes Meyer. God bless you.