Does Church History Lead to Catholicism? (Joe Heschmeyer & Dr. Gavin Ortlund)

you're recording hey guys that sounds like you hey guys welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is austin this is gospel simplicity not the cordial catholic but today i am joined by k albert little of the cordial catholic keith what are we doing today i don't even understand how you have my merch because i don't have any merch yet you are there wearing my shirt and it looks great so i want to know where i can get one of those austin that sounds you just go to teespring.com gospel simplicity and you can get your very own cordial catholic t-shirt and you know i'm going to make a special deal that a portion of the proceeds today will go to the fantastic podcast the cordial catholic run by my friend k albert little so get your stay before they sell out and thanks to the patrons and birch buyers of this the patrons like keith thanks keith for your support but seriously thank you so much to our patreon subscribers and merch buyers who make this possible keith what are they about to see in this video this is going to be a real experiment i contacted you austin a while back to say do you want to do a crazy show and of course you said yes because you say yes everything i ask you to do uh including you know what i didn't ask you wear that shirt so i shouldn't say that you do things even though i don't i don't ask you to do certain things you do anyway this show is a fantastic collaboration between the the two of us in the background but two much greater minds joe hesh meyer who's written the fantastic bow this has to be an outtake i oh this this can't be serious i'm sorry i said guys thank you so much for being here i am so grateful for you and i think you're really going to enjoy this episode with dr gavin ortland and joe heschmeyer i hope you enjoy it half as much as keith and i did and here it is [Music] hey guys welcome to this special crossover uh collaborative edition uh gospel simplicity the quarter catholic this awesome conversation on being deep in history i'm very pleased to welcome our two guests uh this week previously a litigator in washington dc and a seminarian for the archdiocese of kansas joe heshmeyer now works as an instructor for the holy family institute of faith holy family school of faith institute he has a degree in theology from the typical university of saint thomas aquinas in rome and his writings have appeared in catholic answers magazine the washington times word on fire first things in strange notions he co-hosts the catholic podcast weekly has run the wonderful blog shameless potpourri since 2009. maybe most recently joe has written what my evangelical co-host austin has called the best work of catholic apologetics that he has read pope peter defending the church's most distinctive doctrine out from catholic answers press joe welcome to my show welcome to austin's youtube channel and well thanks for joining us in this crazy crazy collaboration absolutely my pleasure thanks so much for having us on i shouldn't have tried to say crazy collaboration because that was difficult for me to try and pronounce welcome nonetheless uh dr gavin ortland also joins us he is the senior pastor of first baptist church in ojai california he has a phd from fuller theological seminarian in historical theology an m div from covenant theological seminary and is the author of i'm told at least a hundred books in the last couple years alone including theological retrieval for evangelicals why we need to put well we need our past to have a future retrieving augustine's doctrine of creation ancient wisdom for current controversy and anslem anselm's pursuit of joy a commentary on the proslogian from a little place called catholic university of america press gavin's got a cracking youtube channel called truth unites and where he's he's posting some truly awesome material on a whole range of different topics including some of the most thoughtful articulate and dare i say cordial responses or rebuttals to some of the most important catholic doctrines and dogmas gavin i'm so excited that you could join us in this awesome discussion welcome and hello thanks so much for setting this up guys i've been looking forward to it this is going to be great yeah we have been super excited about this and i'm so excited to have you guys here i'm excited to be doing another episode with you keith and to set this up today we're going to be talking about being deep in history there's that famous quote by uh cardinal john henry newman about to be deep in history as we see is to cease to be protestant and to set this up i just wanted to ask both of you why is it important to be deep in history what's at stake here you want to take the first crack sure i'll go i'll make the mistakes and then you can correct me yeah i would say um there's there's probably lots of reasons that we could think of just two that come to my mind one would be that as human beings were profoundly affected by what has come before us and no matter who you are no matter where you live you know we're not self-made so the only alternative to self-consciously studying history and figuring out how that affects us today is just to be um unconsciously affected by history and so there's a lot of value in considering how you know what are the ways that i think and this has actually just personally been such a helpful thing for me in studying historical theology of just challenging the assumptions of modernity and how many things that i didn't realize kind of modern western ways of thinking had gotten into my mind and i didn't realize that until you read someone from a different culture so sometimes it's kind of like studying abroad or traveling or something like that it just exposes you to different ways of of thinking and can be a really good humbling thing and then a second thing i would say is just as as christians and then obviously we'll talk about some of the differences between catholics and protestants but there's a lot we have in common too and i would say the basic appeal that i would make on this is something we really have in common and that is when we have a relationship with christ we're not just coming into a personal relationship with him but we're coming into this huge tradition you know you think of cain and abel at the beginning of the bible and there's these two pathways and it's a wonderful thing to be able to offer people in our culture this sense of belonging that i think so many people are aching for you know there's such a sense of of loneliness i think in modernity so many people have this sense of just lacking a context to make sense of life and one of the wonderful uh privileges we have as followers of jesus is to say to people there is an answer to that there is a home that you can come into and the church is that wonderful tradition that we belong to and obviously there's differences in how that's understood but there's also a common foundation i think so those would be two answers that i would give and i'm looking forward to this discussion and we can keep pressing into that yeah i think that's a beautiful answer i would agree with everything you just said um i would add maybe a couple things just for um for the sake of thoroughness maybe right like when we're trying to understand what some part of the bible means like if you're confused about a passage in the old testament it's pretty much indispensable to know something about the life of israel like how was this understood by the israelites at the time how is it understood kind of down through the ages in israel so too though if we want to understand some part of the new testament it seems like we really need to understand the life of the people of god the church you know like how is this understood by the earliest christians how is it understood down through the ages um but just to kind of capitalize on something that you said gavin like every age has its own cultural blind spots like in the middle ages for instance a lot of people just kind of assumed dueling was okay even though it like from our perspective like obviously wasn't it's not and yeah exactly this was our second choice for how to approach this debate so you know like every every culture every age every you know every individual has you know some set of blind spots and you can often see them from the perspective of history but that also means like we've got our blind spots and reading something from a different culture different time and different place itself can be really important but maybe if i can just give a couple other reasons you know gk chesterton talks about tradition as the democracy of the dead it's this idea that like we need to have the humility to realize i don't have it all figured out my age doesn't have it all figured out my party doesn't have it all figured out my culture my local church we might all have blind spots and so we need to listen to that that broader kind of chorus of voices but there's also that kind of interpretive question i hinted at that a second ago you know like i love using american legal examples whenever i'm talking to keith because they're they're as inaccessible as i can imagine uh like in the us like bad judges interpret the constitution as kind of a stand-alone document radically detached from its history it's how you get people saying the constitution supports abortion or whatever you know we don't have to go down too far in any of those kind of examples um but that same kind of uh historically a historical if you will kind of way is how a lot of people approach the bible and you get them saying kind of crazy things what they say the bible does or doesn't say and so it's probably not a coincidence that the people who are like good originalists on the supreme court you know amy coney barrett samuel ledo clarence thomas delayed antonin scalia all of them were also conservative catholics and they were using the same methodology approaching the constitution and the bible and i think that gives you in both cases the most accurate sense of like what did this mean at the time these words were said what did this mean at the time it was uttered rather than having it be like a living document uh where the meaning can change um yeah i guess i'll just say that like christianity is a it's a historical religion it's not just a collection of myths it's not just a collection of proverbs and as such uh the history actually matters it's part of what we say we believe in and if i could just give kind of an example just in agreement with what joe just said there just personally how this has played out for me um my favorite theologian is anselm so and i've just absolutely loved everything i've learned from him and he has a whole book trying to address the question of how can god forgive and i remember just it just dawned on me one day that that's a sort of opposite question from what i just assumed was the question that we should be asking which is why doesn't god always forgive you know that's one of the big objections to faith in the modern west is why doesn't you know why would there be a hell why would there be judgment how could a loving god send people to hell and it's just interesting that anselm was not only having a different answer to that question he had a different question itself and i remember that when that dawned upon me it helped me realize wow how many other things have i just assumed that reading someone from a pre-modern context can kind of expose those assumptions a little bit sorry to jump in there but oh that's beautiful i love that example i i had a similar thing with the psalms where it wasn't uh why do bad things happen to good people half the time the psalmist is complaining like why do good things happen to bad people and i just love the fact that the questions are different and so if we're expecting them to be asking the same questions we're asking now there's a good chance we're not being as faithful to it but i think this is probably going to be a developing theme in this conversation like knowing uh how to read the church fathers how to read the early christians and and figure out what questions they're asking instead of assuming they're asking the same questions or or making the same assumptions we are so let's push a little deeper then here because this this quote austin brought up right is talking about being deep in history but we all know that saint john henry newman's the rest of his quote was is to be c to be protestant is the rest of that so he's a famous convert of course uh and and he asserts that to be deep in history but you can't be protestant anymore right so from my perspective as even juggle convert to get dolls this was certainly true for me i mean it's almost a trope sometimes the number of converts like myself who've written blog articles and and whatnot on this exact quote right i have my own out there somewhere but i was struggling in my evangelical faith to find agreement amongst my fellow believers to find a hermeneutic that made sense of the bible when so many of us couldn't just couldn't agree in his interpretation right and i found the early church i found history and i found the protestant worldview to be less and less historical the deeper deeper i went so this is this is newman's quote right to be deep in history is to cease to be protestant so i want to ask you first joe maybe and then gavin afterwards joe why is newman right why does it why does being deep in history cease to kind of make somebody a protestant yeah so i mean part of it i guess part of the answer is going to be newman's own story right like he starts out as an anglican who is trying to present anglicanism as kind of a middle way that captures the best of both catholicism and protestantism and his idea is like look with the virtues for instance if you go too far in one direction or the other you're probably in a vice like the virtue is in the middle aristotle talks about this right like if you're overeating or under-reading that's not right um and so he had kind of the same assumption uh coming into theology but when he starts really doing the heavy lifting when he starts really getting into the history of different doctrinal debates he sees that there's like all these instances where the middle ground is actually wrong too so for instance and the pelagian controversy you got the catholics on one side you got the pelagians on the other side you have the semi-pelagians in the middle but the right answer wasn't in the middle it was actually on the side of the catholic church and you see this kind of thing actually time and time again where it isn't just like a coincidence the catholic church is right you'll have like for instance like saint opitatus of malevis in the 300s before augustine is writing about how if you want to know what the right answer is uh look to the church of rome like look to the church and and not just anybody in rome but the one where they actually have like the relics of saint peter and paul and they celebrate on their tombs and like that's the church you need to listen to that church always has the right answer and so if you're a protestant you in like you basically have a couple options one is to kind of go in the route of saying like oh maybe one of these heretical sex is right but mainstream protestants don't believe in like the baga mills or the pelagians or anything like these guys or his story has not been kind to them from either a catholic or a protestant perspective but the other one is to be like wow the roman catholic church was right a remarkable number of times until the reformation and like it's so weird that right when like my teachings come up for the first time that's when they like strike out for the first time and i think newman's point is like that doesn't seem that plausible right um but more than that i mentioned earlier like christianity is a historical religion that isn't just like history prior to easter there are also like a set of historical prophecies made in the new testament so to give a few jesus's last words in the gospel of matthew are low i'm with you always to the close of the age uh the virgin mary in luke 2 prophesies that all generations will call her blessed jesus praise the last supper for future disciples to always be one in john 17 and of course christ promises to peter in matthew 16 that the gays of hell won't prevail against the church so whenever we're looking at history we should expect to find that christ is present protecting the church the gates of hell aren't overcoming it uh there's a visible church which we're supposed to be a part of and there's proper marian devotion going on because mary is inspired by the holy spirit to make this promise so that's true of the first century is true of the 6th century the 11th and then the 21st and and the 31st right like these are the things we can always expect to find if the promises god makes in the new testament are true so we should be able to identify with the the christianity of history because the christianity that's still in the hands of god and so newman goes on to say in the same passage that you're talking about there that the christianity of history is not protestantism and he even argues that protestants know it like no protestant is saying like the medieval church looked protestant and most protestants once they start studying the church fathers don't actually say the church fathers are protestant they just say uncertain points certain fathers at certain times agree with protestantism which is a pretty different claim um i actually in my book i quote gavin on page 211 because i think he rightly calls protestants out for a sort of uh swiss cheese history i'm badly paraphrasing you hear gavin because it kind of jumps from saint paul to saint augustine and then skips more than a millennium to luther and if if you actually believe that the christians in the 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th and 15th century are protestant there should be a ton of these like protestant heroes being held up uh as as models of protestant christianity and and of course that isn't true and anyone studying the middle ages will tell you that isn't true in the east or the west and so i think they like just the reaction protestant christianity has in general had uh to history kind of speaks to the truth of newman's claim that history isn't on the side of the truth of protestantism gavin you would disagree cordially as we do on this super crossover episode because you're deep in history i mean you you have a phd in historical theology from evangelical seminary why would you argue that being people in history doesn't require you to cease being partisan yeah i was going to say i know it's going to be a shock to you guys that i don't agree with newman on this one so try to hold hold your amazements but and i i will try to disagree cordially that's really important to me in these conversations i love the spirit you guys set in that way you guys are great models of that so but i also want to be clear and kind of speak from a genuine concern of just how i do feel that protestantism is sometimes unfairly caricatured and misrepresented and i mean one of the great challenges is of course protestantism is not a church it's a descriptive term for a number of different church traditions so when we're comparing catholicism and protestantism we're already with apples and oranges but i would say about newman first of all and i have scoured that essay on the development of doctrine over and over again and it's there's a number of things that i think we should ask what did he mean by this statement in order to know do we agree with the statement so first of all what does it mean by protestant because immediately prior in this passage he has referenced the popular level religion of england in his day immediately after a few paragraphs he distinguishes protestantism and anglicanism as two separate mutually exclusive alternatives so i actually think that newman is not using the word protestant in terms of what we would probably think that is all the protestant traditions from all times or protestantism as such another point of ambiguity that's probably worth kind of posing is does he mean this in a descriptive sense or in a normative sense in other words is he saying as a matter of fact there are none you know protestants who are deep in history just don't exist or is he saying uh they shouldn't be if they're deep in history that will incline them not to be protestant and i think he's actually saying both because in the context right before he's basically saying we don't have any so the immediately preceding sentence is that we don't have any um good church historians except for gibbon who is a non-believer and and then he just says this and then he moves on to the next section and to the extent that he means it in a descriptive sense i regard what he's saying as kind of a derogatory caricature it's just a sociological fact that there are protestants who are good historians and it kind of comes across in the way when protestants say oh catholics don't really love the bible it's just not true and it's such a blatant stereotype so you know as we're trying to have these cordial conversations i regard one of the ways we can push into that is really careful listening to try to slough off any of those caricatures that may persist that we all have and believe me look it's a humbling process for me with my youtube channel i look back on my videos and i'm always like you know in that video i did better than in that one and you know you always uh it's a learning process and my camera will come back on just in a second here sorry to keep you guys in suspense there um but yeah so so i mean this process is ongoing for that we want to lose caricatures and represent each tradition at its absolute best um and the fact is that there are protestants who are deep in history and if someone isn't even willing to grant that point then it's i feel like we're not pushing into that territory where the conversation can get ahead into more of a respectful kind of treating each tradition at its best now if he's if he meant it in a normative way here's why i would find that less outlandish but still i would disagree and basically i would just make the claim and this is where i would see it differently from joe that the old classical protestant idea that along the development of church history amidst all the good that is also happening there are various accretions and aberrations and declensions and problems that come into the picture and we're trying to go back before those and um remove the errors and i i find that to be a very plausible and eminently sensible appeal you know calvin in the context of a number of disputes basically said all we're trying to do is go back to the purity of the fourth century when the reformers were charged with the charge of novelty there the the counter reformation was saying you guys are new we're old okay and the response to that wasn't yeah so what we have sola scriptura the response to that was no we're even more ancient and right or wrong i mean so in other words it would be a more sensible argument i think if newman was to say protestants are making errors in the way they interpret church history but to just say as he says i regard it as kind of a snarky statement he just says to be deep in history just cease to be protestant and then elsewhere he just says you don't even need to argue for that it's just obvious and um you know what the protestants have always said is look and i you know so in my own research i've been reflecting upon the marian dogmas and the papacy and and um my claim would be that these things develop and they're not representative of the beliefs of the earliest christians in church history now right or wrong and you know this is the classic protestant claim so calvin listed 12 examples at the beginning of his prefatory letter to king francis from eating meat during lent to ministerial celibacy and on and on all these different examples quoting the fathers and saying um you're not in line with with them and that's where i would say you know to joe's point that the protestant church doesn't look like the early church of the medieval church i'd say in many respects of course i would say also neither does the catholic church i think all of the major representations of christendom today have developed and the question is what are our rules for adjudicating those developments and um the reason i just to lay things out here because i know we're just diving right into it i guess so trying to be you know productive here and i'll probably pause in a second so i don't go on too long but when i think about the ultimate root issue that's a point of divergence between us as catholics and protestant christians and i'm honored to be talking to you guys i respect you guys and this is this is all great but the the point of the main point that i would see would be the issue of the papacy because that gets at the issues of authority so if only we had someone here who had written a book on the papacy we would be in great you know so i'm really excited for joe to share his thoughts on on this as we go forward but it because the very means of adjudicating these historical developments for a catholic i.e the papacy seems to me to be itself a development i i don't have confidence in that system of doctrine and so um whatever is right and wrong here on the protestant side the one thing i think is not fair is to say protestants don't care about church history or if you are deep in history it will automatically discourage you from being a protestant i would think the more respectful debate would need to get beyond what newman is saying and get into are protestants right or wrong in their historical appeal because the way newman puts it and it is interesting i mean he said that while he was of course still an anglican he had not been received into the church yet and it was incredibly controversial among roman catholic christians at that time and this statement is wielded over and over again in ways that i think are contrary to what newman actually meant by it so uh i i do find sorry if i'm putting this too strong but i do find this this newman quip is something we kind of need to put to bed or at least quote it in accuracy with what he meant in the larger context of that essay and then we can hopefully get into the deeper issues which is basically let's dive into church history and let's look at these things and let's look at those early centuries of the church when do different beliefs and doctrines come into view so that's a little bit about how i think about newman not to be too harsh you know there's there's an example that may uh flesh this out a little more and it's mentioned in the biography of edmund campion that evelyn law has that when champion is studying to become an anglican priest he starts reading the church fathers and is shocked at how catholic they sound and he goes to the best patriotistic scholar uh at the school and and he asks him about it and he said well if i believed the fathers as well as i know them then i would have to convert and so i think maybe one of the things we have to kind of tease out is what we mean by being deep in history because of course you could know the whole history but even like gavin in your in your description it's it's knowing it and still rejecting a lot of these things as you said like as a christians or declensions or like you can know like the medieval church believed something very different than what luther or calvin or a modern protestant believed um i think newman is making a certain assumption about having a continuity with that and i think he's writing out a time and place where there'd been a little bit of a transition where the kind of calvinist argument that this was a return to what the early church believed was sort of being abandoned um but i don't know i mean i'm interested in kind of what you would say to that because obviously like i'm reading it through catholic lynn saying yeah i know a ton of people who imagine that the early christians believe something more or less like what they believe and then they read the fathers and discover that they actually sound way more catholic um but i'm sure your mileage varies here and you know the fathers really well well no that's a great distinction you made about knowing versus believing because that's true i mean and that there's uh newman's reference to gibbon who's a non-christian historian and he's really knowledgeable and he doesn't believe any of it so but i mean believing so i'm saying you know i think that um the to take the marion dogmas for example that what the early church fathers believed about that is contrary to what contemporary catholics require on pain of heresy and that that's that's a very exclusive sort of system that is now erected that's at variance with what i believe the early fathers believed and then as you get into the patristic era it will vary but somebody like john chrysostom is certainly way out so can i push back a little or maybe just invite you to make a distinction when you say like what the fathers believed was at variance do you mean that there was like a broader range of theological opinion or do you mean that there were no fathers holding to what we would now call the catholic view neither really i just mean that with these dogmas some they seem to come in uh after the apostolic deposit over time some earlier some later and with some of them there are church fathers who um deny what the doctrines hold so with the immaculate conception i've charted out on my blog people could check it out not trying to promote my blog i promise but um you know five or six examples of this where the church fathers just seem to assume that mary is at fault whether it be in john 2 or luke 2 in their biblical commentaries they're assigning vain glory or sinful doubt to mary in certain passages and so the i guess the the way it looks to me as a protestant as i'm looking at church history is that these things developed that they're not represent like the to give an example the bodily assumption of mary which has been dogmatized and is required by the catholic church for someone just to get in the front door and get baptized and take the eucharist and yet this is something that i don't think we have any evidence of being in existence or thought of for hundreds of years and we also have epiphanius in the fourth century saying nobody knows what happened to mary at the end of her life and there's no blowback against that so just looking at it historically i would say based upon the lack of biblical attestation that mary was bodily assumed to have been the lack of early church historical attestation that this came in later that this especially because when it comes in especially in the fifth century you've got all these different legends about many of them are saying that she wasn't bodily assumed that her body was taken to a special place to be to await the resurrection day some of them are saying um she was buried she died was buried for three days and then she was raised and assumed to heaven there's all these different stories that pop up right around the same time and then eventually you get to what the kind of more normative catholic view would be today so i'd say just looking at history i don't agree with newman that being deep in history would make you cease to be a protestant because the history to me on that doctrine so so when i talk with my catholic friends i say look i'm required to believe it that mary was bodily assumed to heaven to join your church so you're making the appeal that this is the one true church and to join this one true church you have to believe this and yet i don't see biblical or early church historical attestation of it so then it kicks to the papacy and that the appeal is well there's a teaching office in the church that has the authority to to dogmatize this particular view and my problem is well that teaching office as well looks to me like it's something that developed and i'm sure we'll probably get into those things but this is where i'm coming at it because i'm very concerned about what the church fathers taught on these things and i think um yeah i just see i i see uh divergence from contemporary catholic requirements and what i see in a lot of the fathers and those are just some examples i don't want to totally hijack you guys moderating so if you want me to just shut up here i totally can but there are a lot of really interesting things you've said there that i'd love to me and joe we're just going to talk and you guys can you guys can just sign off now we'll just take it from here this is a great show i'm just enjoying listening to you too oh no i mean like look like this is one of those things where i think catholics sometimes overstate the case because there are a lot of church fathers who speak of the sinlessness of mary and so for instance i mean really going back to like irenaeus and the new eve theology and the way it's developed especially in the west and like augustine saying like mary's the only sinless woman and like you know all like you you clearly have people who who say mary is sinless the particulars of how she's sinless like from the moment of conception as opposed to like a you know a lot of this the kind of the nitty-grittier stuff you take longer to get the real specifics kind of spelled out but you're also right that especially in the east uh up until john chrysostom but not really after him you do have a camp of people saying no mary sinned at least once you know there's a moment of doubt at the cross or uh mary spoke out of turn in john two or yeah it'll be like some some instance now i want to make two distinctions there first when you have those guys never do they say like it is the teaching of our church or it is a tradition or we all know this like john chrysostom is a great example where he says well maybe mary is uh just trying to like showboat and have jesus perform a miracle for her own glory and like maybe she's sinning here and it's very much in the realm of like theological speculation it's clear from him saying that that there's not a universally agreed upon dogma on this point but then the second thing i'd say is like the the catholic view is on the table it's just not the only option on the table like uh theology my greek is terrible right but it's like an acceptable theological opinion uh theo legomina there it is uh like it you know like it's one option among many and so then i think this gets to maybe the the deeper point gavin that you have that it's not just a marion issue it's it's a church authority issue right like uh at times and places the church will say okay these three or these five or these two opinions have been floating around and this is the right one and that's the wrong one and so i guess my question is are you against that anytime because the church also does that for like the trinitarian doctrines in the christiological doctrines where like even really good christian figures sometimes have kind of screwed up stuff about like the personhood of the holy spirit or whether their subordination subordinationism within the holy trinity or you know what i mean like you'll find even seemingly holy guys before these things are all clarified getting some of the theological stuff wrong on like the trinity and christology or to take like a modern example like william lane craig amazing amazing witness christianity he's a monophylite like he's like he's a heretic uh at least according to the second council of nicaea and so then the question really becomes does the church ever have a time and place where it can say hey there's a dispute let's settle it or is that like needlessly restricting uh to to the believer well let me give a brief answer that and i promise i'll kick it back to keith and we can go on to some new questions here especially since we've now labeled william lane craig as a heretic which i'll i'll list my reservations or my disagreements on that one too but but i know what you're saying and i do agree with you on that particular theological issue but i would say um i wouldn't agree that we have the sinlessness of mary as one option among many at all in the second century i don't know of anybody i mean you can try to extrapolate it from the typology of eve and mary but i don't i think it it starts coming in in the third century and i think that the bodily assumption you have nothing crickets chirping until the fourth century and even then it's very oblique it's really not and then in the fifth century just as i say proliferates but you've got all these divergent accounts of what it means some of them aren't really bodily assumption so i i just i wouldn't agree well it's not because it's not a bodily assumption if mary his body is taken away to a separate place like there's a i can't remember the title of the text but that's a that's one of the views that pops up in the fifth century so i wouldn't agree that you have all these options on the table and then one of them is selected by the church i would say it looks like it develops it comes into existence several hundred years into church history and that's why the newman quip about being deep in history uh i find unhelpful and unfair but i'll i'll stop there and let sorry sorry to just take over this guys man it's my fault this is fantastic i'll speak for both of us here and i can see on keith's face he's enjoying it and i am too so so have at it guys something i want to get at here that i think is interesting as we approach this subject that is still somewhat at this beginning level because i think there's a lot of areas in which we talk past each other in these conversations but what should we be expecting of church history so when when you look back are you expecting to see some type of continuity there like do we have a reasonable expectation that there's this teaching that's going to be preserved or is it a lot less clear than that and i imagine you guys are going to answer this differently but we'll start with gavin since we start with joe last time okay i would say you know um the general expectation i would have is that the witness of church history is going to matter a great deal so a couple just distinctions that are kind of obvious or basic points would be that the more attested something is the stronger uh that show should influence us you know a 90 10 is going to be stronger than a 60 40 on a split opinion about a particular doctrine similarly the more central a particular doctrine is so like you know in terms of the issues that divide us as protestants and catholics if something like purgatory i became convinced was universally attested throughout church history and biblically theologically there there's no no red flags that wouldn't necessarily make me become roman catholic because there's lots of protestants who believe in purgatory it's not as central to the belief system um historically there's some anglicans and even some methodists and lutherans who formed purgatory and you can find contemporary evangelicals from purgatory but it's something like the papacy that's different that's more central so it kind of depends on which doctrine we're talking about and how widely attested it is but the main sort of observation i'd make is that for protestants we want to try to look at what we would think of as kind of the some aggregate witness of all christians so we're not looking to a particular teaching office within the church of rome as kind of the final verdict we're trying to you know vincent famously talked about what's been believed everywhere always by all or if you think of a much looser kind of category c.s lewis's category of mere christianity which is often misunderstood as though he's saying that's all you need or something like that mere christianity for him was the hallway not the room you live in it's kind of the entry point and it's a way to try to make the christian faith intelligible to someone who's maybe new to it and it could be a rubric that you might use in in terms of the interpretations you make with regard to church history and with regard to theology so we're looking those things are really important to us they weigh upon us kind of what's mere christianity what's the some witness of christians throughout the church age that's going to weigh more for us as protestants than one particular teaching office and so there's differences kind of in how we negotiate church history but and you know joe the portion you quoted in my i think it was an old blog post one of my first blog posts ever so i can hardly remember what i what it was even about but i think i was just criticizing protestants which whenever i'm having these discussions it's really important to me to number one if i say something that gives a fence or steps on toes or is inaccurate forgive me and and you know let me know that i did that and also to be willing to own the protestant errors which are many um and you can be a protestant christian for a reason other than thinking oh protestantism is perfect this is great this is exactly the dream um there's lots of protestant errors and ignorance of church history is a huge one but i think at their best that's a little bit of how protestants have thought about you know how much church history would you need to sort of change your mind on something yeah um i would obviously take a slightly different kind of approach with it um i think so i guess austin to your question go back to the last supper right jesus promises the counselor of the holy spirit and the father will send in my name he'll teach you all things and brings your remembrance all that i've said to you that's kind of the promise of the holy spirit working throughout history and i don't think we should understand that as an immediate process like the apostles just have all the theology or the first century christians have all the theological questions like uh you know if if they were faced with like bioethical questions they might still need to do a little bit of work right it isn't just like it's all immediately clear uh same but rather like a spirit-guided unraveling of this down through the ages that's still ongoing uh st gregory naziensen says it this way he says the old testament proclaimed the father clearly but the sun more obscurely the new testament revealed the sun and gave us a glimpse of the divinity of the spirit and now the spirit dwells among us and grants us a clearer vision of himself it was not prudent when the divinity of the father had not yet been confessed to proclaim the son openly and when the divinity of the son was not yet admitted to add the holy spirit as an extra burden to speak somewhat daringly end quote so it's like that idea in the church fathers that like yeah this stuff becomes gradually more clear but i want to be clear this is a movement from like blurry to clear not a movement from like black to white or white to black like you can't just say hey by the way there's now a fourth person of the trinity it's it's rather that there's this ongoing unpacking of of what's already believed in at least an embryonic form before that so like the example i've given before is like a sudoku puzzle i don't know if any of you are nerdy enough to understand that example you get like the number puzzle right and everything you need is already right there and so like if you can understand the relationship between the numbers you have it all solved that doesn't mean you have a solved puzzle before you you still have to do the hard work of like seeing the relationship between the numbers that have been like revealed uh to understand how the rest of it all fits in place and that's the journey the church has been on for 2000 years now as you move further down the line like as you spend more time on the puzzle you'll know oh no it can't be a seven there when maybe an hour before you thought it could have been and so i think you know to gavin's point you go back in church history and you'll find a wider theological diversity of opinion on most questions that's what we should expect if this idea is true that like things become clearer as we move on that also means like okay now we can say here's what's not true about the will of christ or here's what's not true about the natures or here's what is true about mary or you know uh calling mary mother of god versus mother of christ all that stuff builds and develops as you move forward not as adding something new like adding a new number that wasn't like given to you but rather of seeing how like it all interplays uh with each other so i think that's one thing you're going to see like a movement from blurrier to clearer theology more precise theology as you go down through the ages but i think the second thing just to kind of create a baseline right uh in the book i mention this idea of ecclesial deism and i'm getting this from brian cross i think he's getting it from someone else but here's how he explains it uh he says deism refers to belief that god made the world and then left it to run on its own it is sometimes compared to a clockmaker winding up a clock and then letting it run it's distinct from theism and that theism affirms not only that god created the world but also that god continually sustains and governs all of creation now brian's going to say and i'm going to say that a lot of protestant theology sort of treats church history as if god winds up the church and lets it run in a similar way so he says ecclesial deism is the notion that christ founded his church but then withdrew not protecting his church's magisterium i.e the apostles and or their successors in the teaching office of the church from falling into heresy or apostasy ecclesial deism is not the belief that individual members of the magisterium could fall in the heresy apostasy is to believe that the magisterium itself could lose or corrupt some essential of the deposit of faith or add something to the deposit of faith as according to i'd add some protestants allegedly occurred in the fifth sixth and seventh ecumenical councils so in other words you will find like this greater clarity but the baseline expectation is twofold a that the orthodox belief is always acceptable within the visible church like even if it isn't the only option on the table that is always an acceptable option on the table it's never declared a heresy and b that the teaching authority itself never like dogmatically defines something heretical because if it does then like that defeats the whole point of having a visible church or visible teaching authority in the first place like the apostolic structure of the church is totally thwarted if the apostles or their successors can teach something heretical so that would be the baseline that uh whatever is being dogmatically taught uh is always going to be not heretical it doesn't have to be exhaustive of all of orthodoxy but it's always going to be not heretical and orthodoxy is always going to be an acceptable option on the table i mean i know that's a fairly low bar right but i think if we use that bar it gives us a really effective way to compare catholic and protestant theology or theologies because gavin's right like there's not a monolithic protestantism but just as kind of like a framework in which to understand church history and you guys are pausing and waiting for me to go i guess i i appreciate joe's comments i'll just make a brief comment but i don't want to keep getting us i don't want to sidetrack us so please interrupt me uh anyone um i would just there's a lot of agreement here doctrinal development is is absolutely unavoidable and and and certainly the way protestants look at church history as well that's not where we would differ in fact one of my favorite things to think about is can you prove the trinity in the old testament and that is a really fun exercise and i think it's a great example of doctrinal development because you've got these murky so like a good metaphor you wake up in the morning and the sunlight's barely coming in through the window and you can just barely see things but then you turn the light on and uh it's kind of like from old testament to new testament on the trinity you've got some clues you've got psalm 110 and you know the the messiah is going to be called mighty god and there's all the other psalms and so forth but you don't really have the trinity so that so doctrinal development is definitely uh a point of agreement in in you know as such i think i i would certainly um the notion of ecclesial deism i don't know how to say this without being i don't want to be too blunt or too do it go for it it just strikes me as such a preposterous criticism of protestants i mean deism means that god sets up the world and then steps back and stops working well obviously protestants don't think that unless you have an infallible teaching office in rome god isn't working it seems to assume that two things number one this is it assumes that the roman catholic magisterium is the way that god is working and that that's seemingly the only way that god could be at work but i don't even think catholics would think the only way god is at work is through the magisterium protestants believe that that god is at work in in in myriad ways and and for the word deism to come up in the context of the of a criticism like that is tough for me to uh to fathom i mean read calvin on how god on how christ sustained the medieval church he's saying christ upheld the church by his right hand he protected her by his word he covered her in his spirit and so on and so forth i don't know how any anyone who has read you know the best of protestant interpretations of early church history medieval church history francis turreton carl bart john calvin people like that could think of it in terms of deism sorry if i'm coming on too strong but i feel the need to be clear because i feel like that's a really unfair representation of protestants gavin i really appreciate you pushing back and i you're not anywhere near like the edge of propriety so don't worry about all okay uh but no i so i if i can clarify a little bit i think maybe i didn't explain it well just to be clear like brian cross and i are not saying protestants or deists like we still realize but rather that like so go back to matthew 16. some of the most important words of the passage are i will build my church like christ is saying i'm going to build a church and the gates of hell are not going to prevail against it and so the catholic argument is like if you think the visible church taught heresy that defeats the whole point of christ building a church himself or to put it a different way like when c.s lewis talks about the church and he compares it to like the platonic society of like a group of people who just like study plato that's what you would get like that's the kind of church you would get if christ hadn't built one himself if he just left it to his followers to like group together and try to understand his teachings as best they could so if christ withdrew from the protection specifically of the church like it's not just deism it's ecclesial deism like uh winding up the ecclesia the church and letting the visible church kind of run into heresy and not not keeping it from heresy not that god just like totally withdraws from the world it's like a much more specific uh kind of argument that like the magisterium the teaching authority however you understand that whether you take it like the orthodox church or the catholic church or but the to the extent there's a visible church if you say the entire visible church is an error on doctrine x it seems like that defeats the point of there being a visible church i think that's the argument okay that does help clarify a little bit and i think i guess a question i would have which i don't know if we want to pursue it now is how do you understand the division between the east and the west on this i mean christ is in charge of the church he is the church is his precious bride right he nourishes the church um but he allowed there to be a division and this division came into existence oh sorry keeping you guys in suspense again this uh this division came into existence uh you know well before protestants did not introduce division to the church we inherit a church that is divided so did christ allow this division to take place well yes it happened um i mean are orthodox christians ecclesial deists uh no i would say no because they think like to kind of answer it broadly right the orthodox claim is like christ established a visible church it's the eastern orthodox church and somewhere along the way the papacy comes along starts making claims that are crazier and crazier and in 1054 splits off that is at least a historically plausible kind of claim uh i think it's wrong i think the evidence actually points against it and for reasons that would take like way longer to kind of explain but that's at least like a plausible claim in a way that i think christ establishes a visible church that visible church quickly or not so quickly falls into heresy and like a german monk named martin or like a french lawyer named john or whoever comes along and resurrects christ's church on their own and and kind of reintroduces orthodoxy like if that that claim doesn't seem to me to to withstand and i know i'm character trained a little bit right but like the idea of like the visible church falling into something like an apostasy uh is i think what this idea of ecclesial deism is speaking into and the orthodox don't believe in an apostasy right and and most protestants don't either this is where this discussion is helping me understand a little bit how better you're thinking about that of course there are some protestants who believe in a great fall sometimes with constantine or as early as the great cent or back into the second century you can find that out there but most as i was saying earlier read turretin on his notion of the preservation of the true church every single reformer without exception every single one of the magisterial reformers affirmed the preservation of the true church in every generation protestants believe in the visible church so the protestant view is much closer to the orthodox view than than i i think you just presented it there that's what i struggled with in the early chapters of your book joe is it felt like maybe not the best of protestant views being brought to the table because i mean the reformers were so clear on this point they said christ never abandoned the church the true church was preserved in every generation and that's so i draw a lot on that in the in the theological retrieval book as a as a reason to rebuke my protestant friends for the errors we've talked about where protestants sometimes do have a more separate and you can find those apostasy or remnant views of church history but that's not the best protestant view it's certainly not the majority one among the magisterial reformers yeah so uh just to be clear like in my book i i actually talk about i distinguish that view the one we're talking about right now from like the view laid out by huss by cliff luther calvin on like the idea of like some sort of invisible church or in a church of the save distinct from the visible magisterium um so i i totally agree that it's not the only view out there and i i would be happy to talk a little bit more about that if you guys want if you want to go on to the next question we can we can do that too i'll leave that to you keith well i think we can go bit forward because a bit further forward i want to save some things for our parts two three four and five of these discussions because i think there's a lot of fruit to be had in these if if we can get you guys to entice you guys back on on this collaborative program in the future but i want to talk about this idea of retrieving theology because you mentioned your book uh gavin theological people for evangels and in my mind there's a serious problem with that it comes down to picking and choosing so i want to ask you first gavin i said earlier that the deeper i got into patriotistics the more that i found the protestant narrative something wasn't tenable we've always talked about that quite a bit here and you do lay out a lot of perils of this idea of retrieving ancient theology i think readers are really well served by what you ultimately bring about there in your book in the and what you lay out but i don't think this suggests is the ultimate issue of who decides who decides what to retrieve and what to leave off and who decides where the ancient church was right and where they were wrong and i'm thinking of dr doug beaumont a good friend of of my show and a good friend who was teaching at southern evangelical seminary assisting the late dr norman geisler in writing his systematic theology and doug later converted amongst a wave of converts and ended up maybe writing a whole book on this called evangelical exodus one of my favorite collections of conversion stories and i'm not doug's marketing team here so i should i should keep going my point is though that what doug told me on the show was that his his research for geisler uh was basically to go through the early church fathers and find up and find quotations that lined up with his theology that with geisler's existing theology you know it was it was shoehorning the church fathers piling up quotations into already existing theology and that's my problem ultimately with any kind of approach of retrieving theology you know it makes the retriever like beaumont or geisler or like i would have been as i was understanding the church fathers as an evangel it makes the retriever of that theology into the arbiter right the arbiter of what parts of that theology are right and and what's wrong so i wonder how you would address this idea of how do you avoid just picking and choosing things from the fathers to believe yeah yeah i feel the weight of that question because when you're doing theological retrieval um yeah i mean that's a real live danger for sure um but i would say a couple of things i mean so for people watching this when i talk about theological retrieval i i just mean that in a very broad sense of just drawing from historical theology to do constructive systematic theology today basically we're just talking about learning from the past kind of going back to question number one especially with an emphasis upon neglected or or resources that maybe have been forgotten to some extent and i think sometimes the idea of picking and choosing is presented there are some differences between how a protestant will engage in retrieval and a catholic but i think sometimes those differences are pressed too absolutely as though they're totally different first of all most protestants are a part of a particular ecclesial tradition that does have doctrinal standards you know if you're an anglican you got the 39 articles if you're lutheran you got the book of concord if you're presbyterian like i used to be you've got the westminster standards and i remember vividly the debates about what is proper subscription to the westminster standards really entail and those can get really feisty and those standards aren't enforced by ecclesiastical courts so the sometimes people act as though protestants are just out there on their own you know whatever i like i accept whatever i don't like i don't accept protestants um do read scripture in light of their own ecclesial tradition that one of the differences will be they don't see those doctrinal standards as having any sort of inherent infallibility but they're still bound to them and if at any point they become outside the bounds then you stop being a lutheran or you stop being an anglican and actually i think that's kind of similar to what catholics will do i mean you choose to be a catholic you you choose to be a catholic or you're born into it and you remain in it and you do that because presumably that's what you think is right and you're in a sense picking and choosing you're choosing to remain a catholic if at any point someone doesn't believe that the catholic church is the true church i would expect and hope that they wouldn't be a catholic you know it's a it's a choice you make now then you'll function differently in light of that but not not on everything there's lots of points that the catholic church hasn't dogmatized that you know the kind of retrieval i do is like augustine on evolution stuff i think that's really fun you know how what can we learn from augustine's commentary on genesis as we're wrestling with creation and evolution so that's kind of the whole impetus behind my my book on that so that's the kind of thing a protestant and a catholic could have great discussions about and we'd both be in a similar place we're saying what can we learn from augustine this is a member of our church family this is someone who's really smart and really sincere we can both learn from him and and the particular questions aren't things that like you're bound to as a catholic so i don't i don't see catholics and protestants as too too different on this point i guess the in my mind the picking and choosing happened is an unavoidable part of being a responsible moral creature you know it's kind of what we all have to do do you want me to uh speak into this as well i know this is kind of specific to gavin's book but i i think that's i largely agree with him actually um and i think the example of augustine on evolution is a great one that you can you can do one of two things when you approach them you can either say i need to find a proof text to support my side of a contemporary debate or you can approach him and just say okay here's a doctor of the church what does he have to say like what can i learn from him like to use a contemporary political example just to give another something inaccessible to canadians uh like bernie sanders uh he voted against background checks for guns back in the 90s and his track record is like much closer on like gun stuff uh to like the nra than one might assume he's from vermont uh if you took just that detail you could construct a story about how he's actually like a conservative but it wouldn't be really faithful to the manner to his beliefs uh likewise i think kind of what doug beaumont's talking about in terms of the way norm geisler approached them there's there can be kind of a lot of mining of the church fathers to find these kind of proof texts now that's not exclusive to protestants i've seen catholics do the same thing where they they take quotes out of context to support uh either a protestant or a catholic like argument sometimes like totally avoiding the broader context so to call out like other catholics here um sometimes augustine his earlier stuff on like the rock will be used without any acknowledgment that he later doubted his own arguments right and retraction is he he presents a contrary argument says i actually don't know which of these is right figure it out for yourselves you know like and so if you just take half of that whichever half sounds better for the the debate you're trying to have that's not an honest way of viewing the person right and you see this a lot on the protestant side with like jerome on the 66 book cannon jerome ends up uh submitting to the the what he calls the judgment of the churches and so it would be wrong to take him as like a kind of characteristic of like the 4th century 5th century church and say oh yeah this is a representative view and would also be i think dishonest to take him as like therefore he's basically a protestant what you sometimes get is kind of a frankenstein pastiche of like a few quotes from augusta a few quotes from jerome to present a kind of like uh stitched together church father that you can find saying all the right things to sound like a certain type of protestant but that isn't accurate to any of the the church fathers i don't know if that's like a very clear coherent way of describing it but i think that's kind of the danger and i would say the the response to it is like we should instead all of us should try to approach them as like holy men who understood christ better than we do and who can show christ to us in new and exciting ways and to approach them with the posture of humility to see what we can learn from them rather than trying to grab a good sound bite for like a modern debate and i could just briefly to state my appreciation for what joe just said there because that is a huge temptation on each side you know to and honestly protestants do it all the time i think we all people on both sides can do it where you just go back and just pluck out the quote and that's kind of how retrieval is construed and it's then leveraged in a polemical way against someone and yeah so that's a huge and so to your question keith i appreciate the question because it is a huge danger you know and something we need to be especially alert to that's really good and i love both of your guys insights on that and it's great to hear how similarly you guys think about that i wanted to turn the corner a bit to a question you've posed in your book joe and i've heard you pose elsewhere about this dichotomy between unity and truth so as we look back into the church fathers and we're trying to see them in their context and we're saying you know there are these multifaceted holy men and we're trying to see where they lead i could see how someone would say and for gavin this is for you you know there's this giant catholic church that has this opinion on it and this is they say this is what the fathers are saying and then in protestantism i'm seeing this kind of multiplicity of readings and it's splintered into different directions so if someone looks into church history and they grant that it's not wholesale catholic gavin do you feel they're forced to choose truth instead of unity does it become that dichotomy or is that perhaps not quite fair um maybe this answer will sound overly pessimistic but i actually think falling short of both truth and perfect truth and perfect unity is going to be to some extent unavoidable this side of the second coming and i just a parenthetical comment would be i do pray for the reunion of different branches of christendom i do pray for unity i do pray i think and it is a wonderful joyful thought at the second coming when there will be i mean there's going to be a lot of great things about heaven one of them amidst a zillion others will be no more church divisions uh so that is something we should pray for and long for and that's why dialogues like this are so meaningful and so healthy and so appropriate but i think one thing that's helpful to say i don't know if there's a full answer to the question here but one thing that's helpful to say is and i think we could probably all agree on this that there are different kinds of unity or perhaps better to say it there's different ingredients that go into unity you could have a protestant church where two people are under the institutional umbrella and they sign the on the dotted line and have the same doctrine but they cuss each other out in the parking lot on the way into church and you know it it happens you know so that obviously falls way short woefully short of the realization of jesus's prayer in john 17. now that doesn't mean institutional unity is unimportant it you know it's a necessary criterion it's just not a sufficient criterion so if we're pursuing a full orb unity it's going to involve a both and approach you know we're going to want to approach institutional unity we're going to be take ecumenical dialogue seriously sometimes protestants think of the word ecumenical or humanism as bad words or something like that it can be done badly but it's a wonderful thing to to to looked at how can we heal what is broken you know so i have a big heart for that um i'm sure i'll i've already changed and learned so much in the process of talking with catholics i respect my catholic friends so much i've learned a ton so even just for that reason you know dialogue is useful we can learn things from people in other traditions but i don't think gosh i've said a lot of harsh things or a lot of strong disagreements i don't know how further to push this since i finally struck a more conciliatory note here maybe i should just stop now go for it do it well the last thing okay so just on the whole issue of unity i mean so like i do regard the catholic claim to be the true church as a barrier and and the reason is it it's kind of like if two people think they owe each other money one person's saying hey you owe me 50 bucks the other person is saying no you owe me 50 bucks now some pers if one of the two parties comes to the other and says hey we need to have unity so pay up that's not exactly the most generous appeal now if the on the other hand if they say hey we need to have unity so let's talk until we figure out the financial discrepancy that's a more winsome appeal and when catholics say we're the true church and you're not and we need to have unity it it kind of comes across as a particular kind of unity kind of a unity on our terms and i guess i look i mean protestants have a lot of blame we got a lot of blame to follow at us for um breaching and to since i mentioned joe's book i'll say one thing i really appreciated about the book is the call to unity and the importance of that at the end of the book um that is not icing on the cake that is essential to the mission of christ and it's it right there in john 17 and so we've got to take that seriously so i'll conclude by saying where protestants have failed and we have we need to not just kind of begrudgingly nod at that we need to repent because that is wrong i think it's a really beautiful way of describing that and there's a lot there that we actually agree on in terms of biblical terms the way i usually describe it is one heart unity versus one mind unity you know like like you said you can agree on all the doctrine and still test each other out in the parking lot so like in acts 4 when it says the believers were of one heart that's that unity of heart seems to be something not just in terms of like doctrinal agreement but there's also unity of mind and so like in philippians 2 when saint paul says complete my joy by being of the same mind having the same love being in full accord and of one mind i think he's calling for two types of unity there uh fraternity unity you know a unity of heart but also a doctrinal unity a unity of mind and part of that i think goes back to john 17 right like christ says that we need to be one so the world can believe in the gospel because if you've got innumerable different variations of the creed that are contradictory and contrary uh the non-believer is totally justified in saying okay you guys disagree with each other i don't know what to believe here you're saying opposite things you're saying contradictory things and that actually impedes the cause of truth so i think you know like you said like humanism can be kind of a bad word in catholic spheres as well as protestant ones but there's this idea that unity is actually in the service of the truth that like if we are not united that hurts the spread of the truth and so we got to take one mind and one heart unity extremely seriously i think we don't do that now if i can make a pitch for papal infallibility or ecclesial infallibility in the context of that i'd say this like if the church can air if the visible church can air uh and there may be a time where i have to go into schism from the church in order to be orthodox then we're in a catch 22 right because christ has forbidden uh schism i mean galatians five right like schisms and factions are listed among the works of the flesh that that don't inherit eternal life so if i have to choose between heresy and and schism i'm being forced to choose two things that are both forbidden me in the new testament and not just forbidden me in like some abstract sense but like specifically uh first peter like peter's looking ahead telling future believers that like the days are going to come where there are challenges to orthodoxy and then in john 17 jesus is looking ahead and saying like we we're going to need to be united in the future so like this this prohibition against schism and the prohibition against heresy aren't just for like the first century but are clearly upon us today so it's true that we're gonna probably fall short of a total unity of heart and unity of mind but i think we can at least say let's not be schismatics or heretics and if we can't trust the church then we actually can't avoid uh becoming one of those two things maybe maybe you'd see this differently i'd actually be really interested in if you see a way kind of out of that catch 22 or maybe i need to explain it better well i'll take a throw out of thought here and if this is off topic you can uh you can help me um i mean i i certainly i certainly think from a protestant standpoint we don't think that it is schism to reject heresy so that we wouldn't ha and the reason is we're thinking differently about the nature of the church so i think the distinction between the invisible and visible church and those terms maybe have some baggage but the idea that they're getting at is maybe an area where as we press into further discussions as well we can keep circling back to that because when the reformers made the appeal for this distinction they were looking at augustine's on rebuke and grace chapters 20 and 22 they were drawing from patristic texts and they were basically making an appeal that i don't know how not to make i mean if you think that so like am i going to heaven am i saved from your vantage point don't answer but the question is can non-catholics be a part so the new testament uses the word ecclesia to describe the recipients of the saving work of christ acts 20 christ bought the god bought the church with his blood ephesians 5 the church is the bride of christ he nourishes it he loved her and gave his life for her so um and then you've got a couple of different ways that the word ecclesia is also used now if you allow that people can experience the saving benefits of jesus christ by appropriating his work into their lives and yet they're not a member of the visible church i don't see how that doesn't get you to the same place practically as the visible and invisible church distinction and i think you know at one point in the book joe you mentioned that you think it was a there's a really funny quote by is it bellarmine where he's talking about the body and it's like it has fingernails and it's like it's got these really bad parts within the body but then you talk about how there's people outside the body who can also be saved but it's invisible in the sense that we don't know exactly who it is and i kind of find myself thinking well that's basically gets you to the same spot as a protestant thinking there's a visible church but then there's people outside it and you don't know what those boundaries are exactly so to me kind of what we're talking about kind of kicks back to that issue which i'm sure we'll want to keep probing and if not in this time gosh which sounds like we got enough enough of a starting point like five more of these or something like that which i would love to do yeah i just like to say i would also love to you've been great talking to you know can i can i go into a little bit on just like where i see the difference between um because you're right that there is an invisible dimension to the church here's how i would explain it to explain why you don't have to have two different churches or two different uh reference for ecclesia because like you just give a little bit of biblical background right like in matthew 18 it says take it to the ecclesia take it to the church if you've got a dispute with another believer that has to be to something visible and something able to act in a judicial kind of fashion because that's what's being presupposed right and like the ecclesia is the gathering together it's the calling out and gathering here that's what the word means and so to have people invisibly gathered together like that doesn't really do justice to like the history of the usage of the term kind of even in greek there's a much i just said more than i probably should have there you know i don't want to take the time to kind of spell all that out but let me just say this like uh i lived for three years as an american in rome i was invisibly connected to america right like i could still vote i still had to pay taxes i still had like some kind of connection to the us um but that didn't mean that there was like a visible america and an invisible america and i could go into schism from one without being in schism from the other like i couldn't say i reject visible america but i'm still part of the invisible america uh keith once again in american analogy there's probably the same thing with canada right uh but you know so that kind of idea right like you can be invisibly connected to a visible institution you can be part of a group like you can be part of a book club and not show up and you're somehow still connected to the book club even if you're not physically there one tuesday night or whatever uh so the idea of the church is like we can point to the visible church and say where it is we can't say where it isn't we can't say like who has zero connection to it because connection gets complicated and the entry point to the church which has been repeatedly declared throughout the centuries right is baptism and so anyone getting baptized with a trinitarian baptism is in some sense a catholic they're in some sense part of the church by the catholic church's own understanding of what makes someone catholic even if they're not we'd say juridically catholic even if they're not aware they're catholic and put themselves under canon law or something like that there still is some sense of membership that's a little broader than than some catholics will will understand or acknowledge like you get kind of the hardcore people to say like unless you call yourself a roman catholic you're going to hell and that's actually not what the church has ever said but she still thinks that all of those people are kind of catholic in spite of themselves that they are more catholic than they realize and like the biblical foundation of this would be like saint paul's saying there's a visible body right with apostles that's the head in first corinthians 12 but he also says like if the ear says that it's not part of the body it's still part of the body it's just more part of the body than it realizes or going back to like the psalms when christ when god is talking about zion and says he's got a number like some of rahab and egypt as like members of israel israel had this reality like israel is very clearly a visible place it's got borders it's got censuses and all that but still even in the old testament there's this idea that some are among the people uh just not visibly um and i just to uh be clear too i agree with that visible and invisible are not two different churches they're two different ways i mean another way to get those terms out of here and just talk about the church from the standpoint of god's election in eternity past and the church from the standpoint of who's baptized now um and but part of what we're getting into here too i think is the visible is the visible church the same thing as the institutional church because i that's a point of difference because i and there's these different presuppositions we come to it with and that's where i'm trying to listen carefully and make sure i'm not misunderstanding something because i just i've been a protestant all my life i just think differently so i think of the waldensians i'm happy to say that waldensians were part of the church i'm happy to say that and i'm happy to say that many of them are saved and i'm happy to say that pentecostalism is the holy spirit bro growing his church i i think in unless what i regard as kind of less rigid barriers for what is the visible church in other words i think you can be visible without necessarily being under the jurisdiction of the roman catholic church uh what would what would constitute schism in this view like if the visible church is kind of more loosely defined in this way how i guess how is it possible for schism just the same thing as heresy well i guess you know for in a catholic context the word schism has perhaps a more technical meaning but you can have a view of the church in which you think the true visible church exists in different denominations and different traditions and still think that schism and other related sins of divisiveness and division and so forth can exist um gosh that could play out in a lot of different ways and it does to go back to how where protestants have been weak you know and there has been a lot of splintering and fragmenting so um yeah i i guess that could play out in a lot of different ways and it certainly is a real it's schism seems different than heresy though um both would constitute very grave errors i have pause well yeah i i'd love to find out more about that but this is one of those ones where like we want it to be maybe a five part not like a 50 part oh man i want to ask one more question and then austin has a question to close us off if we have if we have time this is a a juicy question that i'm just dying to ask you guys rod bennett popular writer on statistics and a good friend of this show is another catholic convert he tells the story of discovering the early church fathers discovering that the thousands of pages of the writing that we have and in those pages he found a church that in his opinion looked nothing like the jesus people movement that he was a part of at the time and he came on my show recently and and he issued what i think is a really unique interesting challenge i want to put to both of you guys here and it's equally i think waiting for on both cases and he said as an evangelical and this particularly is pressing for you gavin is a senior pastor of an evangelical church he said as evangel which of the church fathers would you accept as a pastor in your church and his point i think was you're going to find as evangelical church fathers that say a lot of evangelical sounding things but those same church fathers say a lot of catholic sounding things and on the flip side joe i'll ask you this next is that you find a lot of church fathers who might be at odds with catholicism if we just pick them out of history and pluck them down right now into a modern catholic church in the same way but gavin first i want to ask you this what do you make of of that challenge that the early church fathers you know wouldn't be welcome as a pastor at first baptist yeah um yeah these historical uh sort of thought experiments are are really fun to think about of what you know if you if augustine got in a time machine you know what what would he think about this or where would he fit in here um i think they're really instructive to think about i think i actually think they're impossible to answer with any certainty because part of what makes someone believe what they believe is their context and what influences them so it's interesting to think about well how soon after augustine arrived i mean would he have some dialogue some theological dialogue that would change his views within the first 12 hours and and well probably so i mean we're affected by our context so it's tough to say i do think that part of the sad state of christendom right now is that um in none of the major branches of the church would mo many i'll say of the church fathers fit perfectly and that would be you know again going back to the things we're talking about the beginning of how much development and change there has been and i i i think it more i like to think of it in terms of would they be a member could they be a member and could they take of the eucharist um because that to me is a more basic barrier that is extremely harsh to to to set up a roadblock for someone whereas being a pastor is a very high you know you're administering the sacraments and so there's a higher standard for that office i would think that some of the early church fathers could fit the bill here at first baptist so like polycarp and some of these type people but i would acknowledge that many of the later ones couldn't for the for the specific issue of baptism and you just you know if you believe in infant baptism and baptismal regeneration then you wouldn't be acceptable to administer that sacrament in my church context and i don't mean to say that that's simple or easy because i think how the doctrine of baptism develops in the early church is really complicated but um but yeah but it's hard it's those are tough scenarios to say because it's like you're looking at someone in their own context and then you're saying what would they do in a different context and it's it's honestly very tough to be sure i remember like so the final thing i'll say on this is in my favor book c.s lewis is that hideous strength it's one of the his novels there's a scene where the character merlin travels in time it's exactly this kind of scenario and merlin just cannot fathom a world without the emperor he's like it to him it's like this how do you even how does the sun even rise if you don't have an emperor you know and the emperor was hugely he called all of the ecumenical councils you got gregory the great talking about how the pope needs to be submissive to the emperor he was hugely significant in terms of church government so it's an example of how difficult it is to go from one context to another because there's so many intervening contingencies that have changed sorry for the disappointing answer well i i'll just take the opposite view i think it actually isn't as hard uh to know what the answer would be from the catholic context and i think we have at least one person so like like let's affirm what's right and what gavin just said uh the contexts are changed and it would be eye-opening i think in both directions to see how different some of the background assumptions are in 21st century christianity from like fifth century or third century or first century right um but i think that there's uh one litmus test if you will and i'll give you the example of jerome so like jerome i already alluded to before like he argued for the 66 book protestant bible uh basically he argued for the jewish old testament which is what's currently used in most protestant bibles uh and he was more or less in agreement with one other person on this roofiness but he was pretty much outside the mainstream in both the east and the west in the exact cannon he was arguing for but when push came to shove he submitted to what he called the judgment of the churches uh and so he actually writes against ruffiness and in book one he talks about how like he's taking the catholic version of daniel the longer version and he explains he says the churches choose to read daniel in the version of theodosian what sin have i committed in following the judgment of the churches so when his own reasoning led him one way and the clear judgment of the church led him another way he had the humility to say you know what i'm going to submit to the church here the church is probably right and so of course you know he becomes the principal translator of the latin vulgate which is like the 73 book canon used for more than a millennium and that humility i would argue is the hallmark of a saint in any age the ability to say here's what i would have thought on my own but the church says this and the church probably knows more than i do and this is especially true of course if you can trust in the idea of infallibility that it's not just like a probability game but you can actually know god is protecting the church in some sense i would contrast that of course with like martin luther early on um he had this nagging doubt that he later described as saying are you alone wise and i think it's hubris that he basically said yep i'm right everybody else is wrong that is not the way you see any of the saints in the early church acting that's of course not unique to the reformation senior irenaeus uh talks about how like the gnostics in the second century or like the heretics he's riding against he says when we refer them to that tradition that originates from the apostles and which is preserved by means of the succession of presbyters in the churches they object to tradition saying that they themselves are wiser not merely than the presbyters but even than the apostles because they have discovered the unadulterated truth so in other words i would say in the early church there's this continual like refrain that like if you think you're so smart that you're smarter than like the visible church that's a huge red flag because they lived with that kind of humility i think that if they came to you know the modern church and realized like oh okay this thing that i believed was actually wrong on this issue or that issue they have the humility basically of the ethiopian in acts 8 31 who says how can i understand this unless someone guides me and i think that they would be either a relieved to have their confusions cleared up or maybe be humbled to find out that like they'd made a mistake and that their mistake may have led future christians astray like i i think it's very clear that none of them would say i'm so convinced of this point of theology that i will break from union with the church because their lives point to that kind of humility and respect for the visible union of the church if if i can i say something real quick on just like the baptism issue like i i think it's telling there right like you have a universal belief in regenerative baptism like all of the church fathers who write on this are either explicitly pro-regenerative baptism or are like ambiguous enough that like someone who believes in baptismal regeneration can claim 100 of the fathers there's no one who who says baptismal regeneration doesn't happen like even in the debates about infant baptism both sides assume regenerative baptism happens and there's a big debate about whether or not you want that regeneration to happen at the end of your life because you're afraid you might fall into like mortal sin later on like the whole framework of the debate getting back to something we said earlier is just not kind of the framework that like a modern catholic and baptist are having they're they're assuming i would argue a catholic theology and so the only ones we can point to are like in the first or second century where the the evidence is at least vague enough that it isn't like obviously wrong uh so i would say like i i'm really hesitant of any appeals to vagueness of like a b c and d clearly disagree with me but e doesn't necessarily like well if e actually disagreed with a b c and d you would expect to find some kind of debate between them kind of in their age does that make sense to like if like the first and second century church denied baptismal regeneration and then some group came up in the third century and taught it we should be expecting some really big uh debates between them like we see debates in the early church over much less so i think this is one of those areas where like to believe in what the the early christians believed on this issue uh is to at least not be baptist i know that sounds like needlessly pejorative i'm not meaning it that way gavin i'm sorry i'm just trying to say like it's at least to believe in like baptismal regeneration uh and so in that sense i would say like yeah all of the canonized fathers of the church would be welcome in a catholic church they may discover that some of the points they like stepped out on a branch on uh we now have greater clarity on as the lowly baptist over here i i will refrain from too many comments uh because this that would be great stuff to pick up on next time but i would just state my agreement with the general point of if if you find it's like me versus the church uh repent or or change your mind or or at least listen a lot more carefully or be a lot more careful or you know so yeah that that we're in agreement on i think then we then we get into okay well what is that universal witness of the church sometimes like to go back to the marion dogma sometimes there's no debate or pushback about something because it's totally the other way epiphanius doesn't get any pushback when he says who knows if mary died or not in the fourth century because there's no discussion of it so and i don't know that that whether or not john chrysostom would change his mind when he clearly thought of mary as someone who committed sins we don't know whether he would change his mind on that or not whether he'd be welcome or not but as i say to be continued and on baptism stuff i have to acknowledge and humble myself before that topic before that question you raise a lot of fair points on that joe and um yeah i've got some i've got some tough questions to answer so that's exactly the thing i'll save for our next discussion this is fantastic i i hear you guys saying you want to come back to discuss baptism the papacy the nature of the church and so i'm all for it but seriously guys thank you so much for your time this has been absolutely phenomenal i've enjoyed it so much keith thank you for setting this up i just wanted to close with kind of one final question to kind of put a bow on it and then i'll let keith wrap us up at the very end but if someone out there is listening and whether they're protestant catholic or maybe they're trying to figure out what they want to be they're thinking okay i want to be deep in history no matter where that leads me i i want to be deep in history what advice would you give them on that pursuit and i assume that you both think that would have them end up where you are and perhaps just briefly why do you think that is and oh sorry we can start with that gel sorry i i actually cut out there for a second but i think i know what you were asking uh am i good now or am i still cutting out you're good you're good okay cool um i would say like the question of like the church fathers is so big because it's a historic like you're saying like hey i want to know more about like 500 years of church history and i would say the first thing i would recommend is to figure out like is there a particular area you're interested in you know like for me uh a big starting point was on the eucharist i wanted to know the eucharistic theology of the early church and father edwin o'connor i think it is has a book called the hidden manna where he just traces uh like eucharistic theology in the church and he the like it's divided in three parts so the first part is the church father second part is the reformers and the third part is modern theologians so i'd say it's like like the new star wars trilogy and that like the first one is like the most interesting one uh but like if you're if you're more interested in like the poetry and hymns of the early church then maybe you check out like ephraim the syrian or gregory narrack or you know like their books on this at a certain point you're going to want to read the church fathers themselves so i keep pointing people to like books that quote the church fathers and maybe explain them as kind of a zero entry point um so maybe two final suggestions churchfathers.org has uh compilations of quotations of the church fathers on particular topics now quotations it's always a risky proposition because you you run the risk of exactly what we talked about earlier like is this accurate to the views of the father and is the father an outlier on this or is this a normative view of the church in that age so i would say you can use it as like a launching point maybe if you read it and see something eye-opening it gives the sources and then you can like go look that up and dive in um phillip schafe of course has like a huge there's what's called the anf and uh what is the uh the nice scene in post in pnf so it's the antenna scene fathers and the uh nice scene and post nice themed fathers these are like mini volumes right if you want to get really academic on it but then the the final recommendation i'd have is actually newadvent.org fathers that's one of my preferred go-tos because it's a great collection it's pretty extensive and the formatting makes for really easy reading it's in a fairly modern english it's it's easy to read you're not looking at like really tiny text and so yeah just say find what interests you and then start picking it up and if if a particular father is boring or confusing find somebody else for now you know what i mean it's almost like if you picked up the bible and started reading numbers it'd be easy to despair of like the bible and so in the same way it's like find what you can handle and engage in that and then keep swimming as you're able would be more or less what i would say and in agreement with joe on on the um kind of diving in i like to encourage people to dive into the deep end of the pool and just read the church fathers themselves i i actually think some in some cases they might find the church fathers easier to read than books about the church fathers because there's such honesty and sincerity and earnestness their books are often shorter and sometimes they're easier to understand i mean it kind of depends on which book obviously but i think there's huge value in just diving in my encouragement would be to read both east and west my encouragement would be to read early patristic and late patristic so like read the later guys like boethius and gregory the great and some of those um and then read the apostolic fathers i think you know it's easy to go for like augustine and some of the big names but i think reading the full span of and then medieval theology um and then i would say another thing to go back to the question we were talking about with that keith brought up about retrieval as you read do everything you can to let them set the agenda so you're not just using them in your services but you're saying what is driving them it's kind of like in any conversation where you want to really try to understand the other party on their own terms and uh i would i would say that will be a fascinating journey and adventure for any person who embarks on it amen i think i think that's great advice i think that's great advice and i uh i always joked that i bought the international fathers on ebook for about three bucks which is probably a dollar american uh and you know this giant well normally would be a several volume collection it's you know which gavin guys guys this has been an absolute thrill uh thanks being part of this experiment that austin and i cooked up here it's been a lot of fun uh joe why don't you tell us where people can go to to find out more about what you're doing and then gavin you can do the same and then we'll uh we'll close this off sure um uh officially you know my blog is shamelesspokery.com i work at school of faith school of faith.com and i've got stuff coming out in print and i'm really bad at promoting in any single place so uh there's not a good answer to the question because of my own incompetence [Laughter] oh geez gavin what about you are you more competent than joe probably not but um yeah i'll just mention and and and thank you all so much for this conversation i've really enjoyed it and i'm really really grateful for it truly um yeah i think you know i just started a youtube channel about five months ago so it's very fresh and and new and i'm finding a lot of joy in engaging in that kind of space i'm not quite as popular as some of who are like like austin over there but um i i have a lot of joy in that and it's called truth unites so people might check that out and then i my website is just gavin ortland.com people can see more about books and other things there awesome well guys thank you so much for being a part of this uh absolute pleasure we've all mentioned uh future episodes future conversations maybe i think it'd be fantastic and listeners viewers would love that so thank you guys thanks everyone for joining us uh whether it's on podcasts and audio on video on austin's channel thanks guys it's been a trip thanks so much for hosting this and thanks gavin you were great talking to you and you guys had great questions austin keith um yeah i'm looking forward to to be continued yeah thanks everybody same looking forward to next time too truly a pleasure [Music] you

Channel: Gospel Simplicity

Views: 29,476

Keywords: Joe Heschmeyer, Protestant vs. Catholic, Cordial Catholic, Gavin Ortlund, Shameless Popery, Truth Unites, Keith Little, K. Albert Little, Gospel Simplicity, Protestant vs. Catholic Debate, Church History Debate, Protestant Church History, Austin Suggs, Is Catholicism Biblical, Catholic Apologetics, Pope Peter, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, Protestant Church Historian, Church History, Church Fathers, Church Fathers Protestant, Church Fathers Debate

Id: LIB5YLHNqAE

Length: 98min 38sec (5918 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021