Trent Horn on the Papacy REBUTTED

hey everybody this video is going to be a response to some of trent horn's comments in this interview that he had with austin suggs at gospel simplicity let me just explain how this came about i'm i'm doing research on the papacy over the last uh six to eight months and in the context of that i just made a video on a critique of the papacy in the 3rd through 7th centuries so i'm i'm researching reading i went back and watched this interview and i found myself in the context of listening to it thinking how would i respond to that argument and so i kept thinking that through to the point where it's like well why don't i just make a response to this because i actually think sometimes on youtube uh protestant perspectives are less well represented uh sometimes there's just less protestants speaking to these things protestants ignore these conversations a lot and sometimes the protestant voices that are out there aren't necessarily the most winsome or or helpful or capable ones so i thought it might be useful for people just to hear the other side on this this is done in a spirit of respect uh austin is a friend of mine i emailed him and asked him if he would mind if i did this and he very graciously said he wouldn't mind and then uh for trent as well i i trent is a very smart person and a very he makes very reasonable arguments so none of this is coming in a at a personal angle but more just wanting to engage with his arguments and out of out of a concern for the truth of these things and especially as there's so many people i know who are wrestling with these things and again sometimes not hearing the protestant side okay so i'm going to dive right in i'm going to try to go quick i am going to skip around a bit because i want to try to hit the main points so um please i'm not trying to to ignore anything if i miss something important if i skip over something important let me know in the comments i'm not trying to kind of snipe at something by just plucking it out of context but i just have to i don't want this to be a three-hour video and i want to try to hit the main points and there's some points we agree on so it's not as worthwhile to address those i'm going to put it into 1.25 speed so hopefully it won't be too fast and i'll think i'll just dive right in i just jotted down a few introductory notes here but that's i think that's it thank you to all my patrons thank you to everybody who subscribes to my channel and shares videos it means so much to me it encourages me and enables me to do more of this so thank you thank you thank you um okay you're going to start here at about four minutes in this is a point of agreement for us is that the center of many of these divides but how important is this well i think it's really important also because it goes back to the question of authority so what is a christian's authority who do we go to or what do we go to to understand the truth of god's revelation of what god desires of us do we go to scripture i think all christians would agree we go to scripture where we disagree is do we go to scripture alone is scripture our only source of authority when it comes to god's revelation so that we have scripture and then we have other human beings and they're varying opinions about scripture or do we have the authority of the apostles that existed in the first century do we have that authority continuing today in some form so i really do believe the papacy is the most distinctive doctrine of the catholic faith and if you type in catholic in google i'm sure like one of the first things that google images like the first thing you're going to get popping up is probably probably i did type that into google images to see and he's right first one is the eucharist and then there's a bunch of pictures of popes um i do have a worry about a caricature of solo scriptura already here i just hear this over and over if i can make a plea and that'll make a plea for protestants but a plea for catholics engaging in these conversations could you try to engage some historic protestant views on solo scriptura i continually hear this idea that like it's the bible's our only authority or we're just going by the bible solo scripture is much more nuanced than that one basic point is it's not just about the bible is your only authority but the bible is your only infallible authority and that's a huge distinction but that'll come up more later so i'm going to save that i just want to basically say state my agreement with the basic idea here that the papacy is really important okay um and that the way trent put it is it's a matter of the authority in the church not just a matter of the structure of the church i completely agree this came up that was one of the ways i put it in a dialogue with joe hechmeyer recently also on got austin's channel gospel simplicity um and then he he goes on after this to say basically don't so i'm going to skip over this so let me summarize where we agree on what he's saying because i don't want to take minutes and minutes and minutes here but he's basically saying don't misunderstand the papacy by thinking of it as this autocratic person just laying down dictates he's a pastor of the church he's a shepherd over the church and that is a well taken point that protestants should remember also don't think that papal infallibility means that the everything the pope says is infallible okay this is another point where protestants often caricature catholics on this uh so and i see this a lot in the comments too so protestants need to understand papal infallibility does not mean it only applies under certain conditions when the pope is speaking in a kind of ex-cathedral way in this official way over the whole church so protestants we need to be careful about that all right i'm going to skip ahead a little bit here does it kind of create this solid foundation in which you have that and then everything else is good or does it create a potential house of cards and that if the papacy claims to have infallibly validated certain things if you can pluck any one of them the whole house falls does that make sense no i think i see what you're saying here the idea is is the papacy by the way i think this is a question that this is something austin and i have talked about i think it came up in our discussion so it's interesting it comes up here um this house of cards argument by the way i don't raise this argument as a as an argument against the papacy like you know what if the pope says i raise it as an appeal to try to help my roman catholic friends understand my dilemma as a protestant so i say imagine if the pope said something and it was an ex-cathedra statement and it ran clearly afoul of what you believe orthodoxy to be what would you do now i know they will say well we don't believe that that can happen but it might if you just imagine it as a hypothetical it might help you understand what the protestants dilemma is so i raised that as kind of a a way to help someone understand what protestantism is not really as an argument against catholicism but here's trent's answer an asset to the christian faith or is it a liability you know the idea is that we say that the pope is infallible well we've got as of now two thousand years of christian history but if we determine uh that a pope made a you know a theological error that would show he's uh fallible here or here uh you know the target is very wide but i would say that's not unique to catholicism if you make i think many protestants could understand this think about the protestant claim to compare the papacy especially people infallibility which we'll talk about later here in our interview i think one good thing to compare it to is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that many pro not all protestants but many protestants would say well the bible is without error but then what do you do when you have an atheist who comes along and says okay so you believe the bible it's divine revelation because it's divine revelation it's without error is that a house of cards what about like you go to some atheist websites let's say there's thousands and thousands of alleged contradictions and that can kind of shake a christian's faith and he thinks like oh man i believe the bible and i believe it's about error but what about all these these arguments that are out there and actually awesome this would be just another point of agreement real quick before we get to the more substantive things but the house of cards appeal is not unique to the papacy now what is different for the scripture and the papacy is the papacy is an ongoing office so you're bound not to uh a deposit that has that is currently completed that can be sifted through and analyzed but you're bound to as c.s lewis put it once whatever the pope might dogmatize and so all the discussion right now about a fifth marian dogma um yeah i mean it would whatever is said you're bound to that so there's there's a difference in that way but even that isn't really necessarily a problematic difference from the catholic standpoint so i'd say i agree this house of cards appeal is kind of a it's not really an argument against the papacy what i raise it for is to simply say understand the world through my eyes understand how i'm looking at it as a protestant understand what my dilemma is you have respect for these institutions that have developed throughout christianity but you think one of them has kind of gone off the rails if you thought that can you under and then because what i find is a lot of the other caricatures of protestantism tend to fall away not all of them not all the disagreements certainly fall away but some of the caricatures about like do protestants believe in a visible church that'll come up in a second those kinds of things tend to fall away um to some extent at least if someone is making that more sympathetic effort to try to understand a protestant on their own terms but so again not a lot of disagreement so far let's press ahead like my chain of reasoning would go something like this and this is how it was for me during my conversion almost 20 years ago from non-religious to being christian i said look all right i believe there's a god who's out there and i look at the new testament like if it was just historical documents maybe there's some true things maybe there's some false sentence but i can look at these documents and say the best explanation for the origin of the christian church is that a man named jesus of nazareth walked out of his own town if he walked out of his own tomb i'm going to trust what he has to say and from what i see from that evidence and then shortly thereafter in christian history this man gathered together apostles who had authority to form a visible church a visible church with a hierarchy word hierarchy means sacred order and so as this church flourishes with a hierarchy that people look to that in the early church people didn't look to the bible in fact the bible was still being compiled and assembled together they looked to the bishops to see all right is your bishop can he trace his lineage back to the apostles okay let me just jump in real quick and then i'll let it keep going a little bit further i the general way the general like [Music] order of reasoning there that trent has i really like of starting with the resurrection building outward from there but let me just comment on this issue of the visible church not everything i'm about to say is just related to what trent said but i see this so often and i think it needs clarification so what is this idea of a visible church okay first of all the basic distinction between visible and invisible i think is utterly indispensable utterly non-problematic something every christian on earth can agree on and something that would obtain even if there were no divisions in christianity the the adjective visible should not be over freighted to do too much work it's making one specific point namely there's an aspect of the church you can see there's an aspect of the church you can't see it doesn't mean there's two different churches any more than believing in the church triumphant or and the church militant means you think there's two different churches you're just looking at the one church from two different angles the distinction between visible and invisible goes back to saint augustine in his on rebuke and grace chapters 20 and 22 where he's basically saying there's a sense in which judas iscariot is a part of the church there's a sense in which he isn't again i really don't think this this idea needs to be controversial and um it certainly wasn't the basis for the reformation like the reformers never came along and thought so in other words there's there's you there's a church you can see like you can go to the secretary's office and say can i see the membership roles and see everyone who's been baptized you count it up and at one particular congregation there's 251 people who are members of that church you can count them you can see them but then we say but that doesn't necessarily correspond to who are actually god's people though the peop you know the lord knows whose hearts are his own and that is a man a valid definition of the word ecclesia as it's used in various passages of scripture that's a valid distinction to to say this is one aspect of the church this is another aspect of the church what this isn't is uh the basis for the reformation the reformers didn't come along and say because i hear people talk like this as though the reformers were saying well there's the invisible church therefore we can separate from the visible church which is a total caricature of protestantism protestants didn't think protestants believe in the visible church we believe the holy spirit protected the visible church all we deny is that the roman catholic church is the exclusive instantiation of that visible church today we can even say they're part of it so like luther said the roman catholic church is corrupt but she's still holy she still has the word and sacrament she is still the church he said that in the 1530s calvin said the roman catholic church is not the one true church but there are many true churches within her so not everything i'm saying right now is against trent but i think that this just comes up so much where there's confusion about this difference of the visible church and invisible church that's not where our differences lie the differences lie and i even think the catholic catechism has categories similar to that uh when it's talking about the it uses the language of visible and spiritual so but it means something at least close to that but that's not where the difference is lie the difference is lie in what is that visible church how do we identify her um now i've addressed the issue of apostolicity in in my video on the papacy in the first and second centuries where i argue from the church fathers i think it's very clear the church fathers they did not mean by apostolic mainly succession of office succession of office was a part of that but it served a larger end of succession of doctrine we know that because many of the church fathers said explicitly if you have succession of office without succession of doctrine that is only as good a succession as death succeeding life or illness succeeding health or a tempest succeeding calm that's those are images from gregory of nazianzus but augustine many others said the same thing so i don't i don't but people can see my fuller comments on that issue there the only other thing i want to say right now trans comments about and this is another area i have a concern about caricatures of protestants as though protestants thought like the bible is what we look to rather than the church or something like this um or i think there is a comment made there about the early church looked to the church leadership rather than the written scriptures like the early church wasn't looking to a bible and i have a worry about a false dichotomy here of course i would say apostolic authority in both oral and written forms was looked to at every nanosecond of church history as soon as anything was written down and and there's traditions going back early so paul calls paul's writings are called scripture by peter in the new testament in second peter 3 16. the the letters of the apostles circulating those were authoritative there there's questions in terms of canonization about the edges like which you know there's fuzziness around the edges which books are in is revelation in is the shepherd of hermas and those get those take time to develop there's not generally dispute about like if you're living in like 150 or 180 or 210 a.d i don't think there'd be any dispute about like is the gospel of john authoritative over us is the epistle to the galatians authoritative over us of course it is so the early church did look to the scriptures and of course to the old testament as we call it um it's not an either or it's about they look to the church and to the to the written documents that would become scripture um i i'm guessing maybe trent and i would agree on that and it's just a matter of how he worded it there but yeah i just think it's and i'm going to do a future video on augustine's view of authorities in the church it's amazing how far he is i think from contemporary catholic views so that video will come out soon but let's keep going and then the only question remains do all of the successors of the apostles have uh the same authority or does one of them exercise a different kind of authority just like one of the original apostles peter exercises a different authority so i don't see it as a liability any more than many other claims protestants believe in like biblical inerrancy rather i see the papacy as being something that provides unity in the church uh doctrinal understanding and foreign i guess one last thing i would put forward is just kind of a common sense argument with the papacy would be this when you think about you know i believe the church is not an invisible union of believers now there's one view of the church is just well everybody who believes in jesus that's the church it seems clear to me in scripture the church is a visible enduring entity an organization if you will okay that goes back to what we were saying just before visible and invisible again it can be at both end there are passages that use the term ecclesia specifically to those who receive the saving benefits of jesus christ um so but but if even if you don't agree with the protestant control of the invisible church you we still need to recognize protestants believe in a visible hierarchical church that is protected by the holy spirit and never goes apostate never dies this is such a hallmark emphasis of the magisterial reformers over and against the radical anabaptists the church never died the church was preserved in every generation i sorry i but if somebody wants a bunch of quotes on this from the early reformers my book theological retrieval for evangelicals chapter one is all about that it's all about what was the protestant attitude toward earlier church history so sorry to reference my own book so if god is god's organization on earth uh so if the church has that think about human organizations when i think of human organizations the successful ones always have one leader where the buck stops you know there is do you remember that did you ever watch the office a little bit i haven't gotten okay so there was sure sure there's an episode of the office where uh michael scott and jim is in the latest part of the series where they serve as co-managers so they're both in charge of the branch at the same time and it just leads to chaos having them both involved and oscar says oh of course why wouldn't the company have why wouldn't the branch have two managers uh you know what would america be without two presidents what would catholicism be without the popes uh that even in earthly organizations we see a leadership structure that culminates with a single individual exercising authority and leadership so to me if that makes sense among purely human organizations how much more so would it make sense among among the church that christ is established that to me would also mirror and we'll talk about this later in the interview uh that the church is the analog to israel that god established israel it had a similar leadership structure of uh both in the the older covenants and the kingdom of israel of a single individual being a mediator or leader that's established to lead god's people um okay i i love the show the office i remember the first time i watched this interview i was actually thinking of that exact episode and that moment before trent said that so uh it's that's a funny episode um on okay that's a this common sense argument is really interesting i mean in general i have a little bit of hesitation for this if it's put forward too strongly because in general the argument from kind of what works or what we see generally to the church i think is kind of precarious but trent isn't really putting it forward real strongly like that so it's a this is a it's an interesting thing to think about i think i would just observe that it kind of seems to me like a double-edged sword um so like in general if you just look at like how leadership is done in organizations and institutions and bigger entities like countries nations um the the general thing will be the smaller the band of leadership that is ultimately in authority the greater the efficiency the larger the greater the accountability um and that's why for a lot of companies you will have like a ceo or something like that and then you'll have a board a plurality of people the board will have certain decisions that they alone can make and there you know you can see all different models of this but they're part of the reason for this is people see there's actually again the double-edged sword there's some downsides to having such efficiency such power um so like an example would be like in my context i i as a protestant i've come up into this in the context of discussions about what's the ideal number of elders at a church and the general way of thinking is you got to find that happy medium because too many will mean nothing gets done too few will mean it's kind of topsy-turvy and and it's uh you worry about uh you know if it's just like you got two or three elders it's much easier for them to not have as many eyes on a problem make a mistake something like that so that's the general principle so then you ask okay so how does this apply to the common sense argument well while having one person at the top is a common pattern in many institutions though not all it also is one that often runs institutions into trouble a lot of times what happens is it works for a while and then things kind of go off the rails think of like the way that the roman senate changes once you start getting a single emperor and the way that plays out over the next couple hundred years and basically the protestant perspective would be that having one person on the top yeah there's some common sense appeals for why that has some value there's also some real common sense worries for that so i'm not arguing that and i would say you know part of the appeal of well you have one person on top this can guarantee unity can one person has the authority to sort of you know convoke an ecumenical council and enforce something but only for the people who are under that person's authority anyone outside of the roman catholic church we would regard vatican 1 as the biggest barrier to unity and the orthodox would as well because that's never going to be accepted so the double-edged sword is the you have greater power but that power can then be misused so that's not an argument against the papacy it's just a sort of flag or check on this common sense appeal it's like let's be careful with that how far we push that i the main thing i want to say is on this appeal that there's in the old testament that the papacy is somehow consistent with the old testament because there's always been one person on top that sounds good but the moment you start getting specific i think it starts to fall apart who's the one person on top if you're talking about the king of israel that actually undercuts the appeal to isaiah 22 from matthew 16 and eliakim these are two different people in a different function you've also got the high priest that's the more regular ongoing office that's sort of always there the the king comes in not in the ideal conditions in 1st samuel eight uh and it's not necessarily a good thing that the people want the king though god grants that desire but the main thing so there's like different offices you could maybe compare the papacy to but the papacy is not comparable to any one of them the responsibilities of the pope as defined by vatican one are significantly different from any of the responsibilities of any of the single individuals throughout the old testament who are over this nation you know every every nation had a king or most nations had a king in that place that's why they wanted one in first samuel eight so you know like none of the old testament offices had the ability to speak infallibly for example so the papacy i would say is not consistent in any specific way with god's general ways of working throughout the old testament it is an innovation or a new development okay i'm skipping ahead a little bit here i just edited out a commercial but there's been some discussion now about peter's authority in relation to the other apostles and trent has been talking about matthew 16 matthew 18. here's the main parts now where i want to offer a response but i'll try to let him lay out his case and then i'll respond with peter i'll just kind of be brief with this so we can explore that if you want to go more in depth but for me when you look at the new testament it's not just clear to me it's clear even to many protestant exegetes that peter had unique authority uh within the early church okay now note that word authority unique authority so the claim here is not of just a general leadership role in some way but the one that has where peter has an authority that the other apostles do not have that's the specific nerve center of the differences because everybody thinks i don't really know too many people who wouldn't admit peter has a leadership role of i mean it's just obvious throughout the gospels the question is is it a leadership role as understood by our eastern orthodox friends and as i would understand it as a protestant basically under the heading of first among equals so he has a leadership role but there's no qualitative difference in terms of authority between peter and the other apostles or is it not that that's the question here so let's listen to trent's arguments and then we'll interact with them uh some key elements would be that he's mentioned more than almost any than any other apostle even all that put together uh he's almost always listed first in the apostolic lists matthew 10 2 even says uh it talks about the list and it says use the word protos peter and in lexicons what we see from that is that it's not talking about peter is first in a numerical list but like chief chief is peter matthew 10 2 and of course the last person in the apostolic list is judas and so we see there that the the list most of the absolute lists almost all of them are arranged so you have the least important apostle judas and the most important one peter uh then of course there's the traditional text in matthew 16. peter's name is changed he's the rock and i know there's a lot of debate i talk about this in my book about whether what it means is peter the rock is he not the rock for protestants who say well peter's not the rock christ is my question is why did jesus bother to change simon's name to peter like that's my question often it's like okay if peter's not the rock the church is built upon why would jesus go through all this trouble to change peter's name like that's my question why did he do it then if peter doesn't have special leadership authority because when you look at the bible whenever god changes somebody's name the name itself is a sign of their new mission so when abram becomes abraham abraham he's the father of many nations that's his new mission and it's the same i would say with peter okay this was the part when i was watching this i i was thinking okay let me think about how to respond to this and i thought this is what i thought maybe i'll make because this is the main stuff i want to respond to maybe i'll make a video about this um peter's name being changed okay james and john also have their names changed to the sons of thunder jesus is clearly giving and actually that's interesting because james and john this is something i never quite understand is why peter singled out uh as one versus the 11 in terms of a difference there but peter james and john are not as much as three versus nine in terms of a difference there because james and john actually are singled out i think there's a comparably good case you can make that in a lesser to a lesser extent james and john with peter have this kind of they're in this sort of inner circle among the 12 jesus often like during his transfiguration and many many other times will pull those three away and as we said their their names are also changed jesus can change their names to give them a new mission to give them a new identity without that meaning something that would lead you to the papacy i also think the issue of judas being listed last and peter being listed first falls significantly short of establishing the point at hand of does peter have greater authority judas did not have less authority than the other eleven the problem with judas wasn't that he was a sort of junior apostle or something like that he was a full apostle he was just corrupt you know we know we know what the problem with judas was but it wasn't a lesser degree of authority the other thing i wanted to comment here is the reference with the rock of matthew 16. and i hope this is not being unfair to trent i know what it's like in your when you're just responding in the moment you're probably not giving the fullest case you could give for something so i don't mean this as like a strong criticism so much as just wanting to interact with his perspective on this and throw out some new thoughts from the other side but if i understood correctly trent was just mentioning sort of two possibilities for the rock it's either jesus or peter and thinking of the protestant view being that it's jesus that jesus is the rock of matthew 16 but i did a video on on the papacy a while back and i went through a number of the church fathers and pointed out the three main interpretative options for the meaning of the rock there one is peter another is christ and the other is peter's confession and the interesting thing is that most of the church fathers think it's polyvalent meaning it's multiple of those two things or sometimes all three a lot of them think it's his confession my single greatest encouragement for people watching this video if you want to see a protestant viewpoint on the papacy is do a deep dive on the church fathers on matthew 16. it's really interesting what they say john chrysostom would be a great example of the kind of person who is very nuanced how he talks about it but certainly he does not think it is anything less than peter's confession he he quotes the verse and then he says the rock on which i will build my church that is on the faith of peter's confession my general observation from my research on this though has been how poorly supported the roman catholic view is among the fathers on matthew 16 and the reason is they're all affirming almost all of them are firm it's polyvalent so it's like peter's confession and peter or something like that but the logic by which they say it's multiple of those things is um generally speaking that it's not about peter okay it's about what peter is doing so peter's in other words if the rock is peter and his confession it's peter because it's his confession if that makes sense so like here's how augustine put it augustin's final mature view is that basically he says peter is acting as a representative of the entire church said peter called after this rock represented the person of the church which is built upon this rock for the rock was christ in confessing who as the whole christian church confesses simon was called peter this is why you got a lot of fathers saying like origen says be a rock like peter now i'm not trying to say that this is simple or that you should just go with one of these views among the fathers but i'm trying to say first we've got to make visible all three of the main options for the interpretation of the rock second we've got to see let's probe the logic by which it could be multiple of those and i would simply say that the roman catholic view that is dogmatized in vatican one is i think really really a difficult one to maintain i'd also say the same thing for the keys i've done a deep dive on this and been astonished how many of the church fathers say expressly the keys so in matthew 16 matthew 18. the keys are matthew 16 the binding and loosing is matthew 18 and matthew 16. so people say well all the apostles had the binding and losing but only peter had the keys of the kingdom but church fathers i think were i mean my knowledge is not encyclopedic i don't know every church father but pretty much everywhere i look i find the fathers there i'm sure there's some exceptions but i find cyprian very expressly stating all the apostles have the keys i find john chrysostom the beginning of his sermons on the gospel of john talking about john the apostle as a possessor of the keys you find late patristic thinkers like isidor seville and bead summing up earlier patristic thoughts saying the keys were shared this was the common patristic view i think that peter had a leadership role but nothing given to him was qualitatively different nothing was withheld from the other apostles he had it again in the kind of first among equals way no trent goes on from here to give a galatians 2 argument he calls it the even peter argument i think it's a well-made appeal i think it would be stronger though and more conclusive if there was something in the text that you know it was explicit like this where peter where paul is saying even peter i oppose to his face in galatians 2 or even peter the possessor of the keys or even peter the vicar of christ or something like that i think that'd be a stronger argument i also would say that with galatians 2 it's tough to imagine something like that playing out today and you wonder are there the same guardrails for papal authority today as we see in galatians 2 where the pope can be openly publicly rebuked like that i i'd say practically i don't know that i really see that but the last thing i'll say on this is what he's about to get into here is you shouldn't be protestant until proven catholic and i agree with that i think we should take both options as you know don't be anything yet until you're sure you know study the evidence now there's a lot more you'll have to believe in as a catholic actually because there's just a lot more that's required that's that's been defined as a part of the gospel so in that sense the the um decision to be protestant or catholic will be a little uneven in a certain respect but i agree we shouldn't be protestant until proven catholic but let me let me skip it ahead here i want to get to austin asks a really good question about the development of the papacy let's let's watch this but how much of the modern sharpness do we need to see in peter because again this kind of comes up in that wall's argument as well sure is there is there room for a development because i think at least as a protestant you know looking on from the outside if you will what i see say clement or someone seems pretty far from what i see in gregory or going down the line of this more temporal power these things how much of what exactly do we need to see in peter and the early popes to say papacy sounds like an original thing this is a really good question it's what i just made my two videos on the development evolution of the papacy in church history i think austin's question was more about church history i would have been really curious to see what trent would have said about that he's going to kick it back to the bible which you know that's a valid point i guess because that's even earlier but i would have been curious what he would say about like yeah from clement to gregory how do you how do you kind of uh navigate those differences but um let's let's let trent answer and then i'll respond well i think that what we see in scripture that unique authority is given to one of the apostles that the apostles were not treated as having equal authority amongst each other and then appealing as a group on issues or even appealing that amongst them to uh decide as a majority together as if they all simply had equal voices so i think the fact that one of the members of the apostolic college was given unique authority over others uh and even to be given particular uh protections or charisms when it comes to teaching uh that's why i think for me uh i don't know if i was gonna get to this uh well i was gonna jump to this a little bit later but i might as well bring it up now uh when we look at luke chapter 22 okay so he's gonna go to luke chapter 22 before he gets into this is a one of the i think with the more compelling arguments that our catholic friends can make it's from luke 22 before he gets into data just a final comment here again we're still at this issue of is there unique authority for peter over the other apostles um i i would say just another passage that we've got to wrestle with more and this is not a criticism of what trent said but just a general comment in these discussions because you never want to criticize someone for not saying something you know it's like in a discussion like this it's not my comments won't be exhaustive either but acts 15 has to come up i mean this is the great doctrinal controversy of the early church in the first century you've got peter there you've got the apostles there the presbyters of the church of jerusalem and it just is so evident to me that you you don't have peter functioning in some way that could be resonant with the vision of vatican one all the apostles come together all you know eat several contribute and then james makes the final judgment therefore it is my judgment verse 9. verse 19 excuse me verse 19. i don't even think that means james is in authority over above the rest but if there's someone who does sort of speak more definitively it'd be james so that'd be another passage i'd say again just wanting to push against this i don't think we have any reason to think peter had greater authority over the other apostles as opposed to a more first among equals type leadership but trent's going to make an argument from luke 22 now so let's listen to that and i'll let it go for a couple minutes here to me i find this to be very powerful evidence for uh what we talked about with the modern capacity seeing it in incipient form in scripture amongst the apostles so when you look here it starts what people miss austin is that in most modern bibles there is a header that separates the last two verses from this discussion and you lose the context so in luke 22 24 through 29 jesus there's a dispute among the apostles about who is the greatest among them so you would think oh well this this leaves us right here you know we're talking about is there an apostle who has authority over others and some protestants will read this as saying oh well jesus didn't say peter and that's that but if you know jesus when he teaches he never puts things just point blank to people he leaves them away to enter more deeply into the mystery so he says because they were saying who among them is the greatest he says to them the kings of the gentiles exercise lordship and authority but not so with you rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest as the leader and the leader as one who serves so it's he doesn't deny there's a greatest among them rather what he says is you guys with your authority you're not going to be like the gentile kings you're not going to lord it over people and then when we so he says rather you're going to serve others interesting you go back to first peter chapter 5. i'm sorry sorry beginning of peter's first letter in scripture he tells people to clothe themselves with humility he speaks with humility in his own letter isn't important and he calls himself a fellow presbyter or a fellow elder so he says to them you have continued with my trials my father as my father appointed a kingdom for me so do i appoint uh that you may eat or drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of israel so the apostles sit on thrones one of them is the greatest and then in verses 31-34 this is where usually there's a heaven that disrupts the flow but then if we read that in the context jesus tells peter he says simon simon satan demanded to have you all that he might sift you all like wheat he's using the plural year but i have prayed for you singular in the greek for peter that your faith may not fail and when you have turned again strengthen your brethren so so for me i see very powerful evidence going back to the new testament uh of seeing this idea that peter has unique leadership authority and also a spiritual protection that is designed to provide support and protection for his brother apostles and so for me we then see that unfold as the church understands the office of the successors of the apostles the office of the bishop and the bishop of rome um i'll let him get to that next thing but first i want to respond because he's going to move on so just to respond to the luke 22 stuff i definitely think this passage in luke 22 is a powerful argument for peter having a leadership role in general okay he it's it's a well-made appeal you know you take away the header just keep reading through the greek the original greek and you notice the difference between the singular and the plural there prayed for you specifically um the problem is to strengthen your brothers so the problem is getting a unique authority being given to peter or as trent puts it there a special kind of protection over peter i mean this episode takes place in relation and this is the same with john 21 as well the feed my lambs passage this takes place in relation to peter's denials jesus is basically saying i've prayed for you in relation to that event when you've turned back strengthen your brothers doesn't mean you have authority over your brothers um so to get it's like here's how the feeling i have when i hear these arguments from luke 22 and john 21 it's like you've got the the evidence here and the evidential burden you need here and they're kind of being pulled arbitrarily together so you need to get like all the way to uh you know peter's in authority over the church he's the kind of pastor over the church he can speak infallibly these kinds of things that's what you need to see to see like the papacy unless you're gonna really bank on a developmental model which i know some people do that but to the extent that you're arguing that luke 22 gets you like to something that's resonant with vatican one division of vatican one um i just don't see it like there's nothing in the passage like here's a good test if you were to take 10 people who'd never heard of anything about roman catholic or protestant or anything like that they were completely ignorant of church history and you just gave them luke 22 would they how many of them would come away with something that would be consistent with the roman catholic interpretation of this passage how many of them would think peter has authority over the other apostles how many would think peter is this special grace of you know the holy spirit protecting him and that kind of thing from uh to to so that he can protect the rest of the church um in some kind of ongoing official capacity that's just not the uh uh i would guess zero i guess 10 out of 10 would read it as more just no peter's about to deny christ three times jesus is praying for him in the midst of that event and he's praying that when he turns back he would strengthen his brothers doesn't mean all you know this larger structure that's built out of that passage so that's that's i guess my concern of where i feel like some of these passages are overworked to try to get to the evidential need comes the moderate one i remember once reading a protestant apologist who was saying you know we see people we see pope francis and people are waving their arms and they're they're they're shouting at him he's driving through saint peter's square he said i couldn't imagine saint peter being like this in the first century like you know we make the pope out to be someone like this i couldn't imagine seeing this in the first century but if you read the book of acts it says that when peter walked down the street people would line up on the street just to have his shadow fall upon them so they would be healed and the author of luke's never the author of luke never says this is a superstition or rejects this idea he doesn't it's not condemned it's a passing detail to show i mean i don't even know anybody who tries to get pope francis's shadow to heal them today but this idea that that detail reminds me of that like wow there were people who wanted to see peter when he came by just like people want to do the same with with the pope today even even more so so i'm sympathetic to the concern like well is the modern papacy like the first century papacy i just think we should extend that to other things like so on on peter's shadow i mean i think this is one of those areas where sometimes feel like peter is singled out in a way where it's like yeah but this peter was not unique in this way paul's handkerchiefs are are also used as an instrumental means to bring healing to others who are sick later in the book of acts if you let all the data roll in what you see is um the things the ways in which peter is at work in fact i actually think it's one of the themes of the book i actually think that this was an intentional thing on luke's part where you have so many miracles that are conducted by peter are then also conducted by paul it's a really interesting thing and some of the commentaries on acts of notices now i don't think luke is doing that out of any kind of the concerns we're talking about now in terms of you know relative author i think he has his own purposes for that but the point is i when all the evidence rolls in i don't think you see peter above the other apostles in any kind of authority qualitative authority authoritative way first view of century incarnation of the trinity and allow the doctrines to develop over time so would it be fair to summarize that i don't want to mis-summarize it so please let me know if this is incorrect but that we don't need to see a full-fledged doctrine of the papacy in the first century we need to see that peter and his successors have some type of unique authority and then we can allow that to like kind of concede developing into a more full-fledged doctrine is that is that too minimalistic or is that about well there's different ways to go about understanding the development of doctrine on this issue but i would just compare it to any other doctrine that we believe i mean in uh was it the sixth or seventh century centuries after the time of christ the church was defining doctrines like the monopolized heresy the idea that it was declared a heresy that christ has only one will uh that if you go to i'm sure at moody bible institute and others and you do your christology class you know you'll go through the different christological heresies and one of the later ones is monofilamentism the ideas will know if christ has a fully human and a fully divine nature then he needs to have a fully human will and a fully divine will uh to under you know but however i would say like where is that we pronounce that as heretical to deny it it's an important part of christology and christology developer like when you read the council of calcium and this discussion of christ human divine natures you don't see a similar any similar kind of discussion like that in the new testament but you see important affirmations that christ is called theos he is called god uh he has a unique relationship with god unlike any other prophet and so i would say the same thing we would occur with the understanding of the doctrine of the church the doctrine of the papacy that we see that amongst the apostles peter has unique leadership authority over the rest of the church uh he's given special protection to lead the church and then number three would be what he has given is an office all the apostles are given an office okay i'll i'm gonna let him finish that comment in just a moment but just the difference between the papacy and monothelitism is that the papacy is not just a doctrine it's not just the understanding of the nature of christ that unfolds and then it's mid 6th century you get this dispute about does christ have two wills or one wills and it's understandable that that wouldn't necessarily be up up front you know certainly when you have a doctrine that christ is both human and divine it's totally acceptable understandable not surprising that the understanding of that is going to unfold over time with greater nuance and clarity in relation to heresies that come up especially the papacy is not just a doctrine it's an office in the church like when we look at american history we see there's george washington john adams and thomas jefferson you can see them the the office of the president develops and changes in many ways but there's no doubt there they are and they're functioning as the president um monothelitism and the papacy are apples and oranges i don't get these these developmental arguments from the papacy i mean especially if you go after peter because peter is an apostle so the whole thing is does peter's role transfer in some way to the roman bishops so then you're saying then you're looking at the evidence for subsequent roman bishops right after peter and i don't think there is good evidence that there were even single bishops following peter for a few generations and then um you know one or two generations and then sometime early second century you have this structure spreading more and more and more monarchical episcopate throughout the church but however you understand that development it's a fundamentally different kind of development than something like christology because you can look back and say there's the pope you can't look back and say there is monothelitism it's the understanding of a doctrine that's unfolding so i think it's understandable to say the papacy can develop in some respects but um gosh you need to see more you need to actually at least see popes doing pope like things you know you need to see some popes like pronouncing theological verdicts to resolve disputes pastoring the church you know like where is that in the late second cent in the late 1st century second century it's you just don't see even there being a roman bishop any evidence of that until you get well further down the line and then as i've argued in my later videos once you do have one i don't think they function in terms of vatican one so uh the the the papacy monothelitism i just see those as apples and oranges but especially peter to endure until christ comes again in acts 1 20 after judas commits suicide the apostles cast lots to select his replacement and they say quote the psalms and they say they quote the the septuagint version of the psalms the greek old testament and they say let another his office take which in greek is let another take his episcopal pen or episcopal literally i think in um like the king's english and victorian english would be translated acts 120 let another his bishop rick take so an understanding that peter has this authority he's a you know he has the charism to protect him from teaching error and strengthens brethren and that this is bound up within an office an office that is meant to endure until christ's coming i have never quite understood the relevance and maybe i don't want to be unfair to trent here maybe he maybe i'm not grasping what he's intending in terms of the relevance of matthias in acts 1 the replacement of an apostle is different than apostolic succession so you know having one apostle gone and so bringing someone on is a new apostle matthias to replace judas that's different than trump any kind of transfer from an apostle to a bishop those are two now they might both be right i'm just saying they're different and some i i struggle to understand what is really the point here with matthias in acts one uh i just see that as something we all agree on now the one thing i i would observe about matthias in acts 1 is that the specific rationale in verse 22 for and and throughout actually for his uh appointment is among other things that it says one of these men must become with us a witness of his resurrection you see the apostles were witnesses of the resurrection of christ and then the other thing is they were witnesses of his earthly ministry as well that's why they say someone who's been with us from the beginning but and that's why paul is an apostle he's a witness of the risen christ in his encounter on the damascus road so apostleship was a redemptive historically unique office the the authority given to apostles was played this kind of foundational role at the start of the christian church this is one of the reasons why i would say if you're going to say that apostolic authority has an ongoing reality in the church you need really good arguments for that and it'd be just like if someone said i have mosaic authority or i have davidic authority you need a really good reason to accept that or in a secular context if there's a ceo who retires and someone else says i'm the next ceo you need a really good reason to think that that's right now that's kind of a bigger can of worms and i've made other videos about apostolic succession so i'm just that's just i guess just if you don't like that forget that that's kind of more of a general comment here but it comes up with mathias in acts one okay i'm going to skip ahead a little bit to um trent and and austin are talking about apostolic succession and ignatius i made a whole video on ignatius so i don't want to get into that too much here but he does talk make one specific appeal for ignatius i haven't addressed before in videos so i want to let him do that and then address it and this is when they're also talking about they've i'm skipping over some stuff about apostolic succession in general to get to people succession specifically so let me skip ahead here maybe even the apostles authorities successors why would peter's authority in particular go particularly to his successor and i would look at that both in the biblical evidence and historical evidence biblically when peter is given the keys to the kingdom i would say that that is an allusion to isaiah 22 22. uh when jesus says what you bind uh you know what you buy no one shall lose what is loose uh no one shall bind in isaiah 22 22 it talks about how the prime minister of the kingdom of israel who served under the king it said to this prime minister the key of the house i give you the key of the house of david he shall open and then shall shut he shall shut and then shall open so what i see here in matthew 16 and that later church father is recognized is that peter's role as the pope we can almost call him kind of the the prime minister of the church of god so it's not like you had in israel you had god as the king there was the king of israel like david and then you had a prime minister or a vizier that oversaw the kingdom on behalf of the king so i would say that in the new testament we have jesus christ as our king and the pope serves as kind of a prime minister vizier that oversees the kingdom on his behalf and so i would see that both in the biblical evidence and then the historical evidence like when you go to nations of antioch and we may talk about this a little later um when we talk about uh history ignatius seems very clear like i know what the orthodox say about the rome being having a privacy of honor but he in his letter to the roman church he's just so clear that the roman church is unparalleled to any other church he says to them you preside in love over the other churches that'll be in about 110 a.d so he says the roman church presides in love and that word presides in his letter to the magnesians ignatius of antioch uses the word only to mean an official like leadership capacity so i guess sorry for the mouthful of an answer but that for me gives me pretty solid evidence for uh petrine primacy and its transmission through an office of something like okay so just to address isaiah 22 first i do think that isaiah this is again where um as i'm reading joe heshmeyer's book as i'm reading as i'm listening to i've been on my whole journey here learning about catholicism lost a lot of caricatures learned a lot but i'm i would say i'm a challenged and changed protestant i have great even as i'm making this video i feel this kind of tension of like i don't want this to to kind of stick at catholics in a in the wrong way i have great respect for catholic friends and for the catholic tradition and and i also would say there's a lot of arguments they make that are a lot more uh plausible than many protestants give credit for so this whole argument from isaiah 22 to matthew 16 i think is very plausible that this is forming the background context to a large degree if not exclusively for the meaning of keys binding and loosing etc etc in in matthew 16 and then also some of the jewish usage of those terms what i wouldn't agree with is that it's the exclusive background con so the image of crees of keys excuse me does have a broader biblical context and meaning like i think it's in luke 11 jesus is speaking to the pharisees at the very end of that chapter and he says to them you have taken away the key of knowledge there's all kinds of usages of that imagery of keys that will also need to be dialed in but i would simply say i don't think isaiah 22 as the background gets you to something that would be supportive of an argument for the papacy again it's like these these arguments from the triangular structure of the old testament especially when you see how the church fathers understood the keys it's just tough to know like well okay which is it is it eliakim or is it some other because elia came was not the buck stops with me type person and there's just too many differences between the papacy and the role of eliakim to make that kind of an exact parallel but i would say i think isaiah 22 is certainly should inform our our interpretation of what the keys are and what binding and losing means on ignatius um i would just say i think this language of presiding in love is ambiguous on several different levels such that i find it a very weak argument for the papacy there's no mention of a roman bishop anywhere in that letter oh just talking about the church of rome so already that kind of raises some curiosities this maybe there's an explanation for that but it's kind of odd but the main thing is what does that mean to preside in love the word preside is used twice in that initial paragraph to the of the epistle to the romans first it's just talking about a regional presiding over the region of the romans now he says a lot of praiseworthy things about the church of the romans but he says a lot of praiseworthy things about all the churches he calls the ephesian ephesian church deservedly most happy being blessed in the greatness and fullness of god the father predestined before the ages of time that it should be always for an enduring and unchangeable glory he says of the smyrnian church that it has through mercy obtained every kind of gift which is filled with faith and love and is deficient in no gift most worthy of god and adorned with holiness you can see all these kind of how do you i would just encourage people watching this video go read ignatius's epistle to the romans and see if you can pluck out is is unless you were looking for it in advance with that phrase uh presiding in love or presiding over love lead you to think oh the roman bishop has authority over the other bishops or anything like that again it's that feeling of the evidence is here the evidential burden is here and they're getting pulled together to meet the need at hand rather than something that would spring naturally from the texts or from the evidence in question i'd also observe in passing that the word verb preside this is just an interesting point of fact the same greek verb is used in the shepherd of hermas 1.2.4 to refer to the presbyters in the church of rome okay shepherd of hermas second century text maybe 140 something like that presbyters in the church presiding over the church that's pretty interesting um okay last issue is infallibility i'm going to let you hear trent's answer on this and then i'll high view of respond i feel comfortable with but is that is that a stretch i guess is really the the reservation to me that that feels like it might go i guess the thing is it feels like it's going a little far and how would you respond to something like that sure sure and what i would say is i would look at it um i would compare it to other senses of infallibility to not make it seem as alien of a concept and then look at the biblical and the historical evidence so to compare i would say well what is the doctrine of people infallibility it teaches that when the pope when he teaches under specific conditions he is protected by the holy spirit from binding the church to error he could still be a sinner a brave sinner we've had some waters in church history uh he could even speak theological error if he's not intending for this to be a formal pronouncement for the whole church so it's under these limited conditions he's protected and i would say there are parallels to this kind of infallibility first i would say that um i would say protestants believe in just the general idea that that as catholics we believe in the census fidelium that the faithful as a whole will not um fall away from the faith that the holy spirit protects the census but the faithful as a whole will adhere to the church it doesn't mean there won't be large numbers of people who fall away but the church as a whole will be protected by the holy spirit i think protestants would agree with that as well that the elect those are going to heaven they will not fall away they have this kind of protection uh then moving to the bishops you would say well if you believe in apostolic succession so if you're orthodox i think you would say that the bishops as a whole then you might get another bishop here there i think the orthodox would agree however that the bishops and patriarchs as a whole are protected by the holy spirit from leading the church into error though that becomes unwieldy because without a central figure to unite them it's very difficult for all of them to teach in unison that's why it's been very very difficult for the orthodox churches to hold a pan-orthodox council uh without a single patriarch being able to to unite all of them so i think that you see also in scripture i mean someone says well how could a pope be infallible i might ask a protestant do you believe that peter when he wrote first and second peter was protected from writing error in those letters well yeah sure of course because most protestants believe in biblical inerrancy okay so what pro so what catholics would say is that peter if you were ever to make any other similar pronouncement would be protected from that from error and his successors who would make any similar pronouncement have that protection so i'm i'm building a bridge however to show that it's not alien and then if i do the biblical evidence looking back at luke 22 34 or 24-34 as i mentioned earlier and then also the historical evidence especially in the early church i would just say to our orthodox brothers and sisters when you when you look at i think some of your questions actually deal with this i won't go into it with too um too fine detail they really speak about rome the roman c the successor of peter as having a special kind of charisma or protection that they don't say about other apostolic seeds like jerusalem or constantinople it seems that the early church understood as saint cyprien said that rome was the seat of unity and there was something special about this sea that safeguarded the unity and protected it from error so i guess that's i would compare the doctrine show it's not alien to our understanding of other senses of infallibility and look at the biblical and historical evidence awesome thank you the the first part of his answer there where he's just teasing out this what does it mean to be infallible and trying to draw build bridges to other ways we understand that no no issues there well-made appeal and he's right that we shouldn't think of infallibility as this like alien bizarre thing you know so that's we're all good on that um and i don't want to be unfair here because i know he just unpacked a very brief argument but i still want to respond to what he says about cypriot there now because i've looked into this and i know that this is a point of contest between not only protestants and catholics but the orthodox and catholics but gosh so it's true that cyprian sees the sea of rome as a source of unity and he has very praiseworthy things to say about the sea of rome as i've said in my videos on this people can go watch my critique of the papacy from the third and seventh century this is the first of the five episodes ever count there uh rome is looked to as a source of you know kind of this bastion of orthodoxy this kind of flagship church that's kind of you know um see this is where peter and paul were both martyred it grows it's a large prominent church as you get into church history uh they survive persecutions early on it's it's a remarkable church it's also the capital of the empire so it's got this practical kind of authority and weight in that in in that way as well but uh i i just think it's so clear so so trent is raising this in relation to the connection of points of infallibility that's a topic here and cyprian does expressly deny that the the uh bishop of rome has authority over the other bishops and i want to just tease out kind of how he's thinking what is the context for that when he says that because in his book on the unity of the church cyprian is explicit that the other apostles i'll just read this quote he says the remaining apostles were necessarily also that which peter was endowed with an equal partnership both in honor and of power and cyprian looks to matthew 16 as a charter for every bishop not just for peter specifically so then there's the contest about how to respond to to um you know what are valid baptisms after the decision persecution and i covered that more in my video but basically in his letter to stephen uh the current bishop of rome at the time cyprian makes it clear that peter does not have a kind of primacy the the sea of peter does not have primacy over the others in the sense that there's authority there or that it is infallible and we know that because basically cyprian and also his uh one of his fellow bishops for million of caesarea who is writing a letter to cyprian about this episode they they both think of stephen as in this in his kind of official pronouncement on this matter as not only falling into error but vermillion actually accuses him of schism he i mean again sorry for the offense of this but he he talks about stephen's pride he talks about his um his kind of stubbornness and then he says i'll just read what he says he says stephen is introducing many other rocks so think of matthew 16 and laying the foundation of and building up of many other churches that's not a good thing so that's what any speaks of stephen's stupidity as well in this episode now sorry if that gives offense i know what it's like when you one of your someone you respect is criticized but i'm just trying to say that the early church didn't think of rome as infallible and you that's very clear that's very clear throughout patristic church history they didn't say oh well rome has spoken therefore it's settled um and this is just one episode of that where the other bishops resist the edicts of rome and are quite happy to say so when trent horn says the early church understood there's something special that safeguarded the church of rome from error i would just say i disagree i don't i don't i think the testimony of the other bishops is very clearly in the opposite direction all right the rest of this video is questions from the audience so i'm going to pause it there so this doesn't go on too long now let me say in conclusion if i violated any youtube etiquette i'm a relatively new youtuber i'm within my first like seven or eight months and i don't know always know that if i violated any etiquette here in the way i interacted if i should have played the whole video or something like that forgive me and also let me know that i did that i hope this video has been helpful for people i know that there's a lot of people who are watching youtube videos such as this one and they just don't ever hear a thoughtful protestant side and i don't know how thoughtful mine is i hope it's somewhat thoughtful but i at least if the protestants at least it's something you know because a lot of people are only what a lot of people are doing is they're comparing their experience at a particular protestant church to like the church fathers and then layer on some trent horn and some other catholic answers apologetics and they're just not hearing the protestant side and at the very least i think it's good hear both sides here you know let it be a fair fight hear both sides in it so hopefully this video can play a role in that way thank you for watching hope this has been helpful and don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you'd like to stay in touch as more videos like this will come out thanks for watching god bless you you

Channel: Truth Unites

Views: 5,230

Rating: 4.6900368 out of 5

Keywords: Gavin Ortlund, Trent Horn, Papacy, Roman Catholic, Protestant

Id: Ka8LgyAhUXc

Length: 66min 47sec (4007 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021