Truth Unites - A MAJOR Problem With "Doctrinal Development"

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

In this video I engage the doctrine "no salvation outside the church" as  a window into the Roman Catholic conception of doctrinal development. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

In this video, I want to engage the doctrine that there's no salvation outside the church as a test case for the Roman Catholic notion of doctrinal development. Now, this doctrine, I'll put up the Latin phrase on the screen, no salvation outside the church. This is affirmed by most Christians historically, including Protestants. But the interpretation of that, the understanding of that has developed significantly in the Roman Catholic tradition. I think it makes it a good window into this broader issue of doctrinal development. the heart posture behind this is not just to attack and lob grenades at another tradition. It's more honestly to invite you to consider. How do we come across to someone else who's not already determined to believe this

and try to reconcile this and be sympathetic to it and so forth? Can you see how the massive changes here come across, kind of like there's a magic wand that we're using doctrinal development to just smooth out inconsistencies and contradictions? And I just would invite you to really consider this and don't just be defensive, but really consider how laborious this system kind of comes across. So what I want to do is have two sections. First, just a brief historical sketch. And then secondly, just ask the question, is doctrinal development a valid category for this kind of change?

So in the historical development, first part of the video, I basically say I see three rough stages for how the church understood the doctrine. no salvation outside the church throughout her history. The first stage, I'd say, from the closure of the New Testament, from the Apostolic Fathers, that early time, up through about the fourth or fifth century, somewhere in this very loose, just a construct to help us. And I would say here you have more ambiguity, but you also have more openness and inclusivism in how this is fleshed out. So on the one hand, you have lots of Christians that you can find making explicit affirmation, that people can be members of the body of Christ without an explicit Christian identity.

Usually this is said of people before the time of Christ came, so in the BCs. Justin Martyr, for example, says those who lived reasonably or with reason as are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists. And he lists a bunch of people, philosophers like Socrates, other pagans and so forth. And then he includes Old Testament saints, of course.

Now, he's talking about people before the time of Christ, but the rationale for that is that they live according to reason. And I've found similar statements in Ironaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and origin. The emphasis is pagans before the time of Christ are saved because they are members of Christ's body, because they lived justly. They lived in a just way. And you can find other statements. Gregor of Nisa is a fascinating one. He seems to anticipate this idea of an anonymous. anonymous Christian almost because he'll talk about people who are joined to the body of Christ

before they profess Christ explicitly and so forth. So you have that. But then you have this idea coming in that there's no salvation outside the church. Cyprian is the main early figure who's so influential in this regard. Here's the thing to see about this. Cyprian is functioning in a highly polemical context. When he is leveraging claims like this, no salvation outside the church, it is primarily toward those in schism or heresy. And 250 AD, he writes on the unity of the church, there's about one million Christians total in 250 AD, and they're being persecuted, okay? And the schisms and heresies that he's dealing with are really serious.

So just to give three examples, on the unity of the church was written to address Novation, who was an anti-Pope, and he's got this famous statement in Chapter 6 that, He cannot have God as his father who has not the church as his mother. If you read that in context, the person he's talking about, that he's targeting with that statement, is described as an enemy of Christ who is scattering the church, he's committed spiritual adultery, etc. When he's got his statement in his letters, I think it's Epistle 72 to Jubianus, that outside the church there is no salvation. That letter is addressing the baptism of heretics, and the heresies he's mentioning are the Marcionites,

He mentions a bunch of Gnostic groups and others. So the Marcionites, I mean, there was a significant set of doctrinal differences between the church and the Marseonites. The Marcianites rejected the Old Testament God. They elevated the Apostle Paul. They had a Dossitist view of the incarnation. It had all kinds of problems. So when he's writing that in that letter, that's what he's targeting. The person who's outside the church is like that, like someone like a Marcionite.

Similarly, his statement in Epistle 68, that the bishop is in the church. And if anyone's not with the bishop, he's not in the church. This is in a letter to his arch enemy who's been viciously criticizing Cyprian. And Cyprian is calling him sacrilegious. He's saying, God is going to judge you. It's hard to appreciate the polemical, just how polemical the context was for a lot of these statements. So here's the deal. You can't just kind of take Cyprian statements at face value, pluck them out of that historical context and these literary contexts

and then apply them to the post-1054 world, the post-5th century world, apply them to the 21st century today where you have over 2 billion people who can recite the Apostles' Creed, have enormous doctrinal content that we agree upon, far more. In other words, the schisms in the church today are not like the Marcionites versus the Christians or something like that. And so it's anachronistic to take Cyprian's life. language and just extend it forward without considering, well, we're actually in a different context today. We go from one million to two billion. That's a little bit of growth. And the schisms today are

not the same as the schisms then. Here's a metaphor I've come up with to develop this point. So suppose that human beings colonize Mars. And they set up a government called the Kingdom of Mars because people are trying to illegally emigrate to live on Mars. That sounds weird. It might help us. So there's a rule. No one can live outside the kingdom of Mars. If you don't have jurisdiction in the kingdom of Mars, you're not allowed to live on the planet Mars. Okay.

Now, so that's the rule. No one can live outside the kingdom of Mars. Now 2,000 years goes by. During that time, the population of Mars grows from 100 people to hundreds of thousands of people. And there's like 25 different splits resulting in 26 different different governments there. Okay, obviously you can't just extend that initial statement forward without qualification because you're in a different context there. So it is with the church today. And that's why I

think, you know, here's the thing. People will often say to me as a Protestant, you know, how can you see yourself of the same church as Cyprian when you differ with him on his rigorous hardline view of the church? And the answer to that is, well, I think there are reasons why Cyprian might not be totally correct on that, even just comparing him to some of the other church fathers. But a lot of these critiques that come at you are so naive. I was watching a critique the other day that was attacking the idea of theological retrieval. And it's just reminding me how many people have bought in hook, line, and sinker to this standard pop Catholic apologetics talking points.

This idea that the Protestants are the ones who pick and choose from church history, and that's what theological retrieval is, but the Catholics are the ones who don't do that. There's just total naivety about what the various models of theological retrieval are, what the principles behind them are among both Catholics and Protestants. One of the things I've always said is you know you're doing theological retrieval well when it forces you to change in a way you don't want to or expect to. That's part of the whole fun. You know, when you realize you have to submit to a reality greater than yourself. But there's also so much naivety in these criticisms about how, how different Roman Catholic theology today is from the early church.

So people will say, oh, you're just picking and choosing from Cyprian what you like and don't like. It's like, well, so is everybody. A contemporary Catholic picks and chooses from Cyprian left and right. No contemporary Catholic agrees with Cyprian on his views of the immediate hope in the afterlife, which I pointed to his statements that make it very clear, his expectation, the common hope of Christians is immediate translation. into heaven in the presence of Christ.

And I'm with the Catholic scholarship on that. He doesn't have any conception of purgatory. The primacy of Rome. He is just emphatic and explicit that the bishop of Rome does not have greater authority than other bishops. He goes back and most people think he changed on the unity of the church

after his dispute with Pope Stephen to make that point crystal clear. One of the ways you can see this is his views of penance. his view of penance is so rigorous and the contemporary practice of most Catholic parishes so lax in comparison that it's like night and day. So the Catholic apologist is saying or the Roman Catholic is saying, ah, you just pick and choose from Cyprian and there's massive naivety about how much they also pick and choose from Cyprian because they don't agree with Cyprian on everything. So the reality is we've got to get through these triumphalistic, simplistic ways of thinking.

Everybody picks and chooses. Picking and choosing is not always bad. Picking and choosing can just be practicing discernment because you can't accept everything in church history and nobody. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or anything else can do that. Protestants are, what Protestants can do is simply be honest to follow the evidence wherever it leads. and just, you know, because you're open. You're not yoked to things. You know, ultimately you're looking to scripture, but then you're looking to other factors like Catholicity. There's other, again, like I said, in retrieval,

there's various criteria you're looking to. But the Roman Catholic is yoked to magisterial teaching, as I'm about to get into, and they're always trying to maintain this claim of the consensus of the fathers, you know. And so you have to read history through that lens. And a lot of times there's just a complete lack of, of awareness of how much has changed from the early church to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church.

So let's talk about that change a little bit. So that's phase one. You've got, you know, it's more ambiguous. It's more open-ended. It's not real nailed down and you find at times more of an inclusivist posture. I would identify phase two's coming in in the wake of the conversion of Constantine, the union of church and state that happens there. And then with Emperor Theodosius, where Christianity is now looked upon more favorably in the fourth century, that as one factor and the other factor being the influence of Augustine. Now, I love Augustine, and I'm not a person who takes a fall of the church paradigm who thinks like, you know, when Christianity became legal, it all fell apart. I don't think that has happened.

But I do think that changed the church significantly. Some ways for good, but in many ways more neutral or benign. in some ways not so good. And it changes the thinking about this idea of no salvation outside the church. It starts to become different. It's not immediate, it's gradual, but you're just in a different context. You know, if you're outside the church in the third century where you're this persecuted minority, that person outside the church, like Cyprian thinking of his arch enemy, this might be someone

who gave up bibles during persecution, who betrayed you, you know. But in the fifth century or the sixth century or going forward, the person outside the church. You know, that might have to be somebody who refuses baptism or something like this, because it becomes a lot easier to be in the church. And then you have a kind of crystallizing or hardening around this teaching that comes in in the wake of Augustine. Now, Augustine's own views of this outside the church, there is no salvation, I am uncertain about. Augustine is so tricky because he writes a lot and he writes over a long period of time in different contexts, and sometimes you have different, this often happens where you have different statements and it's not easy,

it's not clear how to put them all together. On the one hand, there are some statements in Augustine that sound like he's saying, someone in the heretical group can be kind of secretly among us or something like this. And he'll talk about people all throughout the world who are members of the body of Christ going back to Abel, you know, so also he'll be clear that people before Christ were members of the body of Christ. So it's like, well, how did that happen? Was it faith? Was it it's not baptism because baptism didn't exist yet, you know. So, but then you have other passages in Augustine, and I think this is probably the more responsible way to take him because these passages are more numerous and clear. And they represent his hardened view. I mean, Augustine does,

this can be overemphasized. Peter Brown wrote a biography of Augustine, and he made this a point of emphasis, and he's taken a little bit of criticism for it. But I think there's something to it, at least, that Augustine hardens throughout his career. By the end, especially after the Pelagian stuff, toward the end of his career, he's a bit more, he's hardened in his outlook a little bit. And so, you know, certainly his final and mature view, he does seem to be pretty rigorous in saying you have to be a part of the church to be saved. And whatever view you take on Augustine, I'm not 100% sure how to take him, but what is clear is his influence that pushes the tradition in this direction, that it's a more rigorous, thoroughgoing, no exceptions

outside the church, you want to. So, for example, the idea that infants who are not baptized and die in infancy are damned. This seems very harsh to us today. People think, really? The parents got in a traffic jam on the way to the priest. Couldn't the infant died before they got there. Now the infant is damned for all eternity and hell. But here's what people need to appreciate. This is not just Augustine. It is this massive stream of tradition that comes in. It's in Gregory the Great. It's in Anselm. It's in others. in the medieval west. Now, eventually it softens a bit because you get the idea of limbo.

So the punishment is very mild. It's just being deprived of the beatific vision, but you still don't have, for over a millennium to my awareness, anybody saying, no, infants can be fully saved and get the beatific vision, even if they die and they have not been baptized. And then beyond the question of infants, you have this more thoroughgoing view, and it finds its way into majesty,

ministerial teaching. So one of the bishops in North Africa of Fulgencius earlier on who makes a statement to this effect, it's referenced in a papal bull at the Council of Florence by Pope Eugene the 4th. And this does meet the criteria for an ex-cathedra statement. It says, the most holy Roman church firmly believes professes and preaches that all those who are outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels unless they are joined to the Catholic Church before the end of their lives.

Now, you just wonder, how could they possibly make it clearer? If you wanted to say that all the non-Catholics are damned in the context of a council that's aiming to heal the schisms, how could you say it more clear than that, you know? And some will say, well, they'll try to say, well, the Roman Catholic Church recognize the validity of some sacraments of other churches. So that's an implicit recognition of salvation. Not so. Here's how the passage continues.

The unity of the ecclesiastical body is of such importance that only for those who abide in it to Christ's sacraments contribute to salvation. So the fact that an Eastern Orthodox baptism would be valid for the person entering the Roman Catholic Church, did not mean it was salvific for them while they remained outside the Roman Catholic Church. And the passage proceeds to basically say no matter how much alms giving, no matter if you're a martyr, it does not matter. Nobody can be saved. Even if he's given his life for the cause of Christ, unless he is in the Catholic Church. I've also in other videos explored the Unum Sanctum. We declare say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation

of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff. I've talked about that in other videos. That also meets the conditions for an ex-cathedra statement. So it's held to be infallible and therefore irreformable, and that view persists for a long time. Okay. So now we come to this. We know today, famously, that Vatican II says that people outside of the Roman Catholic Church

can be saved, possibly even Jews and Muslims. and they found various ways to try to explain that and see this as a development. Okay. Here's the question for us to consider second part of the video. Is this a valid development? Now, this word development implies a pretty clear amount of continuity. Okay, this is not, this is a different word than transformation or change. Development.

As it turns out, before we consider the question, bear in mind the strictures that Vatican one set to doctrinal development. Vatican 1 declared the meaning which our Holy Mother Church has once declared sacred dogmas to have must always be retained and there must never be a deviation from that meaning on the ground, on the specious ground and title of a more profound understanding. So the understanding can grow, the understanding can change, but the meaning cannot. And you can't smuggle in a new meaning under the guise of new understanding. You see something like this thinking of the Catholic Church at the time of late 19th century and then into the 20th century in Pius X, Oath against Modernism, which was required for various

Catholic clergy to state for a good portion of the 20th century, and it included this assertion. I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the Orthodox fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another, different from the one which the church held previously. So we're trying to set the guardrails here for doctrinal development. The dogma can change in its understanding, but it cannot change in its meaning. Okay. So is that what is happening with the doctrine of no salvation outside the church? Well, from the Council of Florian,

to the Vatican two statements, I would say it is very difficult to see this as just a change of understanding and not a change of meaning. The teaching amounts to two different fundamentally, qualitatively unique results, right? In one, Jews and Muslims cannot be saved, and frankly, other Christians cannot be saved. In the other, they can. And that's a pretty wholesale change. It's hard to see that as one thing developing as opposed to just two different things.

Now, people say, no, no, no, the meaning is the same. We're just understanding it differently. The problem is the interpretation has changed so much. You know, you'll have people try to say things like, for example, people say, well, it's still true that there's only one visit, institution that is the church and you have to be on that institution like you have to be connected to that institution, you have to be saved by that church or saved in that church, but you can be

invisibly connected to the visible church. You'll find that. The problem with this is you get to a point where nobody was saying anything like that before the modern era. That is a total modern innovation. I'm not aware of anyone between Augustine and the 19th century that is construing this teaching such that Jews and Muslims could be saved or you could be invisibly connected to the visible church any more than you could be invisibly on the Ark of Noah. One of the things the catechism says is in paragraph 847 it says basically this teaching was not targeted at those who through no fault of their own didn't know of Christ in his church. So it's getting into this idea of invincible ignorance. Now the problem is why didn't anybody ever say that before? Wouldn't that be an

important qualification to offer before, you know, in the context of the Council of Florence, where there's an attempt at reunion amidst schism, and wouldn't that be kind of important to say, by the way, when we say that even the martyrs are damned, that doesn't apply to people who have invincible ignorance. When we say that it's absolutely necessary, these statements don't have any qualifications in that context. And I don't know of anybody who interpreted them like that at that time. So my challenge for people who want to say that this is just a legitimate development as opposed to a change is to say, can you find any precedent? If it's a legitimate development, shouldn't there be some precedent? Think of how frequently this appeal is leveraged against

Protestants, that we don't have any precedent for our beliefs. Whether that's true or not, we'll leave off the table for now. That's the claim that is often put against us. Well, if that's the claim put against us, shouldn't it, in fairness, be put against your own? conception of doctrinal development. If it's a valid development, shouldn't you be able to point to some precedent for it? So I would just say that it gets to a point where the idea of doctrinal development is so squishy and so ambiguous that it's practically useless because what people are always saying is, oh, we need an infallible teaching office to settle disputes in the church, right? But what good is an infallible teaching office for ending disputes if it ends the dispute

and everybody, every single Christian for 500 years, misunderstands the result. So it takes people 600 years later to start to unravel it. How do we know that the infallible teachings today won't be understood differently 600 years from now? In the previous paragraph of the catechism anticipates this problem, and it quotes a statement, no salvation outside the church, and then it says, how are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the church fathers? and then it reformulates it in a positive way. It says reformulated positively,

it means that all salvation comes from Christ, the head, through the church, which is his body, and then it fleshes out necessity in that sense. And this is similar to how I've seen other contemporary Roman Catholic theologians try to reconcile this. And I'm sympathetic to what they're trying to do. I mean, I appreciate actually the trajectory here.

But what they're saying is the heart of the teaching, The basic impulse behind the teaching was always just the necessity of the church for salvation, but that is a change in meaning, not just understanding. These two statements are different. Number one, there's no salvation outside the church. Number two, the church has a necessary role in salvation. Those are different. Number one, it's gone from a negative statement of restriction to a positive statement of necessity and identity.

Those are two different statements, not just different in understanding, but different in meaning. For example, here's a metaphor. Let's say a parent says to their child when the child is six years old, no money outside of allowance. You're not allowed to have any money outside of allowance. And that's how it's understood for 10 years of their life. When they're 16 or so, they get a weekend job and keep it a secret. their parent confronts them about it and they say, well, that's consistent with what you said because all it meant was that my allowance has a necessary role to play in my finances.

Can you see why this feels disingenuous? Can you see why the parent would feel betrayed or at least misunderstood to go from nothing outside of this to, oh, this just has a necessary role? Now, I am sure that people who are pre-committed to defend this as a legitimate doctrine of development will find ways to do it. You know, we're always just going to stick to our guns if we want to. But can you see if you're not already pre-committed to construing it like that how this is just not compelling at all? It gives every appearance of being, not a development of in one consistent strand of teaching, but simply a change. And it looks like the term development is being used like a magic wand to just wave over a contradiction.

Now, my interest in making this video is not to criticize the theology of Vatican II. Believe me, I appreciate it. I am grateful for that, for the broadening. But the point is, it's a problem because it involves the reform of supposedly irreformable teaching. And to say, no, it isn't. you have to really stretch out this idea of doctrinal development like a rubber band. As a Protestant, I'm just free to just say, I think the church made a mistake on this. Now, when you say that, you don't just go against, just you against everybody.

You're looking at the earliest testimonies before the 4th and 5th century. You have precedent. You're noting the particular reasons why a change happened. The imperialization of the church and the influence of Augustine of Hippo are weighty reasons. You're looking at other ways that the church fell into, you're looking at the seriousness and rigor of the contemporary reconsideration of this, that it's across different ecclesial communities. It's not just Protestants who are,

but you're also noting, well, Roman Catholics today are also kind of taking a fresh look at this. You're looking at the historical factors that cause people to think one way at one time, another, the medieval era is different, the modern era is different. Maybe there's reasons why something became mainstream. So you're not flippant about it. You're not just shooting from the hip saying, oh, the church got it wrong, so who cares? You're very careful. You're with fear and trembling before God.

But ultimately, with the scripture as your ultimate guide, because you've got, I think, biblical teaching in the scripture as well for a less restrictive institutional exclusivism, then ultimately you're saying, I think the church made a mistake. And you can just say that. You can say, you know what? I think what August, what came in in the wake of Augustine and stuck around for a long time, I don't think that was correct. There's reasons why maybe the mistake happened there.

It doesn't mean the church died. Like we're always told you, oh, that means you think that, you know, Christ abandoned his church. No, no, no, we just think a mistake happened. And that happens. And there's reasons why that can happen. It wasn't even a fundamental mistake like the gospel itself died. It's just a mistake in this particular way of thinking. Protestants, we can just say that.

We can just say, you know, we reform the tradition where it needs to be. be reformed under the Word of God. But for the Roman Catholic, you're yoked to these allegedly infallible teachings. All of our churches are riddled with errors. Accretions happen within my Baptist Church within one generation. Accretions are constant. The difference is when the accretions are ensconced within allegedly infallible teaching, then you're stuck. This is why I love Semper Reformanda, always reforming the Protestant heart cry. when you get stuck, you can get unstuck. And I would say this area is an example of where a Protestant way of looking at things

allows you to be more consistent with your own doctrinal standards of your own church historically and be able to look at something like this and say, you know what? Christians have not always thought about this perfectly, and you can make those reform efforts. So anyway, so my proposal is this teaching, no salvation outside the church, is one area where we can see that the Roman Catholic conception of doctrinal development is too flexible and too squishy to be credible or to be much use.