Truth Unites - Cameron Bertuzzi's Conversion to Rome: Protestant Response

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Here I offer a Protestant Response to the reasons why Cameron Bertuzzi  of Capturing Christianity offered for his conversion to Roman  Catholicism.    Check out the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bilP-Rh6jYk  For diving into church history as a Protestant, check out my book, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: https://www.amazon.com/Theological-Retrieval-Evangelicals-Need-Future/dp/1433565269 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/

On Monday of this past week, Cameron Bertuzi let me know that he was becoming Catholic. And I wasn't shocked by that. He seemed like he'd been going in that direction for a while. But that's when I kind of found out. And then this week, that's become public. And he put out a video sharing some of his reasons why in Rome on kind of overlooking the Vatican. It was kind of amazing scenery talking to Matt Frad at Pints with Aquinas. I can't talk today. So I wanted to give some reflections upon this. I wasn't planning on doing that.

And then I thought, you know, maybe this could be useful. And it's always kind of tricky trying to get this right. But this is not to attack Cameron. I consider him a friend. I've told him before. If I can never help in any way, if you want to talk about things, theologically, if I can pray for you, if you want to pray together, you know, want to be friends.

And that doesn't change at all when someone becomes Catholic. Friendship can remain even amidst strong disagreements. And so, you know, that is one thing actually I've been dismayed at seeing in both directions. When people, when there's a change, the people on the side that is departing, like when Josh Schupeg became Protestant and I was talking to him about that, man, but this way too, people can be very uncharitable. And I think this is something we need to be very careful about. What happens is people experience negative emotions. For one thing, people can feel hurt or even betrayed. For another, people can feel threatened. People can feel shaken. It really

happens. And so the emotions could be legitimate, but then in responding to that, it's so easy to be led into uncharitable speech. One of the big ways it happens is we judge motives. People say, oh, so-and-so just did this for that reason, or he just did this for that reason. It's like, people, we don't know anyone's heart. We don't, only God knows the heart. We don't know people's motives. We need to be so careful. But I also think it's okay to lay out our concerns and our disagreements and debate these things and debate the theology, especially because I'm very concerned about the impact that Cameron has. He's got a huge following and lots of people and he's been very public for a long period of time about his journey to Catholicism kind of along the way. So a lot of

people are watching it being influenced. So the motive behind this video is trying to help people who are maybe wondering, maybe they've been, maybe they feel pain because of this or maybe it causes anxiety or thoughts and just wanting to maybe say some things that could be helpful for others who are wondering, well, should I leave Protestantism as well and wondering what to do about these arguments? So I'll put the focus on the arguments here. So in some ways, throughout this video, it's going to be, the spotlight will be less on Cameron per se, and more just on the issues that are represented by his story. I have two basic things to say, two appeals for people who are considering leaving Protestantism, and then I have a final practical comment about kind of

where do we go from here when there's a change like this? Appeal number one, study classical Protestantism. I know this sounds kind of simple, but unfortunately, historic, mainstream, classical Protestantism is not well understood generally, but especially by those who've grown up in a low church evangelical context in a place like the United States where evangelical Protestantism is often kind of assumed. It sounds strange to say, but it's kind of like if you grew up in a democracy, you might actually not know the best arguments for democracy or the history of how democracy came about. You just kind of assume it because it's what you've known. This happens a lot with Protestantism. People conflate contemporary evangelical Protestantism, particularly in some of its

less robust expressions with Protestantism as such. And the result is that Protestantism is massively misrepresented. And the differences between Protestantism as a system and the alternatives is misframed. So the real fault line of difference, the razor-sharpers, the razor edge where Protestantism actually differs from an alternative tradition like Roman Catholicism is not framed accurately. We don't hit the line of demarcation where they depart from one another. Here's a metaphor that I'll give some examples. Suppose you grew up in rural Tennessee, and then, and I'm not picking on Tennessee. I love Tennessee. My family lives there. It's one of my favorite places to go. But just a metaphor. You grow up in rural Tennessee. You visit New York

City. You're overwhelmed by the beauty and the spirit. and the pace and the culture and the people. You're walking around Times Square. You think this is amazing. You're drawn to it. And you've never visited Charlotte, Nashville, or Atlanta. And people ask you, how is New York City different from the South? And you're going to say, they're so different. The South has so few people compared to New York. New York is so much faster pace than the South, et cetera, et cetera. And you see the problem here, if rural Tennessee is taken as representative of the South as a whole. Rather than looking, you know, say at some of the cities as well, the overall contrast between the two regions is going to get distorted. You're going to get a simplified

picture of one side. This is what happens with Protestantism over and over again. Let me give a couple examples. I'll play some clips from the video, again, not to attack Cameron, but because what he's saying here is actually representative of the way a lot of people think. Here's one example on how Protestantism is represented on the question of confessing sin. You want to go tell this strange man, all the bad stuff you've done yeah but you kind of like you kind of get to get it off your chest and like and then you get to move on yeah it seems kind of which i mean you know protestants are going to say you can just do that directly with god and fair enough but yeah and you can't that's the thing like why can't i just go straight to god it's like you can yeah no one said you can't why can't i pray just

directly to god you yeah it's like catholicism is the both why do you why do you ask your friends to pray for you yeah if you can go straight to god and you can listen to a few minutes before that as well. And what you see is this, the overall impression given is that in Protestantism, you confess sin to God alone, where in Roman Catholicism, oh, it's the both and you get confession to God and human beings. But this is that misframing thing, okay? First of all, within Protestantism, you have some amazingly beautiful expressions of what James 516 looks like, which says, confess your sins to one another. Bonhofer's life together, great example. Another good example is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.

Methodism like Protestantism as a whole was a powerful renewal movement. The Holy Spirit worked powerfully through John and Charles Wesley and others. One of Wesley's great gifts was organization. Always an important gift in revivals, actually. One of those neglected things. He would organize these societies of people. And it was kind of like what we would call a small group. In 1738, they came up with these rules for them.

one of them says that they will meet together once in a week to confess their faults one to another and pray for one another that they may be healed. There's the basis in James 516. Here's another. It says that everyone in order speak as freely, plainly and concisely as he can, the real state of his heart with his several temptations and deliverances since the last time of meeting. I love that phrase, the real state of your heart. Transparency, accountability. This is actually something that you see a lot in Protestant churches today, even evangelical churches. I don't mean, sometimes people act like, well, okay, yeah, the evangelical churches are bad, but the rest of Protestantism is good. That's not actually what I'm trying to say here. I'm just trying to say be accurate about the

whole thing. Evangelical Protestants have a lot of strengths too. One of them is this emphasis upon the laity and upon small groups, accountability groups. There's lots of confession of sin to other people in a Protestant context. This is not where we, you know, the idea that like, well, The Protestant confesses to God alone, the Catholic confesses to God and human beings is like somebody saying New York City is big and fast and the South isn't. It doesn't really get into where the differences are. The Protestant concern with the Catholic view is not about confessing to human beings, but it's the sacerdotal and sacramental context of how confession works in the Roman Catholic system. So sacerdotal meaning having to do with the priesthood, sacramental having to do with the sacrament of penance specifically. and the concern is with this whole system that evolves throughout church history, and we would say lots of accretions on top of James 516 that have lots of specific features where these are the specific things we need to talk about for where we differ.

One example would be the necessity of confession after a mortal sin. In Roman Catholic theology, if you commit a mortal sin and you do not confess to the priest and then you die, guess what? You do not go to heaven or purgatory. You go to hell. And that's magisterial teaching, the counsel of Florence, for example. So mortal sin was not just like cold-blooded murder. In Catholic theology, you can read through the catechism about things like gluttony or masturbation or not going to mass or using contraceptives.

You know, mortal sin is basically a sin whose object is grave matter. And then it has to be intentional with deliberate consent and with full knowledge. So, you know, there's lots of mortal sins. And the very question of what is and what isn't a mortal sin is, you know, enough already to start generating the questions here of just, you know, think of the anxiety this puts you in, this system. And the Protestant concern is this is like putting storm clouds over the heads of the laity. You're in a state of grace. Now you're not in a state of grace. You're in a state of grace.

Now you're not in a state of grace. You're bouncing back and forth. Now, this is why we love the simplicity of the gospel. And this is an emphasis within the Protestant traditions. Assurance of salvation is a good thing. John Bunyan used to talk a lot about how, you know, if you emphasize the grace of God and the security of the laity within the grace of God that doesn't make them disobey more, it makes them disobey less,

because the key to all true obedience is love for God flowing out of fellowship with Him and the Holy Spirit. The grace of God is so important that people experience that. Now, I'm not saying Catholic theology denies the grace of God or something, but this system of theology, which is built up over time in church history, does put people in anxiety. Now, let's say that you disagree with that, and you say, no, no, no, no, the Catholic system of confession is beautiful, which I'm sure it is in many ways, but not in every way. And it doesn't lead to anxiety, and you're wrong about that. And here's why you're missing something and so forth. Okay, fine. That's the discussion we would need to have Protestant to Catholic.

That's where the fault line of difference is, not whether we confess to other people. You see how it's like we haven't even hit where the two views actually touch up against each other. Let me give another example here from the video. I kind of looked at it like it was very freeing. And that's one of the things that I've had to give up as a Catholic. It's like you don't just have the freedom to believe whatever you want and do whatever you want. Well, to certain degree. You know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah. But so that was one of the things. was kind of pulling me back from Catholicism was the fact that like even when it comes like some of these central doctrinal beliefs there's obviously wiggle room within Catholicism on these sort of tertiary doctrines different interpretations perhaps different ways of phrasing it yeah and so you have different models and different things and so there is like variety in the Catholic faith but at the same time like you don't have as near nearly as much freedom like ecclesiologically yeah in things that you believe and so I was kind of worried about that I was like I kind of like just, like, reading the Bible and then just being like, all right, that's how it seems to me. You know? Or like, hearing an argument for something, be like, it seems like a good argument. And then just like going with that. Now leave some wiggle room here for miss speaking.

Having been one who's put out a lot of videos and then sometimes people attack you on Twitter and like clip out this tiny little 30 second thing, I don't want to pin someone down to something they might have said at this one point when they're just thinking off the cuff, you know. But nonetheless, this is illustrative of, again, just in general how people think and how many people will imbibe that video. They'll think, okay, so the difference is Protestantism, you believe whatever you want, Catholicism, you submit to what the church teaches. Here we've got individualism, here we've got authority, draw a thick line down the center, and that's the difference. And that's kind of the – people wouldn't maybe say that, but that's the idea that people are going to walk away with. And again, it's like people saying that the South doesn't have lots of people or isn't fast-paced. It's just not true.

It might reflect your own anecdotal experience, but it's massively unfair as a representation of Protestantism as a system. There are points where we differ about how authority works, but it's not this individualism idea where private judgment reigns supreme. In fact, historically, Protestants have been really tough on private judgment and have had very high view of the rule of faith, universal traditions without scriptural warrant, the authority of the church, the authority of church councils, and so forth. Here's Article 34 from the Anglican 39 articles. Whoever by his own private judgment openly, willingly, and deliberately breaks those customs and forms of worship of the church, which do not contradict the word of

God and are approved by common authorities to be openly rebuked. That's a Protestant document. You know, go back and read that. It's amazing because it's not talking about using private judgment to go against the scripture. It's talking about to go against customs and forms of worship, which are simply not contradictory to the scripture. So, you know, that's just one example. You could go through so many others. But again, people are never going to know this if they don't read the 39 articles. There's such an ignorance of historic Protestantism. People have not I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not speaking of anyone in particular, just across the board. So many of us, we grew up, you know, evangelicalism is huge in the United States.

We've grown up in this just sort of the assumed background, but we've never actually studied what historically Protestantism is. But even evangelical churches today don't have a believe whatever you want ethos. That's really not fair. I mean, I don't know, I can't, my own experience has been, churches have statements of faith, the vast majority of churches have statements of faith, they have church membership, and if you're a member of the church, you have to adhere to the church's statement of faith. So you're not just free to believe anything you want. You, for example, Cameron seems open to universalism. Well, most evangelical churches have hell in their statement of faith, and not just the idea of like an empty hell with no one in it,

but heaven and hell is the two final destinations. That's pretty common in evangelical churches. So you'd have to submit on something like that to be a member of that church. So even in like contemporary evangelical churches like non-denominational churches, congregational churches, Baptist churches. But then certainly as you look to like the historic Protestant traditions, there are guardrails too. The differences aren't whether you submit to the church. It's how much you have to submit to and whether that is understood as infallibly taught. So there's differences, but it's not well framed there. And I just have a concern that people are going to hear this and think, okay, these are my two options, you know. Okay, here's another final example I'll share.

And this is one of the things that's really given me, given me, like, a better appreciation for the Bible is the fact that the New Testament ties in to the Old Testament. It's the fulfillment of the Old Testament. It's not as if, I mean, as a Protestant, my view was kind of like, we could kind of like get rid of the Old Testament. Like, let's forget about it. Let's try to forget about it.

Because you have these problematic Old Testament passages about the Canaanites and bears attacking children. It's like, can we just forget about the Old Testament? Can we just like forget about that? and just focus on the New Testament because it's all about love. Now, Cameron says a little bit just after that that he was sort of unconsciously drawn to that. So don't pounce upon him too much. He's not endorsing that.

But nonetheless, there's still this weird misframing as though as a Protestant, you could kind of function like that. But now in becoming Catholic, that's something you have to jettison. This is just weird. Protestants are totally the same as Catholics and affirming both the Old and New Testament as the Word of God. reject any kind of splitting of them up or something like that. Typology, you know, and other relation, the general relation from Old Testament to New Testament, a lot of the leading voices on that are Protestant scholars. So this is just not a point of difference. I won't go

through a bunch of other examples. Hopefully you can see the general concern here. One of the other ones I'll mention was about Catholic services have reverence. Protestant services typically don't. And again, it's like the person who goes from rural Tennessee to New York. You can understand why someone thinks like that. But it would be a great thing to go to historic Protestant services that are more liturgical and kind of see, you know, the contrast here is not so absolute. There's lots of very reverent. I mean, a couple weeks ago I preached at Beeson Divinity School.

Fantastic seminary in the South in Alabama. I'll put up some pictures of their chapel. I got to preach there. It was so lovely and so beautiful. Eason is an interdenominational evangelical institution. So it's evangelical, but it has Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians altogether. In their chapel, there's images and statuary all over the place. Their worship is very liturgical.

It's very reverent, very historically rooted. We just don't bow down to the images. And we don't claim we're the one true church and things like this. But you get all the wonderful things that you might be looking for in another tradition. It's kind of like somebody going to, you know, if more low church evangelical Protestants before moving to a different tradition outside of Protestantism would explore the richness and fullness of historic Protestant traditions, which are there. They're not as rare as you think.

It'd be like someone realizing, you know, imagine the person in rural Tennessee walking through downtown Atlanta and realizing, oh, it's not just New York. There's lots of places that have the things I saw there. And so again, you just you grieve over the misframings because it's not fair to Protestantism. Now, the other thing that was interesting about their discussion on this point was that

not only are there these false contrasts like confession to people and God versus confession to God alone or individualism versus authority and these kinds of things, but the real points of actual difference between Protestant and Catholic are not really visible.

It seems like the three issues that were hang-ups for Cameron that he articulated he had to work through were divine simplicity, how to interpret John 6th in relation to the Eucharist, and a traditional view of hell. Now, interestingly, those are all points of agreement between classical Protestants like myself and Roman Catholicism. I've done work on each of those defending a view that's very much resonant with the Roman Catholic view. So that's not where our differences lie. The actual points of historical difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism too often are not really in play and not really even visible.

And this happens a lot where Protestants who don't have a lot of theological or historical training don't have a full picture of what Protestantism is and why the Reformation came about. Why did the Reformation happen? Because in the medieval era, there was a lot of idolatry that had crept into the church. There's liturgies circulating that are prayers to Mary that have the approval of the church that are essentially saying in their content, Mary, propitiate Jesus. And if you want to see more about that, people often accuse me of making things up and lying. I'm not.

Okay, watch my video on praying to the saints. You can see the references. And the Protestants were coming along and saying, this is not good. We need to reform our practice here. Jesus is the propitiator, not the one being propitiator. it. There was a withholding of the Eucharist in both kinds and very rare participation from the laity in the Eucharist. And Protestants were coming along saying, this is not good. The laity need the Lord's supper frequently and in both kinds, both the bread and the wine. And they need to

eat it, not just adore it. There was a withholding of the scripture from the laity in the vernacular language. And the Protestants were coming along saying, this is not good. We need the people of God need to have the word of God. There was this increase of claims for the authority of the Pope and the practical function of the Pope, particularly with regard to papal infallibility in the 13th century, 14th century, and it's very controversial, but that's the time period in which papal infallibility is explicitly coming into view, and that's disputed a little bit where in there. But that's the standard scholarly view. Again, people will go after me and attack me for saying that. It's just a standard scholarship.

papal infallibility first explicitly emerging 13th century 14th century. So the Protestants were coming along and some of the proto-protestants saying, no, this is not good. The Pope is a lesser authority than the scripture. That's something Jan Hus was saying. Speaking of Jan Hus, there's persecutions. There's terrible persecutions. The medieval Roman Catholic Church claimed authority over the power of the temporal sword.

the civil power, and wielded that brutally torture to extract confessions in the various inquisitions. The execution of heretics in the most cruel and inhumane ways, burning people alive. Massive massacres in which women and children were not spared funded by the promise of indulgences. Now, those three things that I just said, that's true. It pains me to say it. I can't imagine how it can be uncomfortable for others to hear. saying it to kind of, I'm saying it because it's true. And though I know people will attack me and dismiss me, look into it. I'm not making that up. The medieval era got bad. That's why Protestantism

came about. People were rising up saying, this is not good. We need to reform our theology and practice. And the way Huss put it, quoting St. Augustine, the way you deal with heretics is not by burning them, it's by arguing with them. All kinds of other things. I mean, the initial spark would be just the legalistic system that had developed this transactional system of salvation with the treasury of merit and indulgences and the way that was just mushrooming up and up and up. And you can study how it's going in the 13th century and then the 14th century and the 15th century. And in like 200 years, you see just from that time alone, it's like, you know, massively spiked up. And the Protestants were saying, this is not good. We need reformation. The grace of God is freely available and fully

available to anyone. You don't need to do anything other than simply repent. Put your faith in the gospel. So what I'm trying to say here is Protestantism arose in response to real error, real idolatry, real violence and abuse of the laity, legalism. And it's a tragedy when people leave Protestantism without fully appreciating all that led to it. And putting their finger on the real nerve center of how this terrible split came about within Christendom and really appreciating the good of Protestantism as a reform effort within the One True Church. So my encouragement from all this is that for people considering leaving Protestantism, do a deep dive into classical Protestantism.

I'll give some book recommendations in a minute. Let me address two things real quick before moving on to my second and final appeal. One is people are going to say, oh, you're exaggerating or it wasn't that bad. all I'm going to say is do your own research. It's not in dispute in the scholarship. The violence and financial manipulation of the laity, it won't be hard for you to discover. Okay. That's all I'll say about that. Second thing is some people are going to say, well, you can't really distinguish this pristine, perfect vision of historic Protestantism from the on-the-ground reality because the on-the-ground reality is what Protestantism leads to. The worst abuses you see in evangelicalism,

that's the destination, right? Two comments in response to that. Number one is saying this is what Protestantism leads to is a different claim than saying this is what it is. So there's still a concern of misrepresentation. More to the point, it's just not fair to use anecdotal observations rather than official stated theology

to evaluate an entire tradition. You can't judge the whole based upon the parts. The way you know this is you could do the same thing against Roman Catholicism and disprove it. You could go to places like Portugal or Venezuela or Colombia or Ecuador, places like this that have a majority Catholic presence. You could look at on the ground street reality and you could say, see, this is what Catholic theology leads to. It's not a fair way to critique the whole of Roman Catholicism. To critique Roman Catholicism, you have to look at the entire tradition throughout time and space according to its official

tenets and its official theology. Same with Protestantism. You have to do the same. You have to do the same. You have to look at the old reformed scholastics. You have to look at the 17th century Lutherans, some of the finest scholars of church history in church history. And I could go on and on. There's a lot. That's what a lot of my videos try to do. So my point is, study Protestantism.

Don't assume you know what Protestantism is just because you've had anecdotal familiarity with it. You have to get into the theology historically. And I just for, this is for people out there watching along and wondering. We need to dive into classical Protestantism and learn the best of the historic arguments for Protestantism. Second appeal for people watching along, maybe wondering, you know, what should I do? Should I make a similar change to that Cameron made? Is to read widely in theology.

Again, doesn't sound very controversial or very complicated, but sometimes it's the basic things that need to be said. One of the concerns I have, as much as I love YouTube, is that people, in our day derive an enormous amount of information from social media and podcasts. And more traditional forms of learning theology like books or a seminary degree are sometimes sidelined. And my perspective is that YouTube is a great thing. I love YouTube. It's been way more fun than I ever thought and I love having my channel.

But it's a great supplement to reading books and journal articles and so forth. It's not a good replacement and a lot of people are overrelying on social media and they're not really immersing themselves in the scholarship or in historic texts and that can lead to a major distortion factor. It's not that those things are wrong, but they're not a good replacement. So I want to give a couple of recommendations for people. Someone's saying, okay, I want to learn more about historic Protestantism. What should I look at?

Let me give one representative text from each of the main streams of the magisterial Protestantism, Anglican reformed. And these are great. I mean, so first one is John Jewel, an apology of the Church of England. This is, you know, just a class, very early on in the Anglican tradition, just a classic apologetics text for Anglicanism and by extension Protestantism as well in many ways. Readable, 130 pages, not expensive. Thanks to the Davenant Institute for publishing this.

It's put up by Davenant Press. about the Davenant Institute. They do a lot of work trying to rehabilitate historic Protestantism. Fantastic resource. The whole thing is about the Catholicity of Protestantism. He's going on and on and on about the church fathers and why they don't support the 16th century claims of the Church of Rome. Okay, here's a Lutheran example. It's going to be loud on the mic, sorry. The council, examination of the Council of Trent. Martin Kempnitz, four volumes. Now, as soon as you see the size of that, it might be intimidating. you don't have to read the whole thing. It's like an encyclopedia.

You use it as a reference work. So you just go to the part you're interested in. It is pretty expensive, but you could just start with one volume. Maybe you can get it on Amazon used for like $30. So it's not that bad. But it's one of the finest representatives of historic Protestant thought you can find. Deeply immersed in the church fathers again. And if it's too expensive for you,

what I'm trying to do in my YouTube channel is mainly just channel these kinds of voices. And Martin Kemnitz, as you've noticed, comes through a lot. That's why I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do. I never thought I'd get into these conversations, but I just feel a need for more representation of historic Protestant views. So hopefully you're getting some of chemnets just from me. And then you could look at Francis Turriton. Institutes of Ellingtic theology, again, use it as an encyclopedia,

really crisp, clear. The thing is, you will assume that because it's got big words like Ellingtic, that it's going to be really hard to read. clear. It's so much clearer and easier to get into. I just spit all over my camera. Wow. That's what happens when I talk about historic Protestants. It's easier than you think. I mean, it's just, it's like reading the Summa Theologica or something like that. It's designed for catechesis, so it's actually not as hard to get into as you think. There's an initial foreignness of vocabulary, but it's not that opaque. You can get some traction with it pretty

easily. Then you've got to read the Catholic. You know, you can pick up a copy of the catechism. I didn't pull these off my shelf. Or John Henry Newman. If you're considering a conversion to Catholicism, you have to read John Henry Newman because he's so significant in contemporary Roman Catholicism. So I guess to put it like this is if you're considering making a change as big as converting out of Protestantism or into Protestantism, it's just not responsible to do so without reading the best representations on each side. YouTube videos are great, but they're not enough, and you can't just read like one book. You've got to immerse yourself in the best of the arguments on both sides.

Otherwise, it's like if you become an atheist, but you just don't bother to read Al Plantinga and William Lane Craig and so on and so forth, or go in the other direction. There's no substitute for wide reading. And I just have a concern about, I don't know, maybe Cameron read a bunch of books and just didn't talk about it, but I don't know. It seemed like there was just not as much immersion in classical Protestant argumentation. And I just have a burden about that because for others, I want to encourage them. Really, you need to avail yourself to all that is in this tradition in order to make such a significant decision. And the reality is, and this would be the deeper concern beyond the medium, you know, beyond like whether it's in a podcast or a book, because you can get a lot of good stuff from podcast too. But beyond the medium is you have to study theology deeply. You have to

look at all the different issues and that just takes time because theology is really complicated. With Cameron, he put a lot of focus on the papacy and this one particular typological argument via Bayesian analysis. And I wanted to, so I wanted to address that because this was significant for him, so maybe it would be significant for others. And this would be an area where I think, you know, there's a little bit of an overfocus on a particular way of thinking this through and some context may be missed. I've addressed the typological argument for the papacy elsewhere from Matthew 16 and Isaiah 22, just to reiterate my main three points. I think there's a lot of confusion about what typology is as though it were general fulfillment. Typology is one specific kind of relationship

between two texts, and it's a very broad and flexible kind. Jonah getting eaten by a fish is a type of Christ's burial. The temple curtain is a type of Christ's body. The rock that Moses strikes in 1 Corinthians 104 is a type of Christ. Typology can work in all different kinds of ways. Between all different kinds, it's not always like, you know, from one office to another office and so forth. So because it's such a flexible, hermeneutical category, to use it responsibly, you have to look at the text and what the author is doing with it. And this is why historically typology has never been used to establish dogma, but rather to explicate and clarify dogma. And this is why I would say careful Roman Catholics today don't use this argument for the

papacy. And historically it's not been used. You can find scholars and historical figures who will reference intertextuality between Matthew 16 and Isaiah 22. But we all agree on that. You don't find this argument for the papacy that I'm aware of. I think I don't know how much this argument it exists outside of YouTube. That's just an initial thing. The main things are these next two. Second of all, the usage of typology is arbitrary. It's in the eye of the beholder. It becomes like Plato. You can bend it any way you want. So some offices from the Davidic monarchy are carried over to the New Covenant era, but not others. Why? Who says? Why do you have the secretary, or you have Eliakim's office, the steward, but not the secretaries? Who's picking and choosing?

some aspects of this office are carried over, but not others. Why? The typology is applied to some New Testament passages or extra-biblical passages differently than others. So Matthew 16 works one way, Revelation 3-7 works another way, similar language in Josephus still works a third way. Who's deciding how you apply the type to the anti-type, what gets carried over, what doesn't, and so forth? or, you know, it's very arbitrary. Thirdly, let's suppose you gave the typology maximum flexibility. You put the typology into the hands of the interpreter. You say, look, there's some kind of usage of Isaiah 22 here in Matthew 16.

So do anything you want with that. Whatever you see in this office, the type, apply it, bend it, change it, fly as high as you want into the sky with it, whatever you want to do with it, and then apply it to the anti-type, okay? That would still nonetheless amount to an argument against the papacy. Because Eliakim's office is nothing like the papacy. It's not priestly, it's not teaching, it's not supreme, and it's not infallible. Not only is there no dogma, no infallible dogma that any holder of this office ever gives, there's no dogma of any kind that anyone who held this office ever gave throughout the entire Old Testament.

The office of Eliakim looks nothing like the papacy. It's just a minor office. You know, we can hardly name anything that anyone who held this office ever did. You could count them on one hand. And then after Eliakim, it just completely fades away. So the point is, how in the world do you arrive upon this specific antitepe, a Vatican One idea? Even if you allow yourself to say, well, Peter is the new Eliakim, but in a way that Jesus isn't the new Eliakim, we'll do this with Matthew 16, and then we'll do that with Revelation.

37, give yourself maximum freedom. Nonetheless, where in the world the things like infallibility come from? It's like pulling it out of the rabbit out of the hat. They're not there in the type. So where do they come from? So I really think this argument is problematic and I just hope that people will really think that through and then be consistent with the way they use typology in other cases. Then so for this, for Cameron, it seemed like that argument was the main thing. And on top of the typology, then there's the Bayesian analysis. Now, contrary to some people, I don't have any problem with people using Bayesian analysis. I think it's fine for the purposes it's designed for. It's simply a technical way of arriving at inferential probability. And that's fine.

You know, you can use any sort of method you want to do your reasoning. The problem is if you lack good theological training or judgment, things can get really skewed really fast in terms of the numerical value attached to each particular piece of data. So in some cases, you know, an argument against the papacy isn't going to be given nearly enough numerical weight. So, for example, I'm at 22 minutes and seven seconds in the video, I won't even show this clip. Just keep it moving here. I want to finish up soon. But at that point, he talks about how, you know, this issue of, well, that no Pope's names were known early on. But that's not a big deal because maybe they wouldn't share the names because it was a time of persecution.

And it's like, this is not a good understanding of the argument. It has nothing to do with names. First of all, the persecution was not continuous. But more to the point, it's not the absence of names. It's the absence of the whole thing. It's not just that we don't know Pope's names. It's that we don't know anything about any single business. early on. And we have so much countervailing evidence like the Shepherd of Hermes, talking about

presbyters presiding over the church in Rome that even the Catholic scholars acknowledge there's a plurality of leaders in Rome early on for some period of time. The only debate in the literature is how long. So things like that were, in other words, an argument against the papacy's not being given sufficient weight in the numerical value assigned. And then later on, I think it was around 29, the 29 minute mark, Cameron was saying, you know, he thought about my arguments against the typological argument, Swans' arguments for it, Swan's arguments for it. By the way, sorry, Swan if it's hard. I really like Swan. He's a brilliant guy. So I'm not trying to, none of my comments he reflect upon him in his work on this argument. He's done a lot of groundbreaking work. But I don't think

this is a good argument. And you can really respect someone and just disagree with them. And that's where I'm at on this. But anyway, so Cameron was saying, you know, he's kind of in between. He's not sure. So he just, he said, you cut, what you do is you don't dismiss it, you cut the probabilistic force in half. Now that was a really interesting point in the interview for me. And I'm thinking, why half specifically? That's a very specific numerical judgment, 50%, not 40%, not 60%, not 80%, you know, because I would say a bad argument shouldn't have any value. You know, imagine if you're talking with someone and they say Psalm 104 verse 5 and Psalm 93 verse 1 is proof of geocentrism. Historically, the church, both Catholic and Protestant, use these passages which say the earth shall not be moved,

and they appealed to the passage in Joshua where the sun stands still to oppose Copernicus and heliocentrism. And so suppose someone is saying, look, Psalm 93 says the earth shall not be moved, therefore geocentrism. And you say, but that's not what the verse means. That's not a good interpretation of the verse. It's not speaking to this question of science. And they say, okay, fine, cut it in half. Put it through Bayesian analysis and cut it in half. Well, cutting it at half is still giving it enormous weight in the overall calculation.

So what I'm saying is the typology and bays allows, in combination with each other, allows things to get very squishy. Not because typology is bad or bays is bad, but because they're really easy to misuse if you don't have good theological training. And yet this argument really seemed to be the main one that convinced Cameron. And so from that, I guess the appeal I'd like to make is to encourage people to really read widely. And that means taking your time. And by time, I don't mean a couple of months or something.

I mean really immerse yourself and, you know, learn the arguments from both sides in the best possible resources. Now, some have an understandable concern that comes up here and they say, this place is an intolerable burden on the individual Christian. How can everybody become an expert? And this is something that Cameron and Matt were talking about. And they were saying, you know, you don't have to face that burden. You just trust the church that Christ established. And I can understand that appeal. But my response to that would be to say, how do you know which church is the one that Christ established?

How do we know it's not the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church? the East or a branch theory view like what I hold. There's no way to know that without studying it. There's no shortcut around really thinking it through. You know, it's like if you go to a mall in the dining area where there's like 12 different restaurants and let's say you go and you're not sure where to eat and the person working at the first register right there just says, oh, just eat here. That way you don't have to make a decision about it.

It's like, well, that is a decision. How do you know that you should listen to that person? the person at the next restaurant down might say the exact same thing, you know. So the bottom line is there is no shortcut around serious theological study through reading historic books and other forms of really deep immersion in the theology. And a lot of the burden of my YouTube channel is to try to just be a resource to people in that process. So I hope my videos are helping people in that process. All right, a final comment.

Where do we go from here? What does this when there's a conversion like Cameron's? What does it mean? What does it not mean? Three things it doesn't mean that don't change. Number one, we can still be friends. You know, it doesn't need to ever become. My approach is we just lay it all out on the table.

We argue for what we believe is the truth, but it doesn't need to go to diminish friendship. And when I watch guys like Cameron and Matt and the other people Matt Fred will have on his YouTube channel, I think these are awesome people. I look up to them. I admire them. I'd like to be friends with them, and that should not change. Number two, we can be co-belligerence on social causes. When, you know, if Cameron follows through becoming Catholic, we can still stand for a lot together. Look at the great things the Catholic Church does on some social issues.

Thank God for what Matt Frad does in fighting against pornography. Thank God for what Lila Rose does in pro-life advocacy. A lot of Catholics are leaving. the charge on these issues and we should partner together. It's interesting. I'm overall more on the conservative side politically, but I'm not in a slavish way and not wholesale and I try to think through each thing for myself. And on some issues, I just don't, you know, I'm just not persuaded. So I've spoken out about issues of race and the issue of climate change. And so sometimes I get a lot of pushback from my audience because a lot of people who watch my videos are more on the conservative side of

of issues like that. And even though I don't even like using that word conservative for that. But anyway, but on the issue of abortion, you know, you won't find a more enthusiastic advocate for a pro-life position than me. And I'm so thankful for the witness on issues like that from Catholics. But beyond those two things, thirdly, we can have a common salvation. And I in saying that I am advocating for a historic Protestant view, and I'll come back to that in a moment.

However, so those things don't change. friendship, being co-belligerence on social causes, and recognizing salvation among those on the other side. But it doesn't mean that these issues are unimportant. This is a significant divide. The difference between Protestant and Catholic is major. It goes down to the roots of how we function as Christians. And so I do think it impedes ministry collaboration.

And I'm bringing this up because I think the thinking for, Cameron with capturing Christianity is that now it'll just focus on mere Christianity, but I think whether you're Protestant or Catholic affects how you even go about doing that. So let me explain that just to finish off here. Why is this divide so deep between Protestant and Catholic? Why is it so intractable that even though we pray for reunion within Christendom, it feels like it will need to be a miracle for it to happen? Well, I would say one of the biggest reasons is the exclusivism of the Catholic side. They, as Protestants, we can call them a church.

I do, and I will justify that in a second. They look on us and they don't call it. My church is not a church according to them. We are just an ecclesial community. We don't have the Eucharist. I've never taken the Eucharist once in my life, and I never will unless I become Catholic. That's their system of theology.

We don't say that about them. I'm writing a book right now called The Case for Protestantism. It has a section on Protestantism and history, Protestantism and authority, and then thirdly, Protestantism and Catholicity. And I'm going through Richard Hooker and Turriton and others in showing that's not the Protestant way of thinking about Catholics historically. Now, I've had people question me on this.

Again, I'm kind of amazed the way people are so skeptical about my claims when I'm summarizing something rather than documenting it. So let me document that here. Just very briefly, I go into it more in my book, but just one quote from Luther, one from Calvin. Luther was writing to two Lutheran ministers about why a Roman Catholic baptism is still a valid. baptism. And in the context of that, he says, in the papacy, there is true Christianity, even the right kind of Christianity, and many great and devoted saints. The Christendom that is now under the papacy is truly the body of Christ and a member of it. That was either in the late 1520s or the early 1530s, but there's another quote, whichever one it is, I found another

quote that's the opposite of that. That's pretty consistent from him. Calvin, same thing. He's going on and on about the idolatry and superstition and error in the Church of Rome in his day that he's opposing. And then he says, when we categorically deny to the papists the title of the church, we do not for this reason impugn the existence of churches among them. He said basically it's not the church, but there are churches there. And the sharpest criticisms that they had were for the hierarchy and the ways they were frankly abusing the laity. They're like the financial manipulation of indulgences, for example. For that, they were using words like worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, the Antichrist, etc. But they didn't deny there's churches there.

And they didn't say you're out of the church or you can't be saved. The way Turriton put it is there's sufficient food for salvation within that system of theology. And that's my view. I hold to a sort of branch theory of sorts. I just think the true church is scattered amidst multiple institutions. I think it's kind of a reasonable view. You think there's one church, but she's. sadly fragmented. It seems kind of obvious to me. I actually think the Catholic and Orthodox views

implicitly slip into that when you hear them actually talking about other churches. And a lot of that is because there's been some changes, especially in the Catholic view. But anyway, but that generosity is not returned. So we are not a church. The Anglican Church is not a church. It's an ecclesial communion, et cetera. And that creates a practical barrier because if your goal is to support mere Christianity, then, you know, the thing is, mere Christianity is just transitional. C.S. Lewis uses that label for the hallway, not for the room that you live in. So you don't stay in mere Christianity. That's just the doorway you go through. And Protestants and Catholics have a different destination that's on the other side of mere Christianity. So inviting people into

mere Christianity is something we can do partly. But as soon as you think through, what's the end result of that, we're actually inviting people into different fellowships. So like an analogy would be if you and your friend are inviting people to a dinner party, you can both and you can partner together to invite them. But if you believe the dinner party has to be in the living room and your friend believes it has to be in the dining room, then you're actually inviting people to two different dinner parties because in the back of your mind, you're realizing we won't be fellowshiping together. And I just think it's really important to be really clear about how huge the differences are. are between these two particular systems, Protestant and Roman Catholic, it's not wrong or

unloving to just acknowledge it. Jay Gersher-Machin said, it is often said that the divided state of Christendom is an evil, and so it is, but the evil consists in the existence of the errors which cause the divisions, and not at all in the recognition of those errors once they exist. And that's true. So what I'm just trying to say is to encourage realism about how significant these differences are. We remain friends. We remain in dialogue. We remain in dialogue. We partner for societal good. We do not anathematize the other side to hell. But ministry collaboration is impeded.

And primarily because of the exclusivistic claims of the other side. Because they don't really think we're of them. Or if we are, it's because we're secretly Roman Catholic without realizing it, or something like that. And frankly, that condescension comes across in a lot of the online community. It's pretty thick. So anyway, that's just an encouragement to say, there's a lot we do have in common, but we shouldn't downplay the differences. This is really a big deal.

And that's why it's so important to be so careful to work through it. So hopefully my video here will be useful for people who are thinking through this. And maybe they're saying, should I leave Protestantism, these would be some things that I would, really, those two first two things, study historic Protestantism and read widely in theology and take a little bit of time to really get your bearings with that. I really would encourage people to do that, and that is my burden and the pastoral burden, honestly. It really is a pastoral burden because these issues, here's the deal. Final, I'm finishing, I promise.

They affect your family and relationships and friends. They affect your ministry and life as a Christian, but they affect your soul. That's the most important thing. They affect your soul. I'm not saying that you will lose your soul necessarily. I don't agree with those who say that, like Cameron, committed apostasy or something. I don't agree with that. But it does affect your soul, the kind of system that you're functioning in.

And I think there's a lot of richness in Catholicism, but I think there's a lot of baggage, and you can get the richness without the baggage in healthy Protestant contexts. So that's my appeal. Thank you for listening. For those on the other side, I'm sure it will be obnoxious. I'm sorry for offense. If the offense is caused by me in any way, which I'm sure it always is like at least 10 or 20%, you know, but I can't apologize for the truth if that's what's causing offense. But if it's me to some extent, then that I will say that's not the intention. I'm not trying to attack anybody.

I'm sincerely burdened about how important these issues are. And if you're new to my channel, subscribe because this is the kind of stuff I do. I do other things as well. But apologetics in the Protestant space is one thing I've kind of gotten into just because I've seen there's a real need for that. so you can check out some of my other videos. I do videos on kind of all different kinds of topics in this space, hoping it will help people who are out there wrestling with them as so many are right now. All right, thanks for watching everybody. God bless you. Let me know what you think in the comments. See you next time.