Truth Unites - How Protestants View the Papacy (Debate Reaction)

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Gavin Ortlund responds to the debate between Ubi Petrus and Erick Ybarra hosted by Matt Fradd about the papacy in the 5th and 6th centuries. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Last night I watched this debate between Ubi Petrus and Eric Ybarra on the papacy. I'm just going to use the term, hit the name Ubi Petrus, because I think that's how he is best known. And I thought it was a great debate. I thought they both did a great job. Pines with Aquinas always does a great job hosting these debates, very fair host and good structure. I thought Eric in particular handled himself really well in terms of just, he does better at this than I do, honestly. The ability to stay calm and yet be forceful as well. It's so hard to find that balance.

I tend to, you know, I either get too argumentative and annoy somebody or I'm so afraid of doing that. It's hard to find the balance. But anyway, he did a great job. Calm, but he made his points well. And it did it. It's hard to listen in a debate. That's one thing. If the whole culture of debate watching could change, that would be good for us all to have a little more grace on people who are doing a debate.

They both did a good job listening, interacting. So, congrats to both of them. I'm not going to do a debate review. I'm probably not competent to do that. I've studied a little bit of Pope Vigilius, but everything else here is kind of I'm still learning about. The subject matter was, is Vatican One primacy manifest in the fifth and sixth centuries? So that's a pretty specific topic. I'll just share my main reaction.

You know, there's different ways you can analyze something. You can go real close. Like if you're studying the Amazon River, you can get in a little canoe and go down every little rivulet and trace it all out. Or you could just step back and look at a map and see the big picture. That's what I'm doing here to step back. Big picture. What was like my main feeling after walking away? And I can summarize it briefly, but saying that was technical.

That was a very fine-grained debate that really got nuanced. And I think part of that was in this particular debate, I felt that because each party showed a good ability to understand some of the nuances involved in the other position, that the other person helped. And so reasonable concessions were made in both directions. So you can see, you know, it's like this party is conceding over here, but then withdrawing a little bit this way. This party is making a concession over here and then withdrawing, you know, and you get this kind of, you're looking in from the outside, kind of trying to figure out how does this all shake out, what does it result in? And, you know, it'll be pointed out like, well, the Eastern bishops made this kind of expression of support to the Roman pontiff at this time. but then in the other direction, Eric is very good at seeing the strength of opposing views when they are relevant. So you can see him, I think Ubi at the end of the debate, summarized his position as a minimalist one rather than a maximalist one.

And he's sort of making this argument, hoping I represent him fairly here, that Vatican One is best approximated by the 5th and 6th century data. But it's in the neighborhood, it's in the ballpark. the scales sort of tip in that direction. That lands you in the neighborhood of Vatican One. I don't know any other church today that can comport with the data. We might be able to say, well, it's not exactly how things are today in the Vatican. Yeah, I grant that. There is some distance.

But if the magic number is 500, I think the evidence of the patristic era in the 5th and 6th century, lands us at 470, whereas the Eastern Orthodox number would be like 300. So in other words, I think the data lands you in the neighborhood of what the Vatican one called the papacy. So the number comparison there, 470 to 300. I hope I remembered those right. You know, in other words, the scales tip this way, but you can kind of see evidence on both sides, just a matter of which set of data outpaces the other.

so on and so forth. It actually gets, and I credit him with arguing in that way, because I think that's a fair-minded approach. But what you walk away with feeling is like, at least, I don't think I'm the only one who will feel this way, the sense, relative to what is at stake in the question here, namely the unity and authority of the church. It's amazing how complicated this topic is. And that raises, now, that's not a criticism of anyone or anything. I'd be criticizing reality itself, if I put that as a criticism. It's an observation, but it leads to a very human and very unavoidable question, and that is, what do you do if you're not sure? I think this applies to a lot of people. And so this video is actually more of a pastoral one than something making a concrete

argument. But just to speak to this, because I think a lot of people will go through this experience. I know they do, where they'll study church history, they'll study the scripture, they'll listen to YouTube debates, maybe they joined a Discord server, they're praying, they're godly and sincere. And they're visiting churches and they're practicing and so forth. And they take their time and they're patient. And ultimately still, nothing decisive really emerges. And they kind of end up saying, I'm not sure, whether between these two options or between

either of them and an alternative. I know a lot of people who feel kind of stuck even between like a Protestant view and a non-protestant view of some kind. And what comes up here is the issue of private judgment. Sometimes private judgment is put against Protestants because there will be this rhetoric that, you know, stop trying to figure everything out on your own and just trust the church that Christ established. We hear this appeal a lot. And it's very powerful because I think a lot of people do feel exhausted these days with trying to figure things out. They see the complexity of these issues more than ever.

And it's a powerful appeal to say, like, wouldn't it be nice if there was just a church that could just deliver on everything when you had a question, you could just get it resolved and so on and so forth. But as it turns out, it's not a simple question to figure out which is the church that you should trust in amidst the various different competing options because it's not even just restricted to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. You've got the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East and then various splinter groups as well. And then we look at all the Protestant groups and so forth. So you could put it like this. If you consider two claims, I'll try to make this point simply.

Number one, don't rely on private judgment, trust the church Christ founded. but then number two, to determine which is the church Christ founded, use your private judgment. And I don't think number two is avoidable. I think you have to do that. You know, no one has a sixth sense guiding them this way or that way. You have to think. You have to work at it. And then the difficulty of number two there reduces the curb appeal of number one. And remembering that, that doesn't defeat any option here, but I do think it undermines some of the rhetoric against us as Protestants about private judgment. And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, because I don't know who this is,

but I saw this tweet, and I thought it actually makes it a really fair point. The more I watch stuff like this over time, the more I think that this sort of stuff is fundamentally vain, that there is no way Christ founded a church that is so hard to figure out that you have to, I think that meant to say sift through 2,000 years of conflicting documents, you're never going to find the church, or never going to find God with your nose stuck in a copy of the epistles of Pope Galasius or hair splitting over a council that happened nearly 1500 years ago. Unironically, evangelicals have their heads on more straight here. Now, I'm not criticizing anybody of being vain. One of my worries in unfolding this set of comments

is someone will take all this to mean basically it's okay to be lazy and just not work hard to study these things. That's not good. Being painstaking in our research, even on matters of detail, is a virtue. Nonetheless, I can appreciate the point that this person is expressing that it seems unlikely that God's intention would be that the one true church is going to be on the final side of like a 180 mile journey, metaphorically speaking, where finally you get to the very end, and you fall this way versus this way on this razor-sharp edge of nuance in this particular historical document. And so now you find the one, you know, it doesn't seem, and if it is like that, that certainly doesn't seem to be a superior option with respect to this concern about the

exhaustion of private judgment. Now, why would this tweet talk about evangelicals being right here? Unironically, evangelicals have their heads on more straight here. Let me just explain a little bit. I'm actually not going to try to, in this video, argue for the superiority of a Protestant view, as much as just try to explain it and not allow it to be unfairly put at the bottom of the pile, if that makes sense, and try to even the playing field a little bit with respect to our overall approach because I just watched a video by Josiah Trellum recently, and then I watched like two others right after and just, man, the Protestant view is just pummeled these days. And the language of Josiah Tretenham's criticism was very strong about just Protestant.

It's so obvious that Protestants have no historical basis and so on and so forth. Now, I think that there is a lot to criticize within Protestantism. In the United States, Protestantism is the largest option and it tends to be, you know, whenever there's a large, like if you go to a Catholic majority country or an Eastern Orthodox majority country, Catholic majority country maybe in like South America or Portugal or something, Eastern Europe for an Eastern Orthodox majority country, something like that, when there's a dominant group, you can often find various kinds of error and declension and, you know, you walk into your average church, your average parish, and you won't always be pleased by

everything you see. And that's true of Protestantism in the United States. We have a lot of weaknesses. But let me say why I think there's actually a really strong case to be made for a Protestant view of ecclesiology generally. That's the doctrine of the church. And by extension, a posture toward church history. And I just think the triumphalism against Protestantism on these kinds of questions is not warranted. By a sophisticated case I'm talking about if you look over right where my finger's pointing, these are Francis Turriton. If you're listening to the podcast, I'm pointing to some books. and then just to the other side is Martin Kemnitz, the great Lutheran theologian,

these other books are not, that's C.S. Lewis as till we have faces in Augustine and Anselm. But anyway, those two are be examples of, you know, Protestants, I mean, I think, again, people don't always treat the Protestant position very fairly. They're just not aware that some of the finest historians of church history that have ever lived are Protestants, like Philip Schaff. And if you, so my point is, if you look at somebody like this, what's their approach to church history? How would they approach this debate

on the 5th and 6th century level of authority of the Roman bishop and so forth? Some of you are familiar with this bell curve meme where you've got... I think the point of these is to say that often the original and most intuitive and simple view is what you actually end up with

after lots of study in a mature position. And I think that... So how would something like this apply to church history and Protestants? Let's say you get saved in college. You hear the gospel at a wonderful church. Loving people, spiritually fruitful, lots of people converting, getting baptized. You know, it's very biblical, very concerned with this scripture. And you just think, well, look, this church is biblical, this church is loving, this church is spiritually fruitful, therefore this is a church.

It's a good church. It's a valid church. So that's you at the beginning of the bell curve. Simple. Then over time, you're wondering, is this really a church? I mean, what about apostolic succession? What about church history? You're going through all this angst. You're worried about this. Question I want to try to address now is, why might you end up at the end of the bell curve, kind of going back to that original instinct that, yeah, they're loving, they love Jesus and they follow the Bible, therefore it's a church. Why might you end up like that? Not to try to argue for

this against every alternative, but just to try to explain a little bit. Protestants essentially say three things about the church and these discussions. Number one, the church is indefectable. The church is never going to die. The gates of hell will never prevail against it. Number two, the church is fallible. She makes a lot of mistakes. Her counsels and deliverances are subordinate under the scripture. They have less authority than God. Number three, the church is not restricted to one institution. A lot of criticisms of Protestantism, I think, especially at the popular level, fail to distinguish one and two. They act like any error means death. I actually don't, I'm not been able to locate why we get stuck here so much. To me, it's very just conceptually clear that error and death are different,

that you can be an error or you can get sick and not be dead. Think of at a hospital, there's lots of sick people, but they're not dead. Same thing can happen to churches. It can be a lot of sickness and unhealth and error without it resulting in death. But the key here is really point number three. So the church is not restricted to one institution. This is why Protestants actually need not agree with the terminology of this resolution with this reference. Now, I know what they mean. They're talking about what we call the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic at that time. But the reference here at the end to the undivided church, we would say the church was not undivided then. You have the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East. We can just say they're part of

the church. You've got schisms within the church, starting at that point, and earlier. We would go all the way back. So you've got schisms right out of the gauge. We can point to second century, third century, but we can also just look in the New Testament itself. The church in Corinth has schismata. That's Paul's word in 1st Corinthians. You've got churches falling away from the gospel in the apostolic age, Galatians 1-6. So let me try to explain this because I think some people sincerely and understandably just don't comprehend. The reality is a Protestant instinct about ecclesiology or the doctrine of the church sort of is just coming at the question from a different angle. And so I do think we get stuck a lot of

times here. So let me try to explain maybe addressing this concern. What a lot of people will say is like this. Okay, yeah, it's really complicated between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics about the papacy or about the filiocque. You go back in the fifth and sixth century, it's really tough to sort out. But the one thing we know we can rule out is Protestantism. This is basically what Cardinal Newman was saying. If you read, a lot of people, quote, to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant from John Henry Newman, and they don't read the surrounding context. In the context, he's responding to an Anglican named William Chillingworth, who was saying that church history is so chaotic that it can't be a reliable guide on par with scripture. And so Chillingworth is saying,

there's counsel versus counsel, Pope versus Pope, century versus century and so forth. And it's interesting how much Newman conceded to him. He basically said, yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. But then he said, the one thing we know for sure is that church history isn't Protestant. So yeah, there's a lot of chaos and division, but the one thing we don't find is Protestantism. And this is how I think a lot of people approach these questions today. Probably a lot of people think about this kind of topic too. Let me just try to address this, in a spirit of explanation. Protestants distinguish between what is essential to the church and what is accidental,

what is at the core of her being and necessary to her being, versus changing outward forms and expressions that can obtain in different instantiations of the church. And basically, we think the idea of a Roman bishop who has any level of authority, whether you're talking about a primacy of honor or a Vatican one supremacy or whatever, all of that belongs to what is accidental to the church, not essential. All of that is sort of coming into being slowly over time. It's not founded in divine revelation. Because of the level of triumphalism that comes against us, I need to say, without intending to give offense, we think the historical evidence for that is just absolutely decisive. And just, you can just

chart it out point by point, and we think the Catholic scholars basically all agree with that. So to understand that, listen to what Ubi says about the papacy in the second millennium. You have a sort of like Pope creep. So it's, well, papal creeping, I should say. So slowly there was an infrastructure built really the end of the first millennium. And then throughout the second millennium that led up to Vatican One. It's not like the Catholic Church was very conciliar. And then all of like, it's not like they followed this conciliar theory theory.

and then, you know, the Pope couldn't just come into any bishop's territory, and defraq a priest or whatever, and then all of a sudden Vatican won. No, slowly they built up to this. It was the Pope being able to ordainal bishops worldwide, him being able to. So what he is talking about there is what I used the word accretion for. I was almost hoping he would say accretion, but slow post-apostolic process of addition, what the Eastern Orthodox say about the second millennium, Protestants would basically just push that back into the first millennium as well. So the Eastern Orthodox

say there's a primacy of honor that's original, but then there's an accreted reality from that. And we would just say yes, but also the primacy of honor is itself an accreted reality from earlier reality. And if you push, go back all the beginning, you don't even have a single bishop there. But it's just first that, then you do, and then it's just growing and growing and growing. And it's totally plausible because it happens to almost every single human institution, whether Roman emperors or the president of the United States, almost any leader accrues more power or any singular office accrues more power like that over time. It's not at all surprising, humanly speaking, that you might see something like that.

Now, what someone might say, though, is, so in other words, you would basically say, look, yeah, in the fifth and sixth centuries, you've got this debate and so forth, but all of that is accidental to the church. Now, if someone were to say, how can something be so significant to the church and still remain accidental? And it affects the church so profoundly, but it's not essential? Again, I'm trying to imagine how people can sincerely be perplexed by this view. But consider as a parallel example the Roman emperor. It's hugely significant, not just for the church's government, but even for her doctrine, that she is

germinating in the context of the Roman Empire and not some other place in the world or some other time in history. The Roman Emperor is literally called the co-ruler of the Church with God, the guardian of the peace of the church. Every single one of the first seven ecumenical councils was both convoked and presided over by a Roman Emperor. It's hard to overstate the impact of Roman emperors on the church, and yet we would say that's accidental. We would say this is massively influential, but not essential because the Roman Empire can go away and the church still remains. And so Protestants basically have, I'm trying to help people understand how we're looking at it. We have a more flexible view of what the church can look like in her outward form and structure over time and in different cultures,

for example, while the substance of her faith endures the same. This is why we will look at the Muslims having dreams of Jesus, becoming Christians getting baptized. Now there's a church formed, totally valid church, who cares if you have a bishop laying hand on a bishop or something like that? You have the substance of the faith. So lots of different expressions. We're not pluralists and universalists who have no boundaries. We would say the church coheres wherever Christ is present in word and sacrament. So you've got to have the gospel. You've got to have the sacraments, but it can take a lot of different expressions. Again, that's not to say that the other things don't matter. Something can be in the accidental bucket and still really important.

like, say how you understand, what is the role of a deacon? Well, that's really important. But if you get it wrong, it doesn't mean that you're not a church. That's what we would say. Now, final question to address here is some people will look at all this and still feel like, well, this is just, it's just not tenable. And again, I sort of sympathize with how I'm trying to help someone who's sincerely trying to understand. They're just saying, like, you know, they might quote Newman to be deep in histories, to cease to be Protestant and just say, look, I mean, what you're saying, if so much becomes accidental rather than essential that's accruing over time, then you have a church that becomes unmoored from history,

and you know, you're just not tied down to like these fifth and sixth century on the ground realities. And I can understand how someone can look at that, but I think we kind of all have to wrestle with that. Okay? I mean, I gave the example of the Roman emperor before. But let me just try to develop this and let me try to cultivate sympathy and understanding for a Protestant perspective, even if it doesn't result in agreement from everybody. In my book, I distinguish between two different possibilities for what it means to be deep in history,

mainstream depth and historical depth. So mainstream depth is just whatever happens to come about as the predominating view or the largest view eventually. Historical depth is what is earliest. And essentially, what I point out is that even John Henry Newman had to recognize that mainstream depth is not a reliable guide to truth. This is, he concedes this point to some extent to Chillingworth. The simple fact is, church history is not the words of God. Church history is really messy. There are lots of things that almost every Christian today regards as error that

became big and dominant and had a kind of mainstream depth. And almost everybody thought like for some period of time. In the book, I give examples of social issues like usury or slavery. views on slavery, views on sex as only for procreation, views of women as not equally constituting the image of God with men. I talk about Augustine's doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized babies, which essentially reigned between Augustine and the Reformation. You have the qualification of limbo, but very few people think that infants who die apart from baptism get full salvation, get the beatific vision. Augustine's view really comes to predominate for about a millennium

among, you see it in all the major theologians like Gregory the Great and Anselm and so forth. And so, and then you look at the Old Testament and you see a similar dynamic of the way mainstream depth could be wielded against the true prophets of God like Elijah or Micaiah. You know, Ahab could say, look, trust the institution that God established. Caiaphas, the high priest over and against the apostles, could make this kind of appeal to mainstream depth. So what a Protestant is trying to do is go back. to what God has said.

Church history is beautiful. The church never dies. God's always at work, but it's not an infallible North Star. Errors do happen. Look at the church today. And so we want to go back to what God has said. We want to go back to the scriptures. And I think that's not only a reasonable view,

but just a really gripping and compelling one. So that's my effort at explaining how a Protestant might look at a debate like this. We might even have the privilege of being able to say both sides are Christians. both sides are the church. You got a schism, and both sides of the schism are still the church. And I know a lot of people today will think more like that, but that wasn't how people thought in the medieval age, as I have tried to document. But the main issue here to emphasize is just that there is no escaping private judgment. That's my main point in this video. Final question, what do you do if you're not sure? Pastoral advice. You watch this debate, you're like, I don't know. And then you watch that,

you watch my video, you're like, I don't know. I mean, how the heck do I know? I'm, how, I'm, how How do I figure this out? It feels like an intolerable burden, you know? Well, part of this is just being a finite creature. If you're an angel, even, you have to use your judgment to not follow Satan, but follow God when Satan rebels against God. So to be a finite creature of God is to face the burden of responsibility, to obey God and to follow God to the best of our ability. Pastorally, what would I say to somebody who's really struggling and they're not sure what to do and so forth? I would say two things. Number one, seek the truth with all your heart. This is so important because we can use the complexity of these things to get lazy.

There are no shortcuts. We've got to work hard. And that's, you know, it's fun. But number two, put all your trust in the Lord. And I think that is the key. I think this question, ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, where is the one true church of Jesus Christ? I think that needs to be brought under Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, like every other decision in our lives. trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. This is a comforting promise. Where you will ultimately find resolution is not reading one more conciliar document. And by the way, people from other traditions can probably agree with this point. It's not being smarter than all the rest of the people. It comes from casting yourself on the Lord. I'm going to put it this bluntly. The most important thing in your ecclesiology is the same as the most important.

thing in every other area of your life, trust God. Put all your faith in him. This very angst you feel about not being able to decide about these things. Give that to the Lord. Surrender it over to Jesus. Ask him to bear that burden for you and to guide you by His Holy Spirit. I'm not embarrassed to speak of these basic existential questions because I think that that's who the Lord is. And I think that's actually where we're going to find peace and not find anxiety because we can trust God because we know who he is from how he's revealed himself in Jesus. And Jesus' willingness to go to the cross for us means he has no desire to damn us. So if we're seeking the Lord with all of our heart, we can put our trust in him that he's not going to deceive us.

He loves us. And as we seek him, he will be found by us. That's a promise in scripture, which I've talked about in other contexts, talking about Blaze Pascal recently. All right. Anyways, so this is a pastoral video mainly, and then an explanatory video as well a little bit. Good job to Eric and Ubi and great debate. Hope this helps somebody out there. Thanks, everybody.