Truth Unites - Is Papal Infallibility in the 1st Millennium? Response to Erick Ybarra

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

In this video I respond to Erick Ybarra on Suan Sonna's channel about whether papal infallibility is in the first millennium of church history. See their video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVH_j22lkrA 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/

Okay, what's up everybody? It's a Thursday night. I'm here at the church. There's some background. The band is practicing. You might hear some background music. My friend Eric Ybarra put out a response about people infallibility and supremacy in the first millennium. I'm not going to give a line-by-line lengthy response. If we want to have a dialogue, that's where we could kind of really dig into the details. And that would be great. I'd be happy to do that. But I just want to give a brief response to address a few general structural issues for people following along in the discussion and I won't even cover supremacy. I'm just going to focus on people infallibility here. My last video is about people supremacy. I haven't really said much about people infallibility,

but they went into that a fair amount. So I'll focus more on that issue in this particular video, but we can keep talking. Just a brief one to move the conversation forward, hopefully. At the end of the video, let me just play a clip of how they summarize their conclusion. I mean, with all the work that you've done, with everything that you presented, just don't think that, you know, Catholics are really anybody who wants to move the ball forward in this debate. You know, I think that's something that Gavin's really interested in moving the dialogue, the ball forward, right? I don't think we can just keep asserting anymore that the claims of Vatican One are totally novel, that they were just invented at the council in 1870, that they

have no prior precedent, or that they don't have robust prior precedent. The evidence is there. Vatican one is there in the first millennium, you have to deal with that fact somehow. Now, that's the question. It's not if Vatican 1 is in the first millennium. It's that Vatican 1st millennium. How do you deal with it? What are your thoughts on that, Eric? Yeah, I think, I think that's, we need to all, you know, kind of like Chinese checkers,

like the ball's got to fall in. We all need to fall into that concave hole where, okay, Vatican 1 is there in the first millennium. I don't believe it. I don't like it. I wish it wasn't there. But it's there. Right. And I have a theory that can account for that. I'm a Protestant. I can edit, revise, and reinterpret history and sort of go back to the original source of scripture. Well, that might be a way to handle it. But let's not, you know, try to revise history to the point where we're denying the facts, you know right yeah and i think that if we deny that vatican one was in the first millennium then we're denying the facts now i found this unhelpful and overstated and kind of triumphalist

they're basically saying anybody who doesn't agree that vatican one is in the first millennium is denying the obvious facts rewriting history and so forth but the view that they're saying that about is representative of all of the non-roman catholic churches this is you know a billion and a half people or something like this. And it's also the mainstay view within the scholarship. So I want to explain just why I strongly disagree. And I think that's that kind of conclusion, the spiking the football in the end zone. It's clear. It's settled. You know, I think that's way off base. By the way, when I reference, I'll get into my case in just a second, quick parenthetical comment about scholarship. I often reference scholarship in my videos.

I find scholarship can be a relatively objective metric to appeal to. in the context of apologetics. Scholarship can be more fair-minded sometimes and less partisan. People sometimes are real negative about scholarship. I do think that's unhelpful. Of course we shouldn't be uncritical in our use of scholarship. And of course, there are various biases we have to be alert to. But the fact is, scholarship's an incredible tool.

And people who reject it are so selective because the only way we have critical editions of these texts and translations is through scholarship. That's something we receive through scholarship. So, you know, but whenever I reference scholarship, it's not just to say, oh, the scholarship says it has to be right. I don't actually do that. I also get into the primary texts.

Some of the other channels, not Eric and Swan, who will criticize me, I find it really strange because it's people who don't have scholarly credentials kind of chiding me for not engaging the primary texts, but it's like in the videos they're critiquing, I am quoting the primary text. But the fact that I quote both the scholarship and the primary texts, they interpret that as, oh, he's not reading the primary text. And they're sort of chiding me about doing that, which is so strange to me because I, like, I've translated medieval texts in peer-reviewed university presses, you know. So I do read the primary text. It's kind of weird where people raise these, I don't know, there's kind of an anti-scholarship mentality that I think is kind of simplistic.

I understand we need to be critical and careful in how we use scholarship. But my interest is always just to say, hey, here's what the scholarship says. Now let's see why they say that. And that's kind of what I'll do in this video too. But anyway, that's just an aside about scholarship. Here's why I strongly disagree with their conclusion. Two concerns. Number one, you know, Eric will have, by the way, let me say at the beginning, I really like Eric and Swan.

They're great people and they're both really smart, really intelligent. Eric's got this bad. I mean, he just wrote a book on this. He knows more about this than I do. He's way more of an expert on this particular subject matter in the whole picture. I do particular dives here and there, but, so he's got this battery of quotations, like all the strongest quotes about the papacy through our church history. And so he's able to line those up and give a very effective presentation. My concerns are twofold, though.

Number one, there's a false equivalence made between the Roman church and the Roman bishop. And second, more foundationally, there's a false equivalence drawn between infallibility, on the one hand, and other things like indefectibility, immutability. immunity, we'll talk about that, more general statements like about the Church of Rome being undefiled or being necessary or other things like the P words I mentioned, prominent, and so forth. So there's an equation being drawn between these two things. Let me just give like one example of some of the differences. I'll mention indefectibility, which means basically not subject to failure or flaw. So in the context of ecclesiology or the doctrine of the church, to say the church is indefectible, or a particular church is indefectible, we're saying that it will

never die or fail to accomplish its purpose. And at Vatican One, there's language about the unconquered stability of the Church of Rome and the image of being set on a rock and things like this. Okay, so that's one idea. Infallibility means preservation from error in teaching. So those are pretty clearly conceptually different ideas. Preservation from death. and preservation from error are pretty clearly different. And yet what's happening is an appeal is being made to the one as though it were to the other. So an appeal is being made to a quote about, and actually there's more distinctions we need to get in here too, but it's an appeal to the indefectibility of the Roman church as though it was a statement about the infallibility of the Roman bishop,

which is a completely different thing. Now, you could argue that one entails the other. And it's not just indefectibility. That's one example of kind of these distinctions that I think are missed in the case. You could argue that one entails the other. That would be, you know, but they're not the same thing. So it would need to be clear that that's an inference that's being drawn. What you can't do is just give a bunch of quotes about Roman centrality and necessity and indefectibility, et cetera,

and then conclude, ah, see, as, as, you can't do. though that were proof of infallibility, you need to show that that's a derivation from the claim. Okay. And the reason for that is these Roman Catholic scholars that I've referenced, like tyranny and chats and others, people following along will recall the quotations from them, and many others, by the way, their view accounts for those earlier statements. Again, I tried to say this so clearly, and I want to reiterate it, nobody is saying that in the 13th century that suddenly you've got papal infallibility out of nowhere. We talk about it as an accretion, a slow buildup. So all of these earlier statements about, you know, strong statements

about the Roman Church are a part of that process. They're a part of the proposal being made by someone like Shats or Tierney or others. And there's differences from one scholar to another about the details. But they're all saying there's a process of growth and it's sometime in the medieval era that you get papal infallibility per se. Okay. The process is an accretion. We're building up to that. Now, at one point, the word spontaneous was used to describe my view. That is inaccurate. Accretions are not spontaneous. They're gradual.

They're the opposite of that. So earlier phases of the growth of the papacy in various respects don't disprove the thesis that the first explicit reference to papal infallibility is in the 13th century. Now, by the way, some people put that earlier or later. I'm not sure exactly where to put it. it's a tough, it's kind of a fuzzy edge. You can't, it's hard to pinpoint, like this is the day it happens. I really am not dogmatic about it.

I'm kind of open to being persuaded where exactly, but I think it's somewhere in there in that medieval high Middle Ages, late Middle Ages, somewhere that you can read through the canon law debates about the papacy and see how it's growing and getting to that point. So, you know, here's a metaphor to try to help explain this. If I said that my six-year-old... year old son is now, I don't have a 16 year old son. This is a metaphor. But my kids are growing so much. It feels like we'll get there soon. If I said my 16 year old son is now six feet tall. I measured him on June 1st and he's six feet tall. He's grown so much. And somebody says, yeah, but he was only

five, nine, three months ago. They're not rebutting you. They're not disproving the point. It's like, yeah, that's what we mean by growing. First you're five nine, then you're five ten, then you're 5-11 and so forth. Similarly, when we talk about the papacy as an accretion, we're not saying papal infallibility just fell like a bolt of lightning in the 13th century or whenever exactly we stage that. It's the final stage of this long process building up to there. So if you're in the 12th century, 11th century, 10th century, you're going to be really close. You're going to find all these strong statements that are almost to papal infallibility per se. If you're in the eighth or the sixth the fourth, you'll find things that are kind of building toward that in that direction and the

trajectory. But it's impossible tonight to deny there's growth. I don't know of anybody who thinks it's just, it's always there. I mean, you know, you can just read through the medieval canon law debates and you see, you know, issues like papal immunity from temporal authorities, from being judged by temporal authority. Big hot topic as it's developing. What do you do if the Pope teaches heresy? Is he deposed? If so, is it immediate? If so, by what process and so forth? Big debates happening. And you can see how the office is changing over time. So, you know, the idea has come up that, and Eric said this repeatedly, that tyranny, the Roman Catholic scholar, who dates 13th century for explicit emergence of papal infallibility is being skeptical, you know, for not seeing papal infallibility in these earlier passages. And I would say, I really, I mean, that was said so triumphant. without even a lot of teasing it out, I would just say, I don't understand this.

He's not being skeptical from my advantage point. You know, let me do this. Let me humble myself under the subject matter here by just saying, here's how it seems to me, at the risk of understatement. But I don't want to offend because I really like Eric and I really like Swan, okay? But it seems to me that Tierney and the other scholars who are in that ilk, because he's pretty representative of kind of, at least in the broad strokes. I understand there's outlier views and there's differences in the details.

But the broad idea here, that papal infallibility explicitly comes into the emergence sometime in that medieval era, I don't think he's being skeptical. I just think he's being careful to make these distinctions between things like indefectibility and infallibility. Or personal infallibility and ecclesial infallibility. Or infallibility in the preservation of tradition. as opposed to infallibility in the pronouncements of dogma. Okay. Now, again, these things all have overlap, and you can argue from one to the other.

But pointing out the difference is, is not being a skeptic. You're just being careful and noting the differences and the nuances, because, again, it's an accretion, so you're going to expect to see, like, a slow buildup to that point. It'd be like, I really don't understand this, because I don't think it's that complicated what we're saying here, but I don't know. It doesn't, we don't seem to make progress as much sometimes. Like, here's how it feels to express my experience in these conversations. If somebody says, oh, you can't do that, that's impossible.

And I say, well, it's not impossible. It's just really, really difficult. And someone says, well, you're being a skeptic. It's like, what? Skeptic. No, I'm just noting that there's a difference between impossible and difficult. Similarly, it's not skepticism to just chart out the historical development and growth accurately and say indefectibility and infallibility are just not the same thing.

And so a quote for one is not direct proof of the other. You need to argue inferentially from that. Okay, so hopefully that makes sense. I don't want to belabor the point here. Anyway, this is just, so let me work through a few examples. I actually am not even going to get into a ton of examples. We can keep, but I asked Eric, you know, What does he think is the most effective quote he has?

And he said he thought they were all pretty close, kind of all in the same general area. But he mentioned, if he said if I had to choose the strongest, he mentioned like four examples. And one of them was Anselm. And I love Anselm. That's the text I worked on. I didn't translate the whole thing, but I translate all the passages I referenced, I translated. That was my dissertation to do a commentary on his book, the proslogion, which is the coolest book, the coolest theological text ever. But that's another subject for another time.

So I'm not trying to give the weakest quote here, okay, because I think he would see this as a strong one. I mean, he said it was in the top four. So I'm going to pull this up on my computer here, and I'll put this up on the slide in my editing process. Really cool picture of Anselm he got. I've actually never seen that picture before, really cool one. But anyway, so here's the quotes. Let's read through them and ask, is this infallibility, papal infallibility per se? Number one, for as much as the providence of God has chosen, your holiness, to commit to your custody, the life,

and faith of Christians, and the government of his church, and to no other, can reference be more rightly made, if so be anything contrary to the Catholic faith arise in the church, that it may be corrected by his authority, nor to any other, can anything, which may be written against such errors, be more safely submitted, that by his prudence it may be examined. Okay, second quote, let those who despise the Christian decrees of the vigor of Peter, and in him the decree, the of Peter and of Christ, seek for other gates of the kingdom of heaven, for certainly they shall not enter in by those, the keys of which the Apostle Peter bears. The first quote is talking about the Pope's authority to correct, he has authority over the church to correct error. He's been given a

charge, so to no one else is it more fitting or more safe to make this appeal. The second quote is saying, basically, if you despise the decrees of the Pope, you won't make it to heaven. basically, or don't look to go to heaven through the keys that Christ talked about. Neither of those quotes is surprising for the time in question here in the 11th century that would fit with the general development proposed by the Roman Catholic scholars, for example. Neither says anything about papal infallibility, which means preservation from error in teaching. You see, it's like, you know, there's the charge to teach authoritatively and correct error and the necessity of submission to the Pope are not the same thing as the Pope being preserved from error in the dogmas that he pronounces.

Now you might say, oh yeah, but there's still really strong claims. Okay, right, it's the 11th century, you know, we're building, you know. But the whole point that I emphasize so much in my video is generally strong claims of authority, generally high, big, grand claims, because you can find all kinds of stuff like this, where the, you know, especially when others are seeking a favor from the Pope, they will really ramp it up. But that's not the same as infallibility. So it's like we're just trying to be precise and accurate about when each particular thing emerges. Now you might say, well, infallibility is implied by those statements for the following reasons.

Okay, I don't think that's true. I don't think that is, it's certainly not obviously true. I was trying to think about that. like, okay, does this require preservation from error in teaching in certain conditions? But even if that were the case, that would need to be said. That wouldn't stand against the proposal on the table that papal infallibility first explicitly emerges in the 13th century. That wouldn't be counter evidence. Because nobody's saying, oh, you know, it couldn't be implicit or something like that before then,

or that it's a hard cutoff, like, you know. So it's just like you just think about, go through each of these quotes. and you just ask, is the word infallible used? If not, is the idea of infallibility, preservation from error present? If so, is it about the Pope? And is it about him teaching dogmas? Or is it something else like the church as a whole preserving tradition? And so many of these quotes, what I'm pointing out with Anselm here is the same as for so many of these quotes.

There's a stretch from other qualities like indefectibility, necessity, authority, etc., to infallibility. those are still prominent. I mean, look, you can still say, wow, we've got a papacy and it's really powerful, but we're just trying to be accurate about when papal infallibility per se emerges. So a scholar like Tierney is not being a skeptic, he's just noticing what Anselm is saying is different from personal infallibility in pronouncing dogmas. Okay, I hope I'm not belaboring the point too strong. But, you know, these quotes were adduced and then it would just be said like, ah, see, Turney just says, you know, I just don't see it, you know. And so let me, just explain like how what what the scholars like tourney or shats tyranny i guess you pronounce that

um how they respond to these things because you know the scholars get thrown under the bus as though they're just i don't know blind or something that is so skeptical like you know a quote would be read and then the the response from these scholars would be characterized as they're just saying i don't see it but that's not what they say they're just pointing out the differences in the development and process of accretion. So, for example, let's look at Shats, the other Roman Catholic theologian and historian who's come up. He's a great, you know, you can read his book on this online. I'll read from page 118 here, because I don't want to put all the focus on tyranny. I mean, he really got labeled as this skeptical person, but what he's saying isn't to all that out there. But anyway,

so here, so let's talk about Shats' view. Basically, he's talking about the formula of Pope Hormizdisdus in 519, which ended this schism between East and West. And by the way, it's going to quote from a later document, the Dictatus Papai, which is a series of statements assembled later in the medieval era about papal authority. So that's what this quote about the Roman church has never aired and never will err is from. But here's, and let me just read from this sixth century formula from this pope because I don't want someone to say I'm misrepresenting it. He said, the first condition of salvation is to keep the norm of the true faith and in no way to deviate from the established doctrine of the fathers. For it is impossible that the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, who said,

Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, should not be verified. And their truth has been proven by the course of history, for in the apostolic sea, Rome, the Catholic religion has always been kept unsullied. Okay, so here again you have this very strong claim, but you'd have to try, if you're saying that, you know, you'll hear people just quote that and say, boom, infallibility, you have to say, well, okay, what does the word unsullied mean? Is that talking about papal infallibility? Maybe you could get there, but it's a little bit of a process of reasoning from that, you see. So let me hear, so here's how Schatz responds to that. He's not just a skeptic, he's explaining. Here's his view. And again, he's a Roman Catholic scholar. Quote, the convict, this is

Shat, speaking, the conviction that established itself, especially but not exclusively in Rome, beginning with the Hormistus formula in 519, that the Church of Rome has never aired and never will err, of course differed from the later infallibility of the papal magistrate, especially in that it did not refer specifically to individual dogmatic definitions, but to the whole of the faith as handed down, and the tradition of Peter preserved intact by the Roman Church. In addition, it did not exclude the possibility that individual popes could become heretics because its reference was primarily to the Roman Church as such and not exclusively to the person of the pope. Now, you could say Shats is wrong.

You could just say, no, no, no, you know, it is, that is. What's being discussed, this high view of Rome in the 6th century is the same thing as personal infallibility in dogmatic pronouncement by the Roman bishop as an individual. You could say that is the same. You could say he's wrong. But he's not being a skeptic. He's just trying to point out some of these differences. And the differences aren't that out there.

So I think it's just a matter of these scholars are just trying to be accurate in just tracing out what I call a process of accretion, a process of growth. The office is growing in its power. Bottom line is there's a massive difference between so many of these statements that are basically saying,

this church will never fail to hand on the faith. You know, there's variation in them. There's a big difference between saying that and saying, Popeius XI is the bodily assumption of Mary is a divinely revealed dogma. You see, there's a big difference. If you're back in the sixth century,

you know, in other words, and this is the main concern of this video, a process of indefectibility for the church in traditioning and maintaining is different from infallibility given to one person in pronouncement. I think that's just what people are talking about when they talk about the medieval development. So hopefully that's clear. One last thing. I told you this was just a brief kind of articulation of kind of categorical concerns,

because hopefully that'll help us in the discussion as it goes forward if we do want to kind of get into the weeds. But one last thing, they mentioned, they made much of the, it was known in every age assertion. So, you know, at the end they said, oh, yeah, you know, Swan brought that up in the first five seconds that this was a quotation from the Council of Ephesus and that just destroys everything. But the it was known in every age statement. It's actually, I'll put this up on the screen. It's disputed precisely how much that's referring to, you know. Does it refer to just the earlier parts of what you're seeing on the screen right now that basically Peter, received the keys of the kingdom and so forth, or does it also refer to the and? And I've even read

things about people arguing about how to interpret that. Does it refer to also the succession? But any way you interpret it, it's not talking about what we're debating here, which is infallibility and supremacy. What I focused on in my video, so it's not, it doesn't destroy the case. That's a quote from Ephesus, because we're talking about papal supremacy, papal infallibility. Now, the statements about those things of Vatican 1 are not quotations from the early church. Here's the one that I referenced the most in my initial video. It's a claim of Vatican 1 that's talking about how supremacy applies to papal teaching. And it says that apostolic primacy, which the Roman pontiff possesses as successor of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, includes also the supreme power of teaching. The Holy See has

always maintained this, the constant custom of the church demonstrates it. and the ecumenical councils, particularly those in which East and West met in the union of faith and charity have declared it. So I talked a lot about that language, constant custom. Now, I just don't understand, you know, why not just take the language of faith value? I'm just trying to be a good faith reader. You know, the word custom, the word constant has a meaning. So somebody says it's the constant, it's demonstrated by the constant custom of the church. I'm saying, okay, is that true? you know, that's an incredibly bold claim. It's saying it's not just occasional and it's not just something that the popes are claiming.

It's the actual practices of the church that constantly are demonstrating this. That's an incredibly strong claim. So that's the target to be evaluated by the historical data. And I don't think that's true. I just don't think it's pretty clear. It's not true. I just think, you know, you just see it slowly developing. And the only questions are about when precisely.

you make the cutoff points and when precisely you identify which elements are coming in at which points. But it's not constant. I don't know. I wouldn't know how to accept that even if I wanted to. So I really am trying to state my concern about this because the papacy is one of those things where it's like, boy, this is just a deal breaker. I mean, we're never going to get back together. If one one of the churches is saying, hey, everybody has to submit to us, you know, we can speak at the level of scripture in terms of infallibility and so forth. that's a major barrier in ecumenism. I would say the main one.

I really would. So that's why I'm trying to help the other side know why I'm so deeply burdened about this. But we can keep talking. Those are just big picture responses categorically. Hopefully that will be helpful. We can talk about people supremacy and other times. I just wanted to kind of briefly respond because I hadn't really talked about. I'd reference that tyranny quote, but I didn't really unpacked.

Maybe that's my fault. Maybe I should have explained that a little more. but for people, because I, you know, again, we're not saying it just starts in the 13th century. You're building up slowly to get there. But all these quotes up before that point, they don't talk about, the vast majority of them don't talk about infallibility. Where you do see the language of without error, it's not the Roman bishop making a pronouncement. That you don't get that, that's what all the scholars are saying.

It takes a while to get there. Anyway, those are my thoughts. Hope this is helpful. Let's keep talking. It's late. It's Thursday night. I'm heading home. Peace out.