Cleave to Antiquity and Matthew Barrett have recently left Reformed theology for more Apostolic expressions of Christianity. Joe explores why this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to explore two maybe seemingly unrelated conversions today, neither of which interestingly are to Catholicism, but I think you’ll see why I’m still excited about both of them, why I think they might be directionally correct and why I think they have some really important things to say about the future of a movement within Protestantism to try to shore up its historical bonafide. So the first of them is a YouTuber Cleve to antiquity. Pastor Ben, who until very recently was making a lot of pro Protestant but mostly just anti-Catholic and anti Orthodox content. It was less, here are some positive principles of Protestantism we all agree on, and much more just like here’s a scandal in the Catholic church. Here’s a controversial thing the Orthodox do. And then a funny thing happened as he was doing this.

CLIP:

If you’re going to consider becoming Eastern Orthodox, then you have to get comfortable with the fact that you’ll have to then think that every Christian you’ve ever met who was not Eastern Orthodox is going to hell

Several months later.

Good morning and welcome to Cleave to Antiquity. My name is Ben and if you’ve seen the thumbnail and you’ve seen the title, then you know that I’ve decided to become Orthodox

Joe:

Ben’s conversion. Announcing that he’s becoming Eastern Orthodox was shocking to say the least. And as I’m going to get into later, there is actually something we should all take away from that, which is don’t assume that because someone’s very hostile to Catholicism or orthodoxy, whatever you are, that that means that they’re not considering it. Sometimes people who are raging the most, it’s because they’re putting up an intellectual fight because they’re trying to work through their own objections. They don’t always want to show you that they don’t want to necessarily be that vulnerable, but that’s sometimes what’s happening. And so I’m encouraged by the fact that in a six video stretch, five of his videos a few weeks ago were just things about Catholicism. That much time and energy about like, oh, what about Catholicism? And maybe I’ve disproved it this time and then a week later maybe I’ve disproved it this time.

That’s good in a real way if it’s him working through his objections and God willing coming all the way home to Catholicism. But either way, him going from being Protestant to Orthodox is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. He will have valid sacraments and as we’re going to see, he has had to abandon a huge chunk of his own arguments for things like solo script Torah. More on him in a minute, but I want to introduce you to the second character, very different. Dr. Matthew Barrett Barrett is the author of In the five Solo series, he did the book on solo script Torah and he’s the editor of a book on justification called The Doctrine on which the church stands or falls. He is the editor of a systematic summary of Reformation Theology, which has a bunch of different contributors that you might’ve heard of before, and I think he has several other books.

Those are the ones I know of. But the most famous book that he has, at least from a Catholic perspective is his book, the Reformation as Renewal. And the whole project that he’s arguing for here is The Reformation is not a break with church history. It is a kind of renewal returning Christianity to the early church and returning Christianity even to the medieval church. So it’s a fascinating kind of claim. Dr. Gavin Orland called it the best new book on Protestantism, and both Barrett and Orland at the time were Baptists saying, look, as Baptists like this thing we’re doing isn’t this radical break with church history. It’s actually faithful to church history. Problem is Barrett has now gone the other direction. He has now announced that he’s becoming Anglican. He can no longer in good conscience be a Baptist for reasons that basically amount to, there’s such a radical break from church history required to be a Baptist.

We’ll get into him in greater depth in a moment as well. And it’s true that Barrett is still Protestant, at least sort of. There’s a reason though, father James Gad, the Anglican refers to Anglicanism as barely Protestant because there’s lots of different varieties of Anglicanism. You’ve got Episcopalianism, which is very liberal and looks much more like other forms of mainline Protestantism. But in this particular case, and Dr. Barrett is a member actually here in Kansas City of St. Aiden’s Church, which is a very traditional Anglican church of North America sort of church. And so that means a couple things. One, remember Barrett wrote the book on soul of scriptura and he is now part of a church that doesn’t affirm. So the script Torah, it affirms Primus scriptura that you have scripture first and foremost, but it has to be interpreted through the lens of church history, through creeds counsels, the church fathers and the church mothers.

It’s Anglican and you can’t just go with your own private interpretation of scripture. And if you look at the church, you might not be surprised to learn. This is often the place people go as Protestants on their way to becoming Catholic before they’re ready to just go all the way Catholic. They celebrate mass at Orienta, they receive communion, kneeling on the tongue. So even though we don’t think they have valid sacraments, stylistically, you’re getting used to a much more Catholic look and feel and style, and for many people, not for everyone, for many people this is a sort of stopping over before they become Catholic. I’m friends with at least two couples who were St Aidan’s parishioners who now go to our Catholic parish. So I want to suggest that this has something to say about what we might call the historical Protestant projects because the one thing that Ben from cleavage to antiquity and Dr. Matthew Barrett have in common is they both were in the business of trying to show that either non-denominational or Baptist or maybe broadly evangelical Protestantism is historically credible.

That if you could draw a through line from the apostles to the early Christians, to the medieval Christians to the Protestants that they were until very recently, and I think both of them have given up on that project as actually impossible. But to give you a sense of that project, the whole reason Ben chose the name Cleve to antiquity seems to be from this line of St. Vincent of Lauren, one of the early church fathers where he talks about what a Catholic Christian should do if faced with some novel heresy that in that case it is your care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty. So he’s looking for continuity with the yearly church. That’s what it is, to cleave to antiquity. And for a while he briefly thought that he could have that as a non-denominational pastor, and then it became very clear he was kind of looking around pretty recently he was putting up a video that suggested he might be on his lady becoming Lutheran, and then he analysis he’s going to become Eastern Orthodox.

That tells us something about how historically credible it is to be non-denominational that the people trying to do it, the people who are the apologists in the field trying to defend this like, no, no, here are these church fathers who support us soul script. Here’s all these guys who they would totally be on our team today that they can’t actually stand by their own argument. So a lot of Ben’s arguments I’ve never really bothered to answer and I don’t think they’re worth answering now because they couldn’t convince him. I don’t mean that in a mean way, dismissively, I’m happy that he’s converted. I would love to hear, I think he’s in the process of doing this. I’d love to hear him more explicitly repudiate why his earlier positions were wrong because I think he has led a lot of people astray who didn’t know church history very well and were convinced by him taking quotes out of context and things that we now see even from his own witness.

It’s not really credible. It’s not a very serious way to do church history. Barrett, on the other hand, I think does a much better job of doing the church history thing in maybe a more serious way. Reformation is renewal, I want to say it’s like a thousand pages long. He has done his work, but he is very much committed to this idea that Protestantism, and remember at the time he’s a Baptist and he’s training the next generation of Baptist preachers at the head of the doctoral program there. He thinks this is in keeping with church history as well. He’s very fond of a handful of quotes from Luther. So at the end of his book, he quotes Luther that thus we have proved that we are the true ancient church, one body and one communion of saints with the holy universal Christian Church. So his argument is Protestants, you shouldn’t run from the one holy Catholic and apostolic church.

You are that one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And he quotes Abraham Koper, who I believe is Dutch Reformed who said that a church that is unwilling to be Catholic is not a church and then he ends with this powerful line. What defines a true adherence to Protestantism to be Protestant is to be Catholic, but not Roman. And I think that that claim has become pretty untenable, even working out Barrett’s own kind of theology. I’ll get into that in a second here, but I want to give a couple more Luther quotes that he’s very fond of. There’s one from Against Hans verse that he’s quoted at least twice in the book and then is also quoted in one of the endorsements of the book in the beginning, it might appear a fourth time somewhere in the, but it gets brought up a lot and he’s arguing against Henry, I don’t remember where Henry was from, and Henry was a Catholic saying, Hey, you guys are creating this new novel heresy, this is bad.

Very much the thing St. Vincent warns against, to which Luther says they allege that we have fallen away from the holy church and set up a new church, but we are the true ancient Catholic church. You have fallen away from us. And then he quotes it again. They allege that we have fallen away from the holy church and set up a new church. We are the chant church. You have fallen away from us that this is kind of the argument. This doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but let’s consider one of the arguments for it. He argues that rather than accusing Luther of schism or of breaking with the church, we should instead look to Yala Pelican. Now, if you know anything about Yaroslav Pelican, you’ll see the great irony of this. He says, Pelican really upends this narrative of Luther as this radical break from church tradition and he says Martin Luther was the first Protestant and yet he was more Catholic than many of his Roman Catholic opponents.

Now that is a line from Pelican, but that is from I believe 1964 book that’s going to matter. I’ll explain why in a second far from a sideline issue. Pelican thinks his paradox lies at the very heart or the very center of Luther’s reformation, and Barrett says such a bold claim is the heartbeat of this book as well. So here’s the problem with that. As I say this is from, again, I think 1964 is when Pelican’s book on this came out at the time he was a Lutheran theologian. Pelican also as he tries to defend Lutheranism historically leaves and becomes Eastern Orthodox. And in fact, he later talked about that he was very gracious and tried not to get into I think what he viewed as interdenominational fights and the like, but he’s very clear that the reason that he couldn’t remain Lutheran, why he became Orthodox was at least in part because Luther radically subordinated tradition in favor of his own personal interpretation of scripture.

CLIP:

The co orination of tradition and scripture was called to account and tradition was drastically subordinated to the authority of Sola scriptura In 1519 at the Life 60 bait Luther’s opponent, Johan Eck spent his entire lecture quoting the church fathers, the councils, the Cannon law, the sentences of Peter Lombard and Luther in response began, and St. Paul and I will withstand them all.

Joe:

So as you can tell, Pelican does not continue to believe that Luther was just preserving catholicity and tradition, but rather views very clearly that he was a threat to it, that he challenged it, that he subordinated tradition Barrett nevertheless cites to Luther’s 10 reasons that he gives for why the Reformational lines with the Nicene Creed when it says we believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church and this is it going to become a very important test, he actually for buried himself, how much can a Baptist affirm the nice and cre not only on one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, but also for the belief on one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And so he’s citing to Luther who claims that, oh no, this is completely consistent with being a Protestant. One of the problems is that one of the things Luther cites to is, well, we agree on baptism and so as Barrett says, the apostle Paul assured the Ephesians that there’s one body, one faith, and one baptism.

The reformation can claim that unity with the same body on the basis of its authentic confession and obedient baptism. They might be saying, hold on a second, how does that square with being a Baptist? Because as you may or may not know Baptist deny from baptism. So if you are a Catholic or Lutheran or whatever and you were baptized as a baby and then you convert and become Baptist, they won’t recognize your one baptism. They will insist on you being rebaptized with a believer’s baptism because they don’t think your baptism as a child counted. This is how the original proponents of this view became known as Anabaptist re baptizers. That was the whole problem. They didn’t respect one lord, one faith, one baptism. So that doesn’t seem like a good argument in favor of the Reformation or certainly the Baptist wing of the Reformation actually being in historic continuity with early Christianity.

And Barrett seems to have concluded this himself as well, that his arguments don’t work for saving evangelicalism or Baptists at least as long as they’re not actually respecting baptism. He says a couple things. First I mentioned the creed and he in announcing that he was becoming Anglican said, are we consistent to cherry pick stealing away the doctrine of the creeds while rejecting the polity of the councils and the office of bishops so instrumental to implementing doctrinal accountability in the church? So let me explain what that means that this whole project Luthers on of saying, oh no, look, as reformers we’re consistent, one holy Catholic and Abic church, we agree with them on all of these different doctrines. Barrett’s point now is, well, look, this church clearly has bishops and you aren’t that church. You don’t have the same structure as that church. You might agree with them on some points of theology, you might agree with them on some doctrine, but is it really consistent to take their doctrine and pretend that makes you guys the same?

If you copy paste another country’s constitution, it doesn’t make you that country. It just means you’ve borrowed from somewhere else and this is what it seems like there it is suggesting Protestants have done with the creeds, certainly Protestants who don’t have bishops, which is going to be basically everyone except for Anglicans and a handful of Lutherans. In an interview he gave this month, he said, looking at early church history, especially the ecumenical councils, I had to ask why is it that the fathers believe that an Episcopal form of polity, that means having a bishop in your local church is simply being faithful to the apostolic tradition? I had to ask myself, this is back in his original announcement, why did the church fathers believe the New Testament naturally gave birth to bishops? Of which we have elaborate records, right? So we know that they had bishops.

They not only have bishops, they believe it is a matter of necessity to have bishops. It’s Saint Ignatius of Antioch points out a couple hundred years before then first council of Nsea that if you don’t have a bishop presbyters and a diaconate, you don’t have a church. That there’s no question that when they say one holy Catholic and embolic church, their meaning of church is something visible, structured and including bishops. And so if you say, oh yeah, we totally agree, only we’ve changed the words to now mean something totally different. You don’t agree like affirming a creed while changing the meaning of the words isn’t affirming the same creed. If a Mormon said, we can affirm this Trinitarian creed because we also believe in a godhead, we just don’t think it’s actually three persons of one divine substance, we just think it’s three different gods or two gods who are in common purpose.

You would say, okay, you’re just using the same words but you don’t mean the same thing. That’s not an agreement. Well, similarly, a Baptist who says, yeah, we can affirm the nice creed while changing the meaning of it doesn’t really work. I did a video on this at the time because the Southern Baptist Convention was debating whether they could adopt the ene creed and significantly they said they couldn’t, and this was one of the major points that Barrett realized he couldn’t remain part of this communion, that they were openly not able to affirm that they were part of the first council of EAs kind of understanding of orthodoxy. Part of that has to do with the authority of creeds within the SBC, but part of it is because I think people just recognized, yeah, we don’t believe the same things that the Christians in 3 25 believed, and that’s a problem for anyone trying to say the opposite.

The other issue that he had was of course on baptism because remember one of the reasons that reformers like Martin Luther claimed that this wasn’t this huge break was because they still believed one baptism. And so Barrett has to ask himself, was the entire church wrong to baptize the children of believers for a millennium and a half? Now, that might exaggerate the case slightly. There are places where they don’t baptize infants, but even the people who don’t baptize infants still believe baptism saves. I think it was much easier to show that even the people who waited to baptize didn’t wait because they believed that it had to be believers baptism. That is a complete historic novelty. They waited because they believed baptism forgives all sins, mortal and vial, and so you want save it for when you really need it. That was a bad pastoral approach because people would die without baptism and baptism confers other benefits, but even the people who delayed getting baptized did it for opposite reasons as what a Baptist would do today.

A Baptist today delays baptism because they don’t think baptism is really a sacrament that gives you any divine grace. The people who delayed baptism in the early church explicitly delayed it for the opposite reason because they weren’t sure if you could be forgiven mortal sin after baptism. So even though you do have somewhat of a dispute on when to get baptized, the two things to note are one, neither side sounds anything like Baptists and two, neither side believes that getting baptized as an infant is invalid or anything. It’s just a question of whether you want to use your get out of health free card in infancy or if you want to save it for when you really need it. I’m oversimplifying slightly there, but that’s the idea. So Baird has to ask, was the entire church wrong on this? Was believers baptism taught by the apostles only to disappear under the supervision of the greatest theologians of the church and then reappear for the first time in the 16th century?

That’s a great question. Are we to believe when St. Paul says when Lord, when faith from baptism, this is apparently something that Christians get. They understand baptism and then despite the writings of these brilliant theologians, not one of them knew this really basic doctrine and we had to wait for the reformers and only some of the reformers to restore it as Barrett puts it for someone serious, but catholicity, that pill was too big to swallow. Now he’s only looking here at two issues, bishops and baptism. Two issues that by the way I cover in my book, the early church was the Catholic church. If you’re interested in going deeper on what the Christians up to the year 200 thought about those doctrines, but as kind of his be noir, Owen Straten points out once Barrett starts making this argument, this is an argument against Protestantism itself.

Owen says, tucked into a single paragraph about baptism, this is an extremely important statement. This in a nutshell is a key Catholic argument against Protestantism. It is not a small or glancing charge. Before the ink dried on Luther’s famous thesis, Calvin’s Institutes in Zw Lee’s own, these Catholic theologians had mounted their most significant accusation against the reformers. Their doctrine was novel and right. If you’re Matthew Barrett and your whole point is the reformation isn’t a novelty, it is a retrieval and a renewal, then having to say, actually it’s a novelty actually they’re just inventing stuff in the 16th century that didn’t exist before. That’s a real problem. But if you’re going to take that problem seriously, that’s not going to just be a problem on baptism. That’s going to be a problem for a lot of Protestant doctrines. I’m going to stick to baptism because it’s worth just underscoring.

These guys both seem to take for granted that there’s a novelty here. Strahan doesn’t say actually believers baptism was widespread in the early church in the Middle ages. He doesn’t say any of that because it wasn’t Everett Ferguson in his book Baptism in the Early Church. I know I’ve quoted it before, but it’s worth quoting here again, looks at the first five centuries of Christianity and he says that there’s a remarkable agreement on what baptism does and specifically the person baptized receives forgiveness of sins. They also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ and it causes them to be regenerated or reborn from above. Like when Jesus says this is that you need to be born again of water in the spirit, that is what it means. You need to be baptized. The early Christians have a remarkable agreement on that in the 500 years that he looks at in his book, and they continue to have a remarkable agreement on that till the reformation, so that creates a real problem.

Remember as din says, the issue here in the Catholic charge is the doctrine is novel. Is it possible that all of the church fathers are wrong and you having reinterpreted the Bible have gotten it right? That’s at the heart of what this charge. This is the charge against the reformers. Then it’s the charge against people who are reinterpreting the sexual morality of the Bible and saying, actually it doesn’t really have anything negative to say on homosexuality. That means temple prostitution, all of those things. Is it possible that everybody, until you has gotten the Bible wrong and you are getting it right, and I think there’s a couple answers to this. Again, I want to stay focused on the issue of baptism, but maybe draw that out for the broader implications because Dr. Gavin Orland was asked about, yeah, it doesn’... Read more on Catholic.com