Joe Heschmeyer revisits the problem of essential doctrines and why Protestant apologists all fail to answer it.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. and I recently found myself the target of a three and a half hour long video accusing me of all sorts of nastiness, a video supported by some of the better known Protestant apologists on YouTube, folks like Gavin Orland, redeem Zoomer, the other Paul, and so on the subject matter, my recent video arguing that the one question that unravels Protestantism is which doctrines are essential. So today I want to explain why that question matters and then show why none of the accusations and responses are actual rebuttals to the argument. So let’s start with why the argument works and why it’s important. First, against the Catholic Church, which argued that we needed the interpretive authority of the church, the Protestant reformers of the 16th century argued that scripture alone is the infallible authority and scripture is all clear. This is called Sori Torah and the clarity or perspicuity of scripture.
I’ve been referring to this throughout as the Protestant view of scripture since it’s not just the Lutheran or Calvinist view, it’s a pretty standard view of scripture across denominational lines. For instance, the Book of Concord, which is Lutheran, talks about how scripture is the only standard by which all teachers and doctrines are to be judged. The Westminster confession of faith, which is Calvinist says the whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his meaning, God’s own glory, man, salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture. And then the London Baptist Confession of faith of 1689 says the holy scripture is the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. So this is enough of a common Protestant belief that you have, for instance, the book Co-authored by a bunch of different reformed theologians, solo S scriptura, the Protestant position on the Bible.
So to the extent we can talk about anything as a commonly held Protestant doctrine, this comes pretty darn close. Additionally, there is this second doctrine, the clarity or a promiscuity of scripture that is closely linked to it. The Presbyterian theologian, Archibald Alexander Hodge, son of the famous Charles Hodge, talks about how in order for scripture to be the sole and infallible rule of faith, in other words, in order for Sola s script, this Protestant doctrine to be true, there are a few things that also have to be true, and one of those things is that scripture has to be perspicuous. Now again, perspicuity is just a fancy name for clarity, and so I quoted in the original video I did on this subject, Barry Cooper of Gospel Coalition who says, it’s the idea that God’s word is clear about things that are necessary to be understood and obeyed in order for a person to be saved.
The Bible’s teaching on salvation can be understood by anyone and everyone. So there are different ways. This has been articulated by different denominational traditions within Protestantism, and the original statements on it were kind of outlandishly bold and had to be kind of dialed back. So originally, Martin Lutheran bondage of the will talks about how the external clarity of scripture, nothing, whatever is left obscure or ambiguous. Now obviously no one who’s spent any real time delving through scripture could hold to this for very long because you’re going to hit those parts where you say, I just don’t know exactly what this passage means and none of the other passages are helping me understand what this one means. So the Westminster confession advance is a more modest form of the claim that those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are clearly propounded.
If they’re not in one place, they are in someplace else. So clearly in fact that not only the learned but also the unlearned can attain to a sufficient understanding of them using what they describe as they do use of ordinary means. So these are cross denominational beliefs. Summing up again what I’m calling the Protestant view of scripture. So that’s number one again, soul of s scriptura. The Bible alone is the so and fallible rule of faith. And number two, purity of scripture. At least all of the essential doctrines are presented in scripture unambiguously. They’re capable of being understood by the unlearned as well as the learned. So this means as a consequence that if you are a believer of good faith, if you are someone who is a member of the elect, if God has cast his favor upon you, if you’re not just acting in bad faith or willfully blind to God, something like that, and you’re using the due use of ordinary means, which is a pretty low bar that the unlearned could reach, you’re going to know all the essential doctrines.
So that’s the Protestant argument writ large. In a nutshell in response to that, here is my really simple straightforward argument that somehow despite multiple response videos no one seems to have responded to, and it goes like this premise one, if the Protestant view of scripture is correct, sincere believers will all agree on the essential doctrines premise. Two, sincere believers do not all agree on the essential doctrines and in the earlier videos I give tons of examples of that conclusion. Therefore, the Protestant view of scripture is not correct. So that’s it. If you’re right about the nature of scripture, it’s all clear and it’s all we need, then it’s going to follow that everybody who is a believer and of good faith is going to come to the same beliefs on at least the essential doctrines. What we find is Protestants good faith, seemingly Protestants don’t agree with one another.
Forget Protestants, don’t agree with Catholics or Protestants, don’t agree with orthodox Protestants, don’t agree with Protestants on the essential doctrines. In fact, they don’t even agree on which doctrines are essential. Now, I want to specify here what the argument isn’t and you’ll see why it’s really important. A lot of people have been making hay of straw men. They’re just attacking these beliefs that are not the argument that I just laid out and are instead arguments that I’m not arguing and have not been arguing. So let’s talk about the arguments that I’m not making. Number one, I’m not saying any system in which people disagree is automatically false. That’s a ridiculous position, and you’re right, you could destroy that position because it’s so silly. Number two, Protestants disagree on things and therefore Catholicism is true. Now look, denominationalism is a scandal, but that’s not the argument I’m making.
Number three, Catholics are less divided than Protestants and therefore Catholicism is true also not the argument I’m making as you could come up with your own religion where it’s just you and your wife or your friend or whoever and you have a long list of very specific doctrines and you might have complete unity on a weird laundry list of doctrines. That is not my point at all. My point is sola scriptura does not reliably and safely get you to orthodoxy in the sense of small like Christian solid beliefs. How do we know that? Well, because of the massive disunity that we see among people who try to follow that roadmap. Like if you had a map and someone said, oh, this map is so clear, but then 20 people tried to follow the map and they ended up in 20 different places. You might reasonably say maybe the map’s not as clear as people thought it was, but instead you find people just attacking again this total straw man that my argument is simply you have disunity and therefore Protestantism is false.
Notice that’s not the claim I’m making. It’s you promised clarity and we don’t see clarity. And moreover, I want to stress that this argument is specifically about how Protestantism is making this false promise that it can’t keep. This doesn’t automatically prove Catholicism, and I didn’t try to claim it did. You’ll notice that the title of the original video in question here is simply called the One Question that unravels Protestantism. It’s not called Here’s Why Catholicism is True or Catholics, we all Get along with each other, ignore what you’ve seen in the media. No, that’s not it at all. And so I’m presenting what I think is just one simple question that shows a real glaring problem within Protestantism that if it worked the way it says it does, we wouldn’t find the amount of disunity that we find on essential doctrines. Now in response to that, as I alluded to Javier, pero, I believe is his name, did a three and a half hour, technically three hour, 23 minute response video to it, any calls at a rebuttal, but I’m going to actually push back on that a little bit because he doesn’t actually rebut any arguments I make.
Now that might sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’ll challenge you when we get to the end of this video or if you have a lot of time on your hand and you want to go watch his video to go see if any of the arguments I actually make, get rebutted and I’ll give you a little clue. You’ll notice if you’re watching the YouTube version of this that I’m wearing a very attractive shirt in the thumbnail of my original video, and he uses that same shirt in the thumbnail of his so-called rebuttal, but you will be hard pressed to find. Well, frankly, much of me at all in his rebuttal video, he tells you a lot what he claims I say and believe, but it’s usually not true. The first time I appear in any way, shape or form myself where I’m actually getting to say my own words instead of him caricaturing, the words he would imagine I would say is an hour and 17 minutes in, and it’s not from the video he says he’s responding to in fact the first time and it’s on an unrelated video on baptism.
Then by two hours and 42 minutes, I think I might have skipped one because there’s a lot there, but two hours and 42 minutes in, he finally gets into the second video I made on this topic, but the original video, the one in the thumbnail, the one that he claims he’s responding to, it doesn’t appear at all. Literally he makes a three and a half hour long video responding to a video I made without ever quoting me. Now, there’s a gazillion clips in his video, but none of them are from the person he claims he’s responding to, which then gets to the second thing, he labels it rebutted and rebutting Joe Hess Meyer. Now for reasons that’ll be clear pretty soon I’m going to use the legal sense of the word rebuttal, which is also I think the colloquial sense, which is that you’re using evidence or arguments in order to counter disprove or contradict the opposing party’s evidence or argument.
Somebody says whatever, and you say, no, that’s not true, and here’s why. That’s a pretty low standard. That’s all a rebuttal is I say London is a great place to travel and you say, no, it’s too expensive. You’ve answered my argument, it’s a great place to travel and I really enjoy it. Maybe I give some reasons for it, and you respond by giving some arguments as to why the thing I said wasn’t true. Now, you would imagine in three and a half hours he would’ve found plenty of time to do this, but amazingly he doesn’t remember. My argument is that if the Protestant deal of scripture is correct, sincere believers will agree on the essential doctrines. He doesn’t agree with that, doesn’t disagree with that, he just doesn’t talk about it. The second premise is that sincere believers do not all agree on the essential doctrines.
To the extent he says anything on it, he seems to grant that and that leaves in the conclusion therefore, the Protestant view of scripture is not correct. Now, I don’t know after having watched that entire video if he agrees or disagrees with that because if he disagrees, he hasn’t given us a single reason to believe that this argument doesn’t hold. So what has he done? Instead, you might be wondering, how has this guy managed to fill three and a half hours of time, yours, mine, and ours, if it’s not actually engaging in the argument, and I would say it’s by poisoning the well. Now, if you’re not familiar with that term, I discovered in preparing this that the phrase axiom, whatever you want to call it, poisoning the well comes from St. John Henry Cardinal Newman and his alogia, pro vitaa where he’s defending his faith against columnist charges and he says in there that he scorns and detest lying and quibbling and double tongue practice and slimness and cunning and smoothness and can’t and pretenses quite as much as any Protestants hate them, and I pray to be kept from the snare of them.
That’s a good place to start like, Hey, I intend to engage in good faith and I hope you do as well. It’s very easy in a polarized world to assume that people with whom we disagree must be like wicked in their wrong on purpose. And I want to be clear, I’m not consciously in that camp and I pray not to be, but says Newman, all this is just now by my present subject is my accuser. What I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his and his concluding pages is to cut the ground from under my feet to poison by anticipation the public mind against me, John Henry Newman, I would cosign and say Joe Meyer and to infuse into the imaginations of my readers suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say and reply to him. This I call poisoning the wells. It’s a military image, right?
If you are a retreating army and there’s an advancing army coming in, you’ll put poison in the water supply so they get depleted, but it’s a vicious kind of tactic. It is not a manly way of fighting as Newman puts it. And notice it is important that if you’re going to poison the well, you do it upfront because if you jump into the argument and people see, oh, you don’t actually have a good response, you can’t really do it like that, right? You have to begin, well, for instance, as Pavier Pero does the first nine and a half minutes of his response are just personal attacks. He literally in the chapters has an entire section called Joe’s Rhetorical tricks in which he falsely with no evidence accuses me of all manner of false tricks. So let’s dive into a couple of them. I just want to show, because I think this point, the fact that so many Protestants think this is a good response and it’s paper thin intellectually, I think points to a problem they have in responding to this one simple argument. So let’s begin with his, again, rebuttal and heavy quotations.
CLIP:
I do want to maybe apologize ahead of time to you guys if I get a little bit fired up during this video just because I want to shoot you guys straight and this case that Joe Hess Meyer puts forth, and if it’s the O of a lot of his videos, it’s just filled with what I would call purposeful obtuseness, what I would call tricks, and ultimately it doesn’t make for what feels like the most a robust discussion or a discussion that’s actually focused on what matters and on the substance, but rather is focused just on rhetoric and rhetorical bluster.
Joe:
Alright, so he is out the gate swinging, and I just want to point out, look, I’m making a pretty simple argument. This argument is either true or false. You don’t need any rhetoric tied to it. I’m not trying to move your emotions. I’m trying to point out the fact that factually speaking, the reformers and their Protestant successors have promised that the nature of the Bible is such that ordinary people can read it and come to the right conclusions on clear doctrines and they haven’t and they can’t. It doesn’t work the way they promised without a magisterium. It hasn’t and doesn’t. There’s no bluster, there’s no intentional obtuseness there. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but I don’t see it. I was going to make an angle joke I thought would be a cute joke, but I decided this was not the right time. In any case, what he’s doing here isn’t answering my actual argument, right?
He’s actually the one engaged in rhetoric. He’s poisoning the well. Now interestingly, he has unwittingly confirmed something I said and in my last video on this topic, which is that if you take this view of scripture, then you become more inclined to see any disagreement not as a result of a good faith like two. Well-intended Christians read the Bible differently, but you have to think somebody is being obtuse on purpose. This sounds really nice, I think on the surface as a doctrine, but it doesn’t really work in practice. What it does in practice is it gets rid of good faith, theological disagreement. Here’s what I mean by that. If somebody disagrees with me and I think scripture is all clear in this way, then they either aren’t doing their very basic homework, the due use of ordinary means and they’re lazy or they’re not a member of the elect and they’re wicked.
There’s not a third possibility as there is for Catholics and orthodox and cops that we have a good faith disagreement. Now to the extent that he specifies what he views as a rhetorical trick, it’s that one of the clips I showed of people who follow the Protestant view of scripture and end up in these false conclusions and contradictory conclusions is from a guy who denied the Trinity. Now, I flagged that at the time. I didn’t try to sneak it in there, but according to him, he gives a whole dialogue that I never actually said that really apparently triggered him.
CLIP:
He opens up one of his examples citing a unitarian and saying that Oh, as he was researching Protestants on the essentials that he was found that so curious to see Unitarian Protestants. I think even that just from the jump should be very frustrating. It is very frustrating Protestants that are good faith listening to videos like Joe’s.
Joe:
So there’s two things to note there. First, if you go back and watch the video, you’ll see I didn’t say Unitarian Protestants. I say nothing like that. What I do point out is that there are people like the guy I quoted in the video who believe in so scriptura, but who read the Bible using the Bible alone and don’t believe that it teaches the Trinity and in fact think that it doesn’t teach the Trinity. And then I asked, yeah, I’ve had this happen before where I’ve actually talked to someone who says they’ve trusted in Christ believe in salvation by grace alone, but they deny the trinity. The thing is though, it seems like all three of those men are talking about cases of what we would call invincible ignorance, somebody who is not consciously rejecting the actual Christian doctrine, they’re rejecting a false version of it or they’re affirming a false version of it thinking they’re affirming the true version of it.
But what about someone who as the standard I laid out before, knowingly intentionally rejects the doctrine of the Trinity? And so Mike Winger, who I mentioned earlier argues that some forms of that it might be okay, you could affirm non Trinitarian heresies like modalism. So the point that I’m trying to make isn’t Protestants aren’t Trinitarian, it’s that people using the Protestant view of scripture, so script Torah and believing in the clarity of scripture can and have come to at least three different conclusions. Number one, the doctrine of the trinity is true and it is essential for salvation. Number two, the doctrine of the Trinity, while true is not essential for salvation, you can consciously reject trinitarianism in favor of heresies like modalism that reject e trinity. Or number three, the doctrine of the trinity is actually false and wicked and is derived from paganism and believing in it in peril salvation.
Now you can find Protestants who will defend the first two and the only reason you can’t find Protestants who defend the third one is because we’re saying they don’t count, because they defend the third one, but they’re using sola script for to get to all three of those answers. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If you want to say they don’t count because they don’t agree with me on essential doctrines, I think you’re missing the point of the argument, but fine, that doesn’t sit well notice also, by the way, in that last clip I carefully distinguished, even when you have people like James White, William Lane Craig and Mike Winger who make things sound like they’re saying belief in the trinity is not essential. I’m careful to try to caveat, give them the benefit of the doubt and say it sounds like they’re talking about invincible ignorance. Someone who unwittingly denies the Trinity. Contrast that with how Javier PMO describes what I did,
CLIP:
Especially when you have Joe showing you all these clips of Protestants disagreeing, and so all we’re missing in reality over this back to back. Can Christians do this? Can Christians do that? No nuance allowed. He may not have said those words, but when he plays clips of Protestants trying to say, Hey, there’s a difference between as someone who is an obstinate heretic and someone who maybe just isn’t being obstinate, but they just don’t fully understand the intricacies of something like the Trinity Joe is like ahaha, so this must mean that the Trinity is not essential.
Joe:
Now you saw the clip yourself, so you know that what he’s saying is just objectively not true. I didn’t say the words he said, I didn’t suggest anything like it. I said the exact opposite. I said The position of James White, William Lane Craig sounds like the Catholic position. This is invincible ignorance. I’m not saying, ah ha, these guys don’t think that it’s an essential doctrine. On the other hand, Mike Winger then proceeds to say he thinks someone could be consciously Im Modalist, could intentionally reject the Trinity and that it’s not an essential doctrine. He could still be saved. That at least looks like a contradiction. But notice he is making it very clear this is a conscious willful rejection. This isn’t me playing. Gotcha. I’m asking the question, can someone knowingly and intentionally deny the Trinity and Javier PMO is not going to give an answer to that and then gets upset that I can point out people who will give an answer to that and they give opposite answers. I don’t see what’s tricky about that. This isn’t like, in other words, I’m giving them every benefit. The doubt you can see that in the clip and he’s just putting words in my mouth that are the opposite of the thing I actually said and did, which is curious if he’s got a good argument. He then goes on to make a really fascinating argument about Gish gallops. Here you go,
CLIP:
And I don’t know about you, but I feel like a lot of the time this sort of Gish Gallup tactic of this rapid flurry of yes or no questions is done in order to overwhelm the viewer and to keep Protestantism on the defensive. I feel that way. That is exactly what it is. That’s exactly what Joe hes Meyer is doing.
Joe:
Now, if you’re not familiar with the term Gish gallop, here you go. It’s another accusation of bad faith
CLIP: