Joe attends to what remains of Ryan’s argument against the salvific power of Baptism.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer and this is the first episode I’ve recorded since I did my debate with Ryan from Need god.net on Sunday. So I wanted to cover a few of the things. Anytime you do a debate, there’s always some stuff where afterwards you say, oh, I wish I’d spent more time on that, or I wish there’d been more time to cover this topic. And this was no different. I think the debate went really well. I still think there were some things I would’ve liked to cover in greater depth, partly because I was under the impression we were going to debate the resolution about whether baptism saves. Whereas Ryan seemed to want to debate faith alone instead. And I understand there’s a connection between baptism saving you and faith alone, and I want to explore that and then explore a few of the other areas and I’m not going to cover everything. So for example, one of the notable moments was when Ryan denied that the latter half of Mark 16 was actually part of the Bible. We should be Mark 1616. You think it should be taken out of the Bible? Is that
CLIP:
It’s
Joe:
Not in the Bible.
And I think there’s a really powerful case to be made there that he’s showing the problem with sell the scriptura. I’ve been told for like a year now after pointing out that the church having infallible authority is really important for determining the canon of scripture that this is a ridiculous Catholic argument and we can know the canon from scripture alone. And here I go debating the canon and saying, Hey look, here’s what Jesus says about belief in baptism in Mark 1616, and he just says, modern secular scholars don’t accept it as valid. So not part of the Bible. And I would just suggest there’s probably more to be said about that, but I’m not going to cover that other than what you’ve just heard here. I’m going to instead look primarily at the arguments that he makes about justification because again, this was not the point of the debate, but I want to cover that as well as this idea of whether baptism is the work which is closely related of course, and then pitting faith against baptism, maybe some tools about how we misread scripture sometime, and then the arguments from silence and we’ll get into all of that stuff.
So it’s going to be a little more of just a bunch of stuff that isn’t big enough on its own, but things I want to cover, not as separate episodes, but just this is going to be a grab back. So buckle up. The first point is this. I think the critical one, people who think Ryan won the debate are people who believe that salvation is by faith alone and that therefore you can’t be saved in any way by baptism because that’s a work. So to put some meat on the bones, I think the argument works in the minds of these people, something like this. Number one, we’re saved by faith, and you can also put that as we are saved by faith apart from works of the law. Step two, therefore we’re saved by faith alone. Step three, baptism is a work step four. Therefore, because we’re saved by faith alone, we’re saved apart from baptism.
Therefore step five, baptism doesn’t save. Now rarely do people spell it out that clearly or coherently because I think they’re assuming a lot of this stuff, but if you were to logically spell out the argument for them, I think that’s what it would look like. And now spelling it out in this way can be really helpful. It shows where we agree and where we disagree. So for instance, that first point, we’re saved by faith or we are saved by faith apart from works of the law. We absolutely agree on that. So I saw in Ryan’s postmortem, he tries to say, oh, Joe’s running from all these verses about how we’re saved by faith. And I agree with all those verses. There’s nothing to run from. Absolutely. We are saved by faith. Catholics and Protestants and Baptists all agree that we are saved by faith. So if you think you’re going to win the argument by stressing the part we agree on more, that’s not going to do it.
I mean imagine if you’re debating someone on the trinity, you believe in the trinity and they don’t and they say, aha. Look at all these passages saying God is one. You’d be like, yeah, that’s right. That’s why we don’t believe in three Gods. We accept all that. Maybe you understand the implications of that differently than we do, but let’s debate your understanding of the implications we agree on the verse. Well, so it is here. We both believe that we’re saved by faith. We disagree with the implications, but people who don’t realize that they’re actually interpreting the text, they think they’re just reading it without realizing that they’re making certain assumptions about what does Paul mean by faith? What does he mean by salvation? What significantly does he mean by works or works of the law? All of that stuff is super important and just largely gets glossed over because people assume certain definitions, ones that aren’t right.
So Ryan seems to divorce faith even from obedience, whereas St. Paul speaks of the obedience of faith. This is strong indication that while Ryan and I and St Paul all agree we’re saved by faith, St. Paul and Ryan don’t mean the same thing by that because they don’t mean the same thing by faith. So that’s the first step and we agree that we are saved by faith. The second is therefore we are saved by faith alone. Now that first step has a lot of biblical evidence. The second step, it depends what you mean by it. If you mean that you come into a right relationship with God by grace through faith apart from anything you’ve done, then yeah, we actually agree on that. There’s a misconception that Catholics believe that you have to earn your salvation, you have to earn your justification, you have to get yourself in right relation with God or you do 50% and he does 50%.
And Ryan spoke this way a lot throughout the debate and that is just a very bad understanding of what Catholics actually believe. Now this gets into that question of what do we mean by justification? What do we mean by faith? But let me give you, you don’t have to take my word for it, you don’t have to take Ryan’s word for it. Certainly you can listen to the Council of Trent, right? The Council of Trent defines what the Catholic church teaches on these issues and says that when the apostle meaning Paul says that man is justified by faith and freely that we’re to understand that in the way Catholics have always understood that namely that we are justified by faith, that faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification without which it is impossible to please God and to come into the fellowship of his sons and that we are justified gratuitously.
Why are we justified gratuitously? Because none of those things that precede justification. So nothing you do before you’re brought into a saving relationship with God, whether your faith or your works, none of that merits you being justified. That’s huge. And so in as much as Ryan was trying to prove that point in the debate, yeah, we agree on that, we would actually go further and say not only do your works not justify you, your faith doesn’t justify you in the sense of meriting it. It is still gratuitous. Your faith saves you, but it is still a gift. So you don’t earn your salvation by your faith. You don’t earn your salvation by your works. None of the gift of God is earned. Now, once you become justified, once you get saved, you do have to work to maintain it. And I’ll talk about that in a second, but I want to give Trent the last word here because they quote Romans 11, six, a very popular go-to verse for many Protestants thinking they’re really disproving the Catholic view.
And it’s funny because Trent says the same thing, if by grace it is not now by works otherwise as the apostle says, grace is no more grace. So we agree on all that. So how can we harmonize that with the view that later actions are needed after you become justified? Really simple. I’ve used this example before, but permit me to use it again. You did not merit the gift of life. You did not do anything to earn being here on earth. You just did not. Nothing you did possibly could have earned you conception or birth because you weren’t around to earn it. And what possibly could you have done to merit existence in the first place? You are owed nothing. However, once you are given that free gift gratuitously by God, do you have to maintain it? You do. So Ryan repeatedly will give these examples that, oh, if I give you this reward but you have to swim a lap in a pool for it or something, then it’s not a reward anymore.
But that completely misunderstands St. Paul actually Hughes the imagery of running a race and winning an award to describe his view of salvation, which again suggests that Paul and Ryan very different understandings and one of them is an apostle. And so yes, we can both say this is an utter gift and gifts have to be maintained with our effort. Someone gives you a car, you might have to put gas in it, you might have to change the oil, you might have to not drive it into a tree. That’s how gifts work in real life. And the gift of salvation is no different. So you can’t earn it, but you do have to maintain it and you can wreck it. There’s no contradiction between believing those things. Now for the record, none of that debate should be relevant for a debate about whether baptism brings you into that right relationship or not.
That’s a totally different debate, but that’s the debate Ryan apparently wanted to have instead of the one we agreed to. So let’s get back to the argument. So you’ve got, we’re saved by faith apart from works of the law. Agree there’s a bunch of biblical evidence, therefore we’re saved by faith alone. Depends a lot of what you mean by saved. But if you mean in the way that you’re brought into a saving relationship, then sure we would say you have to do works after that to maintain it, but they can’t earn it. So we might agree. So where do we disagree? Well, we disagree on the idea that baptism is a work and therefore it doesn’t follow that we’re saved by faith alone apart from baptism, we’ve introduced attention where none belongs and then the conclusion doesn’t follow. So think about the Trinitarian debate. If somebody said God is one, therefore Jesus isn’t God because he is not the father, you would say, okay, I agree with the first part. I even agree with Jesus is not the father, but I disagree with the conclusion you’re drawing from your premise. Well, that’s how it is here. We agree that salvation is not something you earn by your works, not even a little bit initial justification is a gratuitous gift from God. You have to maintain it, you can’t achieve it on your own.
That then leaves this question of baptism because here’s the thing that other debate about maintaining your justification is, as I said, a totally separate debate when the real issue is baptism is just not a work. Step three of the kind of argument is just flat out wrong. Now, strangely, I was reading some of the, or watching, excuse me, some of the reactions to the debate that various people had had. I had sought out what could I do better? And one of the things that I heard from a few different Protestant sources is one of the mistakes that I made was claiming that baptism was a work.
CLIP:
I will say this though, I disagreed with Joe when he was trying to conflate baptism as a work. Did you see that part he was saying was saying, oh,
Joe:
I missed.
CLIP:
He was saying it was a work. The main focus of it is baptism is not a work of man, it’s a work of God. So it’s not a work. Joe Hess was wrong about this in this debate when he was trying to conflate baptismal regeneration with works righteousness.
Joe:
And what’s weird about that is that I said the exact opposite repeatedly in the debate. Now maybe I didn’t say it clearly enough, but here I am trying repeatedly to say I don’t think baptisms at work. And more importantly St. Paul says, baptism’s not a work. When St. Paul says that we’re saved by faith apart from works of the law. Sometimes he says apart from works that he means that we’re saved apart from any human action or that we’re saved apart from anything like baptism. Now I think we’re going to see this misunderstands the Paul line sense of works, but for now, suffice it to say that no passage anywhere in the Bible ever describes baptism as a work. And St. Paul explicitly says in Titus three that we’re not saved by deeds, done by us and righteousness, but that we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.
If that sounds like baptism, it’s because it’s so, Paul believes both that baptism saves and that it’s not our deeds that save, it’s not works that save. And just as we saw in Titus three, the early Christians realized that baptism isn’t a human work, but it’s God’s work in the means by which God saves us by grace. Titus three St. Paul says We’re not saved because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but that we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. So we’re not saved by our deeds, by our works. We are saved by baptism here. Go trust Paul, not Ryan about what Paul means about works. So there you go. I mean quite clearly in Titus three, St. Paul says, on the one hand, we are not saved because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but on the other hand we are saved by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit. So that washing that water with spirit, that very much sounds like baptism and that is how that passage was historically understood. It neatly seems to show baptism is not a work. Now this raises all these questions about what does it mean to be a work? So from how to be Christian, talking about four different ways we can understand the word works in the Bible depending on the context.
CLIP:
Like in the Bible there’s works of law, there’s works of the flesh, there’s works of God, there’s good works, also known as works of love. These are all different categories of works that the Bible discusses.
Joe:
Okay? Now just think that through baptism is clearly not a work of the mosaic law. It wasn’t part of the mosaic law at all. It’s not a good work in any ordinary sense of that word. It’s not something you’ve done that people are like, wow, what a hero of our community. He got baptized as a baby. It’s not even a work in the ordinary sense of an active verb. Belief is much more of an active verb. I believe I trust I make an act of the will, whereas baptism is something you receive. So it’s not a work in that third sense. And it’s certainly not a work in the sense of a work of the flesh or else it would be evil to be baptized. So Ryan hasn’t shown any sense that baptism was understood by Paul to be a work, but more importantly, he doesn’t just need to show that under some grammatical sense of the word work. Maybe it could be he needs to show that this is the kind of work that St. Paul is saying that we’re saved apart from when St. Paul himself says that we’re saved through baptism and not the things he’s calling works. Whatever Paul means by works clearly doesn’t include baptism. So that faith alone argument falls completely apart that it’s fine to say we’re saved by faith. It’s fine to say even though we’re saved by faith alone, if you understand it properly, it does not follow that. Therefore faith is unnecessary because baptism’s not a work.
This points to I think a deeper problem though, which is a kind of pitting faith against baptism. And I worry here that one of the issues going on is that this kind of evangelicalism that Ryan is espousing pits one thing against another because of poor philosophical understanding of causality. And this is going to be nerdy here for a couple minutes, but hopefully not much more. So let me give the example I always give because the Sistine Chapel, if I said who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Was it Michelangelo, was it Botticelli? It can’t be a hundred percent of both, might be 50% of one, 50% of the other and might be a hundred percent of one and 0% of the other as it is, but it’s not going to be a hundred percent of both. It couldn’t be they’re competing actors. This is how Ryan imagines God and us in salvation.
He gives this strange example of putting one foot on the bus and one foot on the ground like you’re trying to get there by yourself or taking the bus. Now that’s a bad understanding of baptism. As I’ve said before, the only reason to be baptized is because you’re going where you believe God is telling you to go that is not trusted in yourself rather than God. That is definitionally what it is to trust in God. But the deeper issue there is to say it has to be faith or baptism would be like saying that we have to be saved by Christ on the cross or by faith. No, it is both of those and it’s a hundred percent of both of those. Well, how could that be? Because these are different levels of causality. They’re different types of causes. So go back to the Sistine Chapel example. If I said what percent was Michelangelo and what percent was paintbrushes, you would look at that question hopefully as a very stupid question. It was a hundred percent of both.
Was it Michelangelo or was it paint? Was it Michelangelo or was it the idea of these Old Testament images? Well, you can’t put those things against each other because they’re not the same type of actors, they’re not the same type of cause and the same way that a thing can’t be simultaneously like a hundred percent red and a hundred percent blue, it can be a hundred percent red, a hundred percent rectangle because those aren’t the same type of thing. Well, so too something can be fully God and fully man for instance, Jesus. And also we can talk about things like baptism being completely human and completely defined or scripture having true human authors and true divine authors in no competition where we can say this is a hundred percent the work of God and a hundred percent the work of the human authors led by the Holy Spirit and we don’t have to pit the two against each other.
The council of turn in talking about justification makes these distinctions. And this is coming from classical philosophy with people like Aristotle with the different types of causes. So some of this language might be foreign to you, but it’s important to note that this is helpful for avoiding the kind of false battles that many evangelicals find them in themselves. Then they don’t have enough philosophical training to realize you’re forcing a battle like Michelangelo against the paintbrushes. So in talking about justification, the Council of Trent says the final cause meaning the purpose is the glory of God, the efficient God, the efficient cause is the merciful God who washes and sanctifies gratuitously. So how are we justified? Well, because God wants us to be and because he causes us to be, but also the meritorious cause is Jesus’s death on the cross, the instrumental cause. How does Jesus apply this to us?
In other words is the sacrament of baptism, which is the sacrament of faith and then the single formal cause is the justice of God but significantly here. Not that by which he himself is just but that by which he makes us just. So if you want to know how are we justified? Well because God wanted us to be just, and so he sent his son to die on the cross. And that’s an important part of the answer. And you’ll notice that answer doesn’t actually mention faith or baptism or anything, but it’s still a hundred percent true. That would be a correct answer to the question. How do we become just good Friday? How do we become just the incarnation? How do we become just God’s desire for men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth? Those would all be accurate answers just dealing with different levels of causality. And so here to insist that it has to be faith and not baptism forces this absolutely unnecessary battle between two aspects of causality.
So I just want to highlight that and again, it’s theologically and philosophically deep waters, but just watch out for that kind of trap of pitting, lowering God basically to the level of a human actor and imagining that if I’m doing something that therefore God isn’t, that is completely unbiblical when St. Paul talks about how we’re saved and then do the good works that God has in store for us, he’s making it very clear that these are both God’s actions and ours simultaneously, not a 50 50, a hundred percent and a hundred percent because we are not at the same level of God. Alright, relatedly, I wanted to talk about how to misread scripture because one of the other things that I see coming up time and time again with this is just not knowing how to read scripture correctly. And I’m going to use this debate with Ryan as an example to draw broader points.
I want to suggest if you want to interpret scripture, well follow these points and if you don’t want to follow the scripture, well don’t do that. So the first point is you should favor specific biblical evidence over applying general or generic principles. Here’s what that means. So if you’re having a debate and the two sides are debating is adulterous sin, one side of the debate says, look at all of these verses in the Bible about adultery and the other side says, we don’t even have to look at those. We can just look at Titus chapter one verse five that says to the pure, all things are pure. What’s gone wrong there? Well, both sides are right to cite to scripture, but only one is citing to passages actually about adultery. The other one is citing to a general principle and then making a poorly educated guess about how that general principle would apply in a specific case, a guess that we know is wrong by reading the rest of scripture.
Well that’s exactly what’s happened here. Ryan has taken a general principle, how are we justified? And he’s misapplied it to what that means for baptism by just taking a guess about what that means. There’s no passage that he quoted at any point in the debate that says baptism does nothing. My opening statement alone, I give 11 different biblical texts that show that baptism does save us. And for many of those, Ryan had little to nothing to say about them. For instance, one of the ones I hope you really, if you’re at any point wondering about this, read Acts chapter two very carefully. You’ll see that the people are struck, they’re convicted when they’re hearing the preaching of Pentecost by Peter and they ask what must we do? And Peter tells ’em they need to repent and to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins.
And then they’re told to save themselves from this crooked generation. Now the apostles are telling the save themselves and there was no rhyme there to say, Hey, you can’t tell them that justification has to be 0% them or else it won’t be God’s action. That doesn’t happen because the apostles understood salvation better they got that it’s not God or man in some sort of tension between the two. And so reading Acts two, you’ll see it says we’re baptized for the Greek word there is ace, the forgiveness of sin. I covered this in my Tuesday episode and in the debate, and I would just stress here, Ryan has no answer to that other than to claim that the Greek word means the opposite of what it really means and he can point to no non-AP who ag... Read more on Catholic.com