In this episode, Jimmy responds to some arguments raised by Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund, primarily concerning the papacy. Gavin claims that there was no bishop of Rome (pope) until well into the second century and that—even if we grant that Peter was the first pope—so much hangs on the idea that there are later popes that, if this were true, it needs to be taught in the New Testament. How can one respond to these claims? What does the historical evidence show? And does Gavin’s own system meet the test he is proposing?
Transcript:
Coming Up
GAVIN ORTLUND: We don’t have anything that says in effect, it doesn’t need to be in these words, but something to the effect of there’s going to be an infallible teaching office, there’s going to be a Pope. And I would say that that’s a problem. In other words, we’ve only got one tire on the car. If we don’t have that, we’ve only got Peter. We don’t have, the car can’t drive unless you get the ongoing. And I would think that that should need to be clear because so much is at stake. If there’s anything that would be important for the New Testament to tell us, I should think it’d be this, that there’s going to be an infallible teaching office in the church.
Let’s dig in!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
What I’m Doing Today
I’m going to be doing something today that I wouldn’t normally do. I’m going to be responding to some arguments made in a discussion that I was not part of.
Recently, someone asked me what my thoughts were on an argument made by Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund about the papacy.
Offering my thoughts on arguments is something I’m totally fine with, but it turned out that these arguments weren’t in one of Gavin’s own solo videos on his channel.
Instead, they were part of a discussion he had with my colleague Joe Heschmeyer that was co-hosted by the YouTube channels Gospel Simplicity and The Cordial Catholic, and this complicated things.
We’ll have a link to the original video so that you can watch the whole thing.
Normally I don’t respond to arguments made in debates or discussions that I was not part of if a fellow Catholic apologist was involved—because it could look like I’m kibbitzing, like I’m offering advice where it’s not wanted.
So I contacted Joe and asked what his thoughts would be if I responded, and he very kindly said “Oh, no! No problem! Go right ahead!”
Also, to be friendly, I contacted Gavin to let him know I’d be offering some thoughts in response.
So that’s what I’m going to be doing today.
Who Is Gavin Ortlund?
For those who may not know, Gavin Ortlund is a Reformed Baptist apologist who runs a YouTube channel called Truth Unites.
On the channel, he does videos on various theological topics, including Catholicism.
Gavin is a really nice guy. He is more thoughtful and better versed in history than many apologists, and I really appreciate the fact that he seeks to stay friendly, to be fair to those with other views, and to keep the temperature of discussions low. All of that is really great.
I’ve interacted with Gavin a number of times, and—despite the fact that we’re coming from different sides of the confessional aisle—I’ve also worked alongside him on issues where Protestants and Catholics are on the same side.
For example, Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity had us both on his channel to respond to some claims made by atheist apologist Paulogia.
And I’m happy to do that kind of thing with Gavin in the future. He’s a good guy who I’m happy to work with!
Having said all that, we don’t always agree, and so here I’m going to be offering some thoughts as a friendly response to some claims he’s made about the papacy.
The Papacy and Sola Scriptura
Even though the discussion Joe and Gavin had was on the issue of the papacy, this topic intersects with other things, like the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.
The reason is that they both deal with the broader subject of how Christians are to form their doctrine.
According to Protestants, we are to form our doctrine sola scriptura—a Latin phrase that means “by Scripture alone.” So we are supposed to form our doctrine by Scripture alone.
What that means is a rather complicated subject, as different Protestant authors use the phrase to mean different things, but we don’t need to get into the details here.
Actually, Gavin’s understanding of sola scriptura is quite similar to one recently explored by Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity, and I interacted with that a couple of weeks ago—in Episode 21 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, so a lot of what I had to say there also applies to Gavin’s view.
In contrast to sola scriptura, Catholics hold that Christians are to form their doctrine using Scripture, apostolic Tradition, and a divinely guided Magisterium or teaching authority.
The Magisterium is the bishops of the world teaching in union with the pope, who is the head of the Magisterium. That’s why the pope is relevant to the issue of how we form doctrine, and that’s one of the key things that Joe and Gavin discussed.
The “Ultimate Backstop”
Early on in their discussion, Gavin said:
One way to put it is to ask the question, does the gospel regulate the church or does the church or some teaching office within the church regulate the gospel? Are the people of God under the word of God or is the word of God under the people of God? What’s the ultimate backstop that’s going to sort of regulate where the boundaries are and what the gospel message is?
This is a rhetorically skillful way of phrasing things. “The gospel” is a high and exalted concept that connects us to God, and so it sounds irreverent to suggest anything “regulating” the Gospel.
Similarly, “the word of God” is another high and exalted concept that connects us to God, and so it likewise sounds irreverent to talk about putting the word of God “under” the people of God rather than visa versa.
But while rhetorically skillful, this ultimately uses prejudicial language and a prejudicial way of framing the issue.
First, regarding the prejudicial language, Gavin is using the term gospel in a different way than the New Testament does. He appears to be using it to mean the sum total of Christian doctrine—since that’s what the Church’s teaching office or Magisterium can teach on.
The New Testament generally uses the term gospel in a much more restricted sense. For example, the existence of angels is part of Christian doctrine, but the New Testament authors would not say that the existence of angels is part of the gospel.
We’ll discuss how the New Testament understands the gospel in a future episode, but we don’t need to be detained by this now.
Second, Gavin is also using the phrase word of God in a different way than the New Testament does. Like many in the Protestant community he’s using it here to refer to just the written Scriptures.
However, the New Testament tends to use the term more broadly. Scripture actually conceives of any information God reveals to man to be the word of God, and it does not matter whether this information is transmitted in written or oral form. Consequently, the New Testament envisions the word of God as including both Scripture and Tradition.
By assuming that “word of God” means the written Scriptures, Gavin is biasing the discussion in favor of sola scriptura rather than the alternative Catholic paradigm.
He is thus framing the issue in a prejudicial way when he says:
One way to put it is to ask the question, does the gospel regulate the church or does the church or some teaching office within the church regulate the gospel? Are the people of God under the word of God or is the word of God under the people of God? What’s the ultimate backstop that’s going to sort of regulate where the boundaries are and what the gospel message is?
Gavin thus envisions two situations. The first is one in which the true Christian doctrine that God has revealed—what he calls the gospel—regulates the Church. He also expresses this situation by saying that the word of God—by which he means the written Scriptures—is above the people of God. This is the good scenario.
The second scenario Gavin envisions is one in which the Church or its teaching office—its Magisterium—“regulates” the gospel or revealed doctrine. He also expresses this situation by saying that the people of God are above the words of God, meaning the Scriptures. This is the bad scenario.
He’s thus proposed a “who’s in charge?” dilemma: Is it God or man? Either God’s word is in charge of man or man is in charge of God’s word. Given that way of framing the issue, the obvious answer is that God should be in charge, and so his word—which Gavin here limits to the Scriptures—should rule man rather than the other way around.
But this is not the only way to frame the issue. For example, a Catholic might call attention to the role of an individual’s own interpretation of Scripture. He might say, “Hey, what you’re really doing is exalting your own private judgment above Scripture. Your ultimate backstop is what you think Scripture means. The real choice is between you ruling the word of God by your private interpretation or you submitting to the teaching authority that God himself instituted in the Church!”
A Protestant might then object that this is a prejudicial way of framing things, and I agree. That is why I personally don’t use this framing.
But both Gavin’s way of framing things and the alternative one have elements of truth in them. So how can we frame matters in a way that doesn’t prejudice the question?
| Catholic View | ||
|
Word of God |
Magisterium |
Person’s |
|
Protestant View |
||
|
Word of God
|
Person’s |
Both sides agree that Christian doctrine is to be based on divine revelation or the word of God. In the Catholic view, this is understood as Scripture and Tradition, while in the Protestant view it is understood as Scripture only.
On the other side of the spectrum, both sides also agree that the individual must make his own choices when interpreting the information he receives. It’s up to him to decide what he believes and how he interprets the information that is presented to him.
What’s different is that in the Catholic view there is also a Magisterium whose job is to help the individual interpret the word of God.
There also is no “ultimate backstop”—in either system—that will ultimately prevent a person from interpreting the word of God incorrectly. That’s a possibility that can happen no matter which view is correct.
This is a neutral way of framing the issue that does not prejudice the discussion in favor of one side or the other. It does not tell or imply which system is right.
I would note that if the Catholic view is correct, it has some advantages over the Protestant view. First, it recognizes more material as the word of God. Catholics have a slightly larger canon of Scripture, which means we have more data to work with. The Catholic view also recognizes apostolic Tradition as the word of God, and so that also gives us more data. More data is better than less data, so that’s an advantage.
Second, the Catholic view has a divinely guided Magisterium, and additional divine guidance is a good thing. Further, the Magisterium is still with us and active, and so if a misinterpretation of the word of God arises—or if a misinterpretation of the Magisterium’s own statements arises—then the Magisterium can issue a correction. This is also an advantage.
But those advantages only exist if the Catholic understanding is correct. The mere fact that one view has advantages doesn’t prove that the view is correct. It may be more desirable to have these advantages, but we’d still need to turn to other sources to prove which view is correct.
And so I recommend that we use this neutral, unbiased way of framing the issue rather than the biased one Gavin proposed.
Engaging the Papacy
We now come to some material that engages the issue of the papacy more directly. Gavin is prepared to acknowledge that Peter had a leadership role among the apostles, and he is willing to grant—at least for purposes of argument—that we could regard Peter as a pope.
But if Peter was meant to pass such an office on to later individuals—so that we’d have it today—he thinks that this ought to be mentioned in the New Testament.
The problem is that the office of Apostleship is redemptive historically unique. There’s no apostles today. Apostles were eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, and they played a foundational role in the formation of the Christian Church according to Ephesians chapter two. So I’d say if there’s going to be a transfer of the responsibilities given to Peter, shared with the apostles to specifically the Roman bishops, we’re going to need to see clear evidence of that fact, and that is what I see as lacking in the New Testament. . . .
I don’t think it’s too much to expect that there’d be teaching. I mean, if there’s going to be, not just among the apostles, but an ongoing throughout the church age, infallible teaching office, I don’t think it’d be too much to expect that we’d be told. So in the New Testament. . . .
We don’t have anything that says in effect, it doesn’t need to be in these words, but something to the effect of there’s going to be an infallible teaching office, there’s going to be a Pope. And I would say that that’s a problem. In other words, we’ve only got one tire on the car. If we don’t have that, we’ve only got Peter. We don’t have, the car can’t drive unless you get the ongoing. And I would think that that should need to be clear because so much is at stake. If there’s anything that would be important for the New Testament to tell us, I should think it’d be this, that there’s going to be an infallible teaching office in the church.
Gavin will return to this subject later in the discussion, so I’ll address this line of argumentation there.
However, first I’d like to respond to some additional arguments he makes.
The Monepiscopacy
Gavin now discusses a concept that is known in theological circles as the monepiscopacy.
In Greek, monos means things like only, sole, or unique, and episcopos means bishop, so the idea of the monepiscopacy is that each church is to have only one bishop. The bishop is then assisted by his presbuteroi—from which we get the English words “presbyters” and “priests”—and also by his diakonoi or deacons.
Under this system, each local church is governed by a bishop, assisted by priests and deacons.
This system is very ancient in the Church, and Gavin acknowledges its presence in the second century.
The question is whether it goes all the way back to the apostolic age, and the matter is complicated because the terms that came to be used for church offices were still fluid then and were often used in non-technical senses.
For example, the Greek word presbuteros also means “elder” and in 1 Peter 5:1, Peter describes himself as a “fellow elder” of the presbuteroi working in the churches to which he is writing. But we know that Peter was more than what today would be called a priest. He was an apostle, after all! So when Peter calls himself a fellow elder, he is not using the term in the technical sense that we use it today.
Similarly, the Greek term diakonos can also mean “servant,” and in 1 Corinthians 3:5, Paul describes himself as one of the diakonoi of God. But Paul is not saying that he held the office of a deacon. He, too, was an apostle! He clearly means that he was a servant of God, so we have another fluid, non-technical use of the term.
There are also passages where the term for bishops—episcopoi—is applied to presbyters—or presbuteroi. For example, in Acts 20:17, Paul calls the elders or presbyters of the church of Ephesus to himself, but when he finishes speaking to them in Acts 20:28, he refers to them as bishops or overseers.
So it looks like the terms for bishop and presbyter could be used interchangeably in the mid-first century, and many have proposed that—originally—local churches were ruled by a council of elders without a single bishop over them.
The question then becomes how we shifted from this model to the monepiscopal model with bishops, priests, and deacons as separate offices.
A Single Bishop in Rome?
Gavin has some thoughts on this and how it relates to the office of the pope or the bishop of Rome. He says,
There’s no evidence of there being a single bishop in Rome until well into the second century as opposed to a plurality of leaders in the church in Rome.
So the claim is that we don’t have evidence of a single bishop ruling in Rome until “well into the second century.”
How does Gavin support this claim?
In the second century, you see the emergence of a Monarchical Episcopal, so a bishop, a single bishop who’s over a geographical region with the letters of Ignatius and see, there’s two errors we could make with Ignatius. One would be to ignore him, and some on my side have done that, and that’s wrong. The other would be to filter all the data through him. And I would basically say that Ignatius himself acknowledges that the monarchical episcopate model is not universal at that time because he says there’s Christians who do all things without the bishop.
Okay, so here we need a little bit of background. The gentleman Gavin refers to is Ignatius of Antioch. He was the bishop of Antioch in Syria, and he lived in the first and second centuries. In fact, he had apparently known some of the apostles.
Just after the turn of the second century—around the year A.D. 108—he was arrested by the Roman authorities and sent to Rome for execution. And being a martyr for Christ was something Ignatius looked forward to.
On his way to Rome, Ignatius wrote a series of letters to various churches he was passing by, and these provide us a very early window into Christian belief and practice at the dawn of the second century.
One of the things Ignatius is very clear on is the monepiscopacy and the three-fold ministry of bishop, priests, and deacons. He refers to these concepts repeatedly, and in his letter to the church of Tralles, he even said,
Let everyone respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as they should respect the bishop, who is a model of the Father, and the presbyters as God’s council and as the band of the apostles. Without these no group can be called a church (Ig.Trallians 3:1).
So according to Ignatius you can’t even be a church if you don’t have the three-fold ministry of a bishop, priests, and deacons.
That—of itself—would suggest that the institution was very widespread in Christian circles, and this is reinforced elsewhere in his letters. Remembering that when Ignatius uses the term bishop, he means an monepiscopus or monarchial bishop, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, Ignatius wrote that
The bishops appointed throughout the world are in the mind of Christ (Ig.Ephesians 3:2).
So the monarchial bishops were not a local institution here and there. Ignatius says that they have been appointed throughout the world.
Furthermore, Ignatius wrote letters to six churches, and he either names or refers to the bishops of five of them. These churches were in the province of Asia Minor and on the Greek peninsula, so we can infer that the monepiscopacy was well established there.
Furthermore, we can infer that it was well established in Syria, as illustrated by the fact Ignatius himself was the bishop of Antioch in Syria and by the fact that he says in his letter to the Philadelphians that to celebrate the restoration of peace in the church of Antioch
The neighboring churches have sent bishops, and others presbyters and deacons (Ig.Philadelphians 10:2).
So the institution of the monepiscopacy was clearly widespread in the Christian world at the beginning of the second century. But for the office to be that widespread by the year 108, it must have started some time earlier than that—in the late first century.
Gavin might or might not agree with that, but he doesn’t think that it was universal, because you’ll recall that he said:
Ignatius himself acknowledges that the monarchical episcopate model is not universal at that time because he says there’s Christians who do all things without the bishop.
Now, I’ve made a careful study of Ignatius’s letters, and this did not ring any bells, so I went through them again and looked at every passage where Ignatius mentions bishops.
There are passages where Ignatius refers to people disobeying their bishops, which he says is wrong, but Gavin is referring to something else. He’s saying that there were Christians in churches that did not have a bishop, and Ignatius never says that.
I think that the passage Gavin is thinking of is one that’s found in Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians, where he says:
It is right, therefore, that we not just be called Christians, but that we actually be Christians, unlike some who call a man “bishop” but do everything without regard for him (Ig.Magnesians 4).
This is clearly another passage about people disobeying their bishop. Ignatius indicates that the church he is envisioning has a bishop. He says these people call its leader “bishop,” they just ignore his authority in practice.
So this passage in Ignatius cannot be used to show that the monepiscopacy was not yet universal.
What else does Gavin have to say in support of this claim?
And then you’ve got other documents from the early second century that seemed to function just like the first century, where you’ve got Polycarp’s epistle to the Philippians, chapters five and six.
It’s just like one Timothy three. You’ve got two offices, qualifications for deacons, qualifications for presbyters.
Here Gavin is referring to a contemporary of Ignatius—Polycarp, who was the monarchial bishop of Smyrna. Ignatius had written a letter to Polycarp, and Polycarp himself wrote a letter to the church of Philippi immediately after Ignatius’s martyrdom—so, again, around A.D. 108.
Gavin refers to chapters 5 and 6 of this letter, which refers to deacons and presbyters, but he misrepresents the chapters a bit. He says that they list qualifications for these offices like the ones Paul gave in 1 Timothy and Titus.
That’s not actually what Polycarp is doing. If you read the chapters, he’s actually prescribing behavior for deacons and presbyters. He’s sa... Read more on Catholic.com