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January 3 - February 22, 2025
To defend their two-source view of revelation, the Pharisees could have made the same appeal to Jesus that is often put to Protestants today: “Jesus, where does the Old Testament explicitly say it has greater authority than our oral traditions?” But the answer to that is simple: The Bible need not anticipate every possible later error or alternative. It is enough to know that Scripture is the inspired Word of God and oral traditions are not.
The handwashing traditions in view here are not explicitly contrary to Scripture, and the Pharisees would certainly not have granted that they contradicted Scripture. But Jesus infers that this is their practical result; further, he asserts, “many such things you do” (Mark 7:13). Thus, Jesus is not merely rejecting one particular Pharisaical tradition but the Pharisees’ inflated view of tradition as a whole. What is at stake is the entire theory by which the Pharisees falsely claimed divine authority for their traditions.
This is the heart cry of sola Scriptura: Test that which isn’t the inspired Word of God by that which is the inspired Word of God. This makes sense because God’s speech is of greater authority than all other speech.
However carefully the New Testament is scrutinized, not one word will be discovered about infallible authority being vested into an ongoing post-apostolic function in the church. Yet if the church did possess such a function, wouldn’t this be the single most important fact for the New Testament to tell us?
Why was this never taught before? What practical good is an allegedly infallible magisterium that can evidently be misunderstood for so long, by so many?
As J. I. Packer more recently stated, “The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. . . . Newton did not create gravity but recognized it.”
William Whitaker is that of a goldsmith discerning true gold from other metals: “The goldsmith with his scales and touchstone can distinguish gold from copper and other metals; wherein he does not make gold . . . but only indicates what is gold. . . . In like manner the Church acknowledges the Scriptures and declares them to be divine.”5
the church does not start from scratch, but measures each book against the previous revelation she has already received from God.
If you think you do have to possess infallibility to discern infallibility, you have a continual regress, because now you need infallibility to receive and interpret the infallible teachings of your church.
For example, Josiah Trenham, quoting 2 Thessalonians 2:15, asks, “Are we to suppose, as the sola Scriptura theory would have it, that you were only to obey the Apostolic teachings and injunctions that St. Paul wrote down and not those that you heard from his own mouth?”14 But the notion that sola Scriptura would give license to first-century Christians to disobey the apostles’ oral instruction is an extreme caricature. For starters, sola Scriptura in no way designates Scripture as the only authority to be obeyed (as opposed to only infallible rule). More basically, sola Scriptura is a
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It was not until the fourth century (in Basil’s writings, for example) that there emerged a clear conception of unwritten tradition as a separate norm from Holy Scripture. But even there, the traditions more commonly referred to are liturgical practices, not universal obligatory dogmas that lack scriptural warrant.
Despite the numerous different meanings of the word tradition, critics of sola Scriptura sometimes employ any positive instance of this term as though it were speaking of tradition in the sense defined at the council of Trent.
Protestants reject this schema because tradition is not the inspired Word of God, and when it is made equal to Scripture and the magisterium is put in the role of interpretation, then it is really the magisterium that has ultimate authority. In this way, the church is ultimately untethered from accountability to the inspired Word of God, resulting in, as Keith Mathison puts it, “a Church which is a law unto itself.”21 Protestants have referred to this position with phrases like sola ecclesia and solum magisterium to reflect the concern that the practical effect of this position (if not the
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and that it stands so absolutely in a superior position to all later letters of the bishops, that about it we can hold no manner of doubt or disputation whether what is confessedly contained in it is right and true; but that all the letters of bishops which have been written, or are being written, since the closing of the canon, are liable to be refuted if there be anything contained in them which strays from the truth, either by the discourse of some one who happens to be wiser in the matter than themselves, or by the weightier authority and more learned experience of other bishops,
Furthermore, while erroneous private judgment is a real danger, another danger is far worse: erroneous ecclesiastical judgments. It is one thing to be able to err; it is another to be yoked to error. This is what sola Scriptura seeks to guard against.
People often seem to seek a sense of security by placing their trust in a church’s claims of infallible authority.
Minimally, the papacy is an office in the church characterized by succession, infallibility, and supremacy. Succession means the office originates with Peter and succeeds to the Roman bishops; infallibility means the pope is capable of speaking infallibly under certain conditions; and supremacy means the pope’s leadership is not merely advisory, but rather constitutes an immediate, universal, and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church.
The notion of papal succession is completely absent from the New Testament. However carefully you might scour from Matthew to Revelation with a magnifying glass, you will not catch the faintest hint of an ongoing office of any kind associated with Peter—let alone one that involves Roman bishops. The whole idea comes about well after the New Testament. It’s difficult to even argue about papal succession from the New Testament because it’s like trying to argue whether Pluto should be a planet or who shot J. F. K. based on the New Testament. There is just not any source material whatsoever.
the New Testament contains an enormous amount of detailed information about the offices of the church. Consider all you can learn from the pastoral epistles alone about the offices of presbyters and deacons. And then we have numerous passages that flesh out the offices of the church specifically with a view to its unity, like Ephesians 4:11–16 or 1 Corinthians 12:27–31. Why is there not a single verse anywhere that ever mentions, “By the way, there is actually a supreme and infallible office above all these others”? This would be rather important information! If Jesus and the apostles
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The simple fact is that Peter never claims supremacy or unique infallibility; no one else ascribes it to him; and the events of the New Testament nowhere depict him possessing such characteristics. There are other designations among the apostles—for example, in Galatians 2:9, James, Peter, and John are identified as “pillars.” But nowhere is Peter singled out in terms of supremacy or infallibility—despite the fact that there are occasions where this would be expected.
The passage most frequently appealed to for Petrine supremacy is Matthew 16:18–19. However, the responsibilities of binding and loosing given to Peter here are reiterated to all the disciples just two chapters later (Matt. 18:18)—
Augustine argued that Peter functioned in a representative role in this passage: “Did Peter receive the keys and Paul not receive them? Did Peter receive them, and John and James and the other apostles not receive them? . . . What was given to Peter was given to the whole church.”
People often try to find examples of papal infallibility earlier in church history, but such efforts typically conflate infallibility per se with other qualities like papal indefectibility (i.e., not being subject to failure or flaw), papal immunity (i.e., not being subject to judgment from temporal authorities), or the general centrality, necessity, or importance of the bishop of Rome.
The bishops’ reasoning was that their authority as gathered in council was greater than the pope’s.
Some argue, for example, that it offers the best pathway for procuring and preserving unity in the church. Only with a central authority that can speak infallibly, it is argued, do we have a decisive mechanism for resolving differences. And to be sure, there is real efficiency and power in having an office with such unparalleled authority. But for the rest of the Christendom, including not only Protestants but also the Old Catholics and various non-Catholic Eastern traditions, the papacy is arguably the single greatest barrier to unity.
Why do most Protestants reject apostolic succession in this sense? Essentially, because there is every reason to conclude that apostolic succession is not apostolic.
It is significant that Tertullian, immediately after opposing heretics on the grounds that they lack apostolic succession, adds, “But should they even effect the contrivance, they will not advance a step. For their very doctrine, after comparison with that of the apostles, will declare, by its own diversity and contrariety, that it had for its author neither an apostle nor an apostolic man.”22 In other words, Tertullian reasons that even if the heretics had apostolic succession, it wouldn’t matter, because their doctrine was not apostolic. This resonates with the later Protestant instinct to
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The recognition that apostolic succession is not of divine constitution but rather represents a gradual development in the early church need not necessarily entail that there is anything particularly wrong with episcopal church government as such. On prudential grounds, one could make a case for elevating one presbyter into a unique role above others or even calling such a presbyter a different term. But requiring such a structure—as well as limiting valid ministry to those churches adhering to it—unnecessarily injures and divides the church.
Only within Protestantism can one be free from such a requirement.
What is more surprising is why these traditions retain a necessary commitment to such beliefs when (1) they have such poor evidence backing them and (2) they serve to separate each tradition, not just from Protestantism, but to some extent from each other.
There is perhaps no more popular anti-Protestant slogan than the famous quip by John Henry Newman: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
I see plainly and with my own eyes, that there are popes against popes, councils against councils, some fathers against others, the same fathers against themselves, a consent of fathers of one age against a consent of fathers of another age, the church of one age against the church of another age. . . . In a word, there is no sufficient certainty but of Scripture only for any considering man to build upon.
In fact, it is the exact opposite of how the original Protestants understood their efforts. To be “deep in history” was the whole rationale for Protestantism.
Essentially, many claimed Protestants were introducing new doctrines, unknown to prior church history. In response, the Reformers did not appeal to Scripture alone, ceding church history to their opponents. Rather, they argued from history, casting the Protestant effort as a retrieval of patristic practice and thereby a return to catholicity—that is, the doctrine and practice that is most representative of the fullness of the church.
Calvin maintained that on these and many other points, being deep in history only strengthened the Protestant concerns: “The ancient Church is clearly on our side, and opposes you, not less than we ourselves do.”16
For Jewel and most of the early Protestants, the concern was not that Christ is not present in the Eucharist, but that bread and wine are present. In other words, all they denied was that, in the communication of Christ to the believing recipient of the Eucharist, the bread and wine ceased to be bread and wine in substance.
Protestants were not arguing that on every point, the patristic testimony favored Protestantism. This is not so. Various matters of doctrine or ceremony came in early in church history that, yet, the Protestants saw as error. An easy example is praying for the dead (yet it is also worth saying that many Protestants have no objection to this practice as such).
For Protestants, the early church does not represent an exact blueprint to be followed in all details—though we benefit greatly from learning from the early Christians.
the Protestants were not arguing that, by the late medieval era, the church had died and needed resurrection. This is a common caricature. Consistently the Reformers affirmed the opposite—that God had faithfully preserved his church, even in the darkest times.
Francis Turretin put it like this: “It is one thing to purge an ancient doctrine of its corruption and recall men to it; another to devise a new doctrine not as yet delivered and propose it for belief. The former, not the latter, was done by the Reformers.”
We must distinguish between particular contemporary expressions of Protestantism versus Protestantism as such. Too often a criticism of the former is construed as a necessary rejection of the latter.
The difference, then, between the various sectors of Christendom is not whether we need reform. The difference is this: Protestants are able to reform themselves because built into the Protestant system at the outset is a mechanism of self-reform (semper reformanda, always reforming). By contrast, the practices that need reform in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts result from what is held to be infallible teaching and are thus irreformable.
The difference is that Protestant accretions are not enshrined within allegedly infallible teaching.
To be clear, Protestants do not regard “majority depth” as insignificant or unimportant. On the contrary, it is a behemoth, a force to be reckoned with. But they do maintain that what is finally decisive is the original teaching of the apostles, and that there are practices and beliefs that occasionally become mainstream despite departing from apostolic teaching.
Apologists on all sides love to say, “All the church fathers said _____.” Sometimes the historical evidence is neat and uniform like this, but usually it is not. Rarely will we find history convenient. Often all sides will be challenged. Honestly, to be truly in history is, before anything else, to cease making simplistic appeals to history.
To any sane historical evaluation, it is overwhelmingly probable that neither the assumption of Mary nor the veneration of images were known to the apostles—or any Christian within several centuries of their lifetimes.
with respect to Mariology we are arguably further apart today than we were in the sixteenth century—particularly since the immaculate conception of Mary was defined in 1854 and her bodily assumption was defined in 1950.
When a church claims a particular teaching to be infallible and obligatory, and yet it is actually neither catholic, ancient, biblical, nor apostolic—indeed, when it is completely unknown to the early church fathers—this is obviously relevant to claims about being “deep in history.”
There is no evidence of any tradition concerning Mary’s Dormition and Assumption from before the fifth century.
But as we will see, this is a Gnostic text with thoroughly heterodox theology. It is highly significant that the earliest known attestation to Mary’s assumption in church history comes in a heterodox context (more on that, as well as on Epiphanius, in just a bit).
