Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

Now, I don't normally do a Friday episode, particularly on the 4th of July, but Dr. Gavin Ortlund replied to my episode from yesterday in a way that I think naturally raised some questions about my integrity and whether I'm treating his argument fairly.

So, I wanna actually begin by agreeing with Gavin on something.

I'd like to try to maintain a positive relationship with Joe.

I like Joe.

I'd like to have a good relationship.

I, um, he's very smart and I feel like if we were talking in real life, we'd get along pretty well, I think.

I would say the same thing about Gavin.

He is smart.

He often does good work.

His recent episode responding to Ted Cruz was excellent, I thought.

And a lot of the confusion over one another's positions could easily be resolved if we could just have a structured debate or a sit-down of some kind on these topics.

Now, I actually offered that to Gavin back in May, but at the time he said he was too busy to, you know, debate the canon, only to instead create a panel of two other Protestants who agreed with him to talk about it.

Now look, that's his prerogative, but the risk is that we do end up creating online echo chambers of just people who agree with us and we kinda talk past one another and maybe come away feeling mutually misunderstood.

I wanna also commend Gavin's emphasis on making sure that we're actually steelmanning the other side's position and interpreting it charitably.

Now, whether I've succeeded or not, I have tried to do that here and I hope that he'll do the same.

Uh, the final point I wanna agree upon here is this idea that when God reveals Himself, this is at the heart of kind of, the discussion we're having, when God reveals Himself, He does so infallibly, of course, without error.

And after all, this is the whole point of revelation.

It's God unveiling Himself so that we can know Him in ways we couldn't from reason alone.

That's what revelation means.

But our disagreement is this: Gavin says that, for instance, Moses is fallible when he hears the voice of God, but fallible, by definition, means that it's possible that Moses is erring.

And if Moses is erring in hearing and in transmitting divine revelation, that logically undermines our ability to trust the inerrancy and reliability of the Bible.

Now, Gavin protests.

He says, So according to Gavin, even if God reveals something to you directly, that is still fallible.

No.

That is not what I said.

My point was precisely the opposite, that God's revelation remains infallible even if it is received by fallible agents.

But look, the steelman version of my argument is obviously not that you're literally saying those words.

I played your words so you could be heard in your own words.

My argument is that this is the logical consequence of your position, and it is.

Imagine three men holding three books.

Person one says, All three of these books are manmade.

They might teach truth or error, maybe a mixture of both.

Person two says, You know, two of these books are divinely inspired and they are without error, but I don't know for sure which ones are which.

Person three says, I know for certain that all three of these books are divinely inspired.

Gavin thinks I'm accusing him of being person one.

I'm not, and I'm sorry if I expressed myself opaquely and, and he misunderstood me.

I'm saying he is like person two, but that person too ends up in the exact same boat as person one.

When reading any of those three books, he can't just uncritically accept its teaching as true if the author of the book has the capacity to be in error when writing it.

Person three, on the other hand, can receive the teachings of each of those three books as true.

Now, apart from this, it is also true that each of those three men are subjectively fallible themselves.

They might misunderstand the book, they might, you know, read it well or poorly, but that is a separate issue and an irrelevant one.

So when Gavin talks about fallible agents receiving revelation, I think he's actually obscuring an important Biblical and logical distinction.

When the Bible talks about faith, it does it in two ways.

First, there is subjective faith.

This is the faith by which we believe.

Now, that's unique to each individual and it is fallible.

You can falter in your faith, which is why Jesus prays that the apostles' faith won't fail in Luke 22.

But there's also objective faith, the faith in which we believe.

Now, objective faith is infallible.

It cannot fail, it cannot be altered.

It is, as Jude 1:3 says, The faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

That distinction matters because when we subjectively misunderstand something in the faith, we can check it against what's been objectively revealed.

The problem is some people claim that objective revelation has itself been corrupted.

For instance, Mormons and Muslims claim that the original words of Jesus were inspired and without error, but those original words have been lost or corrupted over time.

Now, that obviously undermines the reliability of objective revelation.

You cannot trust the Bible accessible to us today as reliable, and it doesn't mean a lot to say that God has revealed Himself without any admixture of error and then to say, Well, this revelation is now so mixed with different errors, either erroneous passages or books, that we're no longer sure which parts are really from God and which parts aren't.

So logically, that position, which I'm describing as person two, ends up in the same place as the person, person one, who just denies inspiration outright.

It becomes a distinction without a difference.

So what about Gavin's position?

Now, he claims that the Church preserved the wrong Bible, that it chose some books which were not actually the word of God under the false belief that they were the word of God.

Now, that's not actually that far off from the Muslim or Mormon position.

It's a belief that yes, there are words of God, they're mixed in with words that aren't really of God in the thing we call the Bible, and there's no trustworthy way to distinguish which is which.

After all, how do any of us know which books belong in the Bible?

We were not there when the words were recorded.

We did not receive it from God in the burning bush, and we can't just say, Because the Bible says so, because it doesn't.

We have to rely on some kind of post-apostolic mechanism, whether that's the witness of the early Christians or the Jews after the time of Christ or an early church council or something.

But according to Gavin, we don't have

A comparable good reason or I would argue any good reason to think that post-apostolic church mechanisms like certain councils, um, ex cathedra statements from popes- uh, anything else like that is infallible.

Uh, those things are not the speech of God, they don't have a good track record and history, they don't have solid support in the New Testament.

So Gavin's argument is not just that these mechanisms can fail, his argument is that they have failed.

And in fact, he argues that they've allowed in seven entire books that were never really from God in the first place and were never meant to be part of scripture.

If you accept that, that undermines any confidence we can have in the inerrancy of scripture.

You can't say on the one hand, This is so clear, it's just like God speaking from the Burning Bush.

And on the other hand, The people who tried their hardest to figure out which books were and weren't in the Bible got it hopelessly wrong.

This is the problem I have with Gavin's argument about Moses' eardrums.

And the philosophical appeal has to do with an infinite regress, that, um, there are certain ways of requiring infallibility for the discernment of and appropriation of infallibility that now push the can down the road, and you're gonna need an infallible knowledge of that.

And so what we can observe here is that every system has a cutoff point where you move from infallibility to fallibility, so there is a fallible reception of the infallible, and that can be in the eardrums of Moses at the Burning Bush, which are fallible eardrums, okay?

He's, but he's still hearing God, and that's an infallible voice coming from the Burning Bush.

So one of the ways that I think we're talking past one another is that Gavin is focused i- on those who hear revelation, and I'm focused on those who transmit revelation, and Moses is both.

So some of that muddiness was probably my own fault, and I apologize for that.

But my point is just that if you claim that the prophets are fallible in receiving God's word, then you are introducing the possibility of error into scripture, because again, to say something is fallible means that it is possibly in error.

That's what the word means.

When Abraham hears God telling him to sacrifice Isaac, is it possible that he is mistaken, that he's really just hearing the voice of the devil or his own thoughts?

If you say, No, God spoke so clearly it was impossible Abraham could have misheard or erred, that's all we mean by the word infallibility here.

Not sinlessness, just that it is so clear he cannot be in error here.

But if you say, Yes, Abraham might have been mishearing and it wasn't really from God, that's a problem for the Bible itself.

After all, seemingly any model of inspiration of scripture works something like this.

God communicates something to a prophet or an apostle, we'll call that step one, and the prophet or apostle then records it in writing, step two.

So God is communicating through the medium of a prophet or an apostle, but once you say step one is fallible, maybe the prophet erred or misheard God, then you're introducing fallibility into scripture.

You're undermining the reliability not only of step one, but also step two.

Gavin doesn't seem to recognize this problem or offer any logical way around it.

He just sort of denies it by saying, But I believe in step two.

Exodus is a part of the scripture, and so that is not fallible, and that, uh, it being fallible would not follow from anything I said.

But if Moses is fallible in receiving the word from the Lord, step one, how does he infallibly record what he doesn't infallibly receive?

That's the argument I'm making.

Now, Gavin also says

The Ten Commandments are written by God, so it has nothing to do with Moses' hearing.

Okay, fine.

I mean, if you think God literally uses his literal finger to write the Ten Commandments, then use any other passage of scripture where God is clearly depicted as speaking to and through the prophets.

So if you don't believe that God preserves his self-revelation by protecting it from error, then you undermine the whole point of infallible divine revelation.

To say, God revealed himself but then we lost it, undermines the point of revelation.

And Gavin, once again, I'd be more than happy to talk these issues through with you or debate them in person directly, and I think that might be the most productive avenue at this point.

But the ball is squarely in your own court.

Final thought for everybody, uh, the categorical error that Gavin is making here where he's conflating subjective and objective faith is the same one being made in another argument that I often hear from Protestants.

You'll sometimes hear people say, You know, Catholics and Protestants both have to interpret what scripture says, or in Catholics' case, like, what the Magisterium says, So we both engage in personal interpretation, so we're really in the same boat.

Now, that is the same kind of mistake, and I respond to that problem in much greater depth right here.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you and I'll be back on Tuesday.

Oh, and happy 4th of July.