Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And many of you are probably familiar with the popular Protestant YouTuber, Ruslan KD. I think I first encountered him with the interview that he did with George Janko a while back.

But since then, I've seen him in several different contexts, whether it's sharing his faith or interviewing guests or moderating debates.

And I've honestly enjoyed him in each of those roles.

He clearly seems like somebody trying to be fair, trying to be open to the evidence, and trying to build up the body of Christ, and I don't know what more you could ask for.

And so, I've been very interested in his recent video called The Real Reason I Won't Convert to Orthodox or Catholic Christianity.

Now, I think he really offers two real reasons.

He rejects apostolic succession, and he thinks that the original Church had just two offices, elder and deacon, not three, bishop, elder, and deacon.

Now, I've actually responded to that second argument recently in a video called The Most Divisive Christian Controversy.

But Ruslan goes a little more into the evidence from the Apostolic Fathers, the first Christians after the time of the apostles, so I'm excited to get into the weeds with him.

I mean, after all, if these are the issues holding him back from converting, these are obstacles that seem pretty surmountable.

You know, this week, I'm gonna be at the Catholic Creator Conference in Steubenville.

And you know how amazing it would be if next year, somebody like Ruslan was there?

Now, of course, short of that, both he and you can watch the panel discussion that I'm gonna be a part of, streamed right here on Thursday evening.

Also, special thanks to Kyle R, who brought my attention to this episode from Ruslan.

He asked me to make this response.

He's one of my patrons over at shamelessjoe.com.

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Okay.

So, I want to actually address the second major argument that Ruslan makes before I address the first one, because at the heart of why he rejects apostolic succession is his belief that this whole model of a single bishop over a particular church is one that wasn't really established by Jesus.

So I wanna address it in two parts.

I wanna look at the biblical evidence, and then I wanna look at the evidence from the earliest Christians, those Apostolic Fathers.

On the biblical evidence, Ruslan makes a point that I basically agree with.

So, I am not saying that there aren't three offices, bishop, priest, deacon.

I'm saying that if we're looking at the scriptures, you should be able to see, if you're a high church person, how many Protestants comes to the conclusion that there's only two offices, elder, overseer, priest, bishop being one, and then deacon being two.

That does something to the idea of apostolic succession.

So yeah, I completely agree that using the principle sola scriptura, Protestants might conclude that bishops and elders are the same thing, or they might not.

And we should be able to look and see why people would come to either of those conclusions.

After all, Ruslan alludes to the fact that Lutherans and Anglicans think that there are three biblical offices and not two.

And as I pointed out recently, non-denominational churches like Bethel think that there are actually five offices based on how they read Ephesians 4. So, one of the biggest reasons that Protestants are divided from one another is precisely that the Bible never explicitly answers the question of Church governance.

And I'm gonna get into why that is in this episode.

And I'd suggest that in trying to solve this problem, trying to figure out Church governance from scripture, there are two very easy mistakes that even smart Christians make.

First, treating the Bible like a blueprint for the Church.

And second, doing what we might call theology by concordance, where we use dictionary definitions to try to settle what are really nuanced theological questions.

To get why these are both errors, imagine somebody 2,000 years from now trying to understand the structure of American governance and trying to figure out if the office of president was different than the office of governor or not.

So first, you know, they might look to the US Constitution.

Makes sense, right?

Looking to the Constitution is an obvious starting place, it's a good starting place.

But there's a problem.

The Constitution mentions the president, but it never mentions governors at all.

Why not?

Well, you and I probably know.

The real reason is that governors already existed.

That office wasn't created by the Constitution, so there's no need to mention it.

But the person in the future might not know this and might wrongly conclude that this proves that presidents and governors are really two different names for the same office.

But just to confirm, let's say the person in the future decides to pull out a dictionary to settle this question.

And sure enough, govern is one of the synonyms offered for the verb preside.

So it stands to reason that a governor and a president are the same thing.

And in fact, you can find plenty of references, even on official government websites, of the president governing or of governors presiding.

Okay, so what would be a better approach?

Well, I would suggest that you should read not only the Constitution, but also read old documents from around the founding of the country.

And if you did that, you'd quickly find the names of specific presidents and governors, and you could see, these are clearly two different offices.

You'd find out, for instance, that while George Washington was president, the governor of Virginia was Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee.

So clearly, these are two different people occupying two different offices at the same time.

Similarly, when we're trying to figure out whether the office of bishop and the office of presbyter or elder were the same office 2,000 years ago, we've gotta watch out to make sure we don't make those same two mistakes.

So first, we shouldn't assume that the Bible is guaranteed to be a blueprint that's gonna spell out the answer to our question.

As a Protestant, remember that we hold to sola scriptura.

That doesn't mean you have to.

It just means that from our framework, scripture is the only apostolic authority that is infallible.

That doesn't mean we don't hold to other authorities.

It doesn't mean we don't like the creeds.

It just means that when it comes to an infallible authority, we believe scripture is the only one.

Ruslan has great intentions here.

By all means, we should look at scripture.But this does highlight how sola Scriptura can put the cart before the horse.

Because while there's debate on the precise chronology, many scholars believe that the first books of the New Testament would be Saint Paul's letters, like his letter to the Galatians and his two letters to the Thessalonians.

And yet, he begins those letters by greeting the churches of the Galatians and the Church of the Thessalonians.

So we can say, as a matter of certainty, that the church and its governing structure predates the entire New Testament.

And it's not just that these churches already existed, it's that they had been personally established by apostles like Paul.

Saint Paul even reminds the Corinthian church of this, that he was the one who first laid the foundation of Jesus Christ for them.

And the Acts of the Apostles show us Paul and Barnabas going from city to city and appointing elders for every church.

So you're just not gonna find a passage in the New Testament that says, This is how to build the Church, because the Church was already built up before a word of the New Testament was ever written.

And the same people writing the New Testament books were the ones who'd already done that church building.

So, while the only apostolic authority that modern Protestants like Rouslan might acknowledge today is the New Testament, the people in those early churches could look to something else.

They could look to the local church that they were a part of, which had been established by the apostles.

So they knew what Christian church governance looked like, not by reading about it, but by living it.

Okay, so what about that second mistake, doing theology by concordance?

So just like you wouldn't settle the president-governor question by busting out the dictionary, I think we should be extremely wary when people try to settle theological questions, things like questions of church structure, by just busting out the concordance.

If we look at this word elder, I can hit study, and we see the word elder here is

Πρεσβύτερος.

Πρεσβύτερος, or priest.

That's where the word priest comes from.

This is someone that is an elder, uh, or someone that is older, uh, someone that is in the Sanhedrin context according to this, right?

One of the translations for it apparently is old men, uh, or someone that is older.

Now, here, Paul is using the word elders.

He's writing in Titus that, to appoint elders.

Now a little later, it says, Since an overseer manages his household, he must be blameless, not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing his wife's game.

So this word overseer, we hit here.

Aha, and now we have our other word.

Επίσκοπος.

Επίσκοπος.

Επίσκοπος is the word bishop.

Now what Rouslan is showing is that the word bishop literally means overseers, and presbyters do oversee the Church, just as presidents govern and governors preside.

But you can't solve this question of church governance with a concordance like this.

After all, take the word deacon, diakonos.

It just means servant, and it is used in the Bible to describe everyone from Jesus to Saint Paul to Phoebe to the servants at the wedding feast of Cana.

Most of the time it's used, it is not referring to the office of deacons.

In fact, ironically, the term is never used in Scripture to describe the first seven deacons we find in Acts 6. So you can see one of the problems with this kind of theology by concordance.

Rouslan gets to Paul calling Phoebe a servant, diakonon, and he concludes that this means there must have been women deacons in the early Church, even though he grants that none of the apostolic churches read Scripture that way.

Interesting about deacons, by the way, is that there were women deacons in the Bible, which none of the high churches today generally, uh, ordain women deacons unless they're, like, completely gone woke or whatever.

So instead of looking for a non-existent verse in which somebody lays out and defines the different offices in the Church, we should instead carefully see how the local churches actually functioned.

Rouslan gives this example from Titus chapter one.

This is Paul writing Titus, and he says, The reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.

An elder must be blameless, faithful to his wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.

Since an overseer manages God's household, he must be blameless, not overbearing.

So here are the standards that we see Paul saying that an elder must have.

Great.

So within the Church in Crete, we can see that there are various elders who helped oversee the church.

And the question we should be asking is, are these presbyters, these elders, the top tier of authority in the local church in Crete, or do they report to somebody else?

Well, they clearly report to somebody else, they report to Titus.

After all, it's Titus who was charged with appointing them, and it's Titus who was charged with ensuring the teaching of sound doctrine, and it's Titus who was told to declare these things, exhort and reprove with all authority.

In Crete, the buck does not stop with any one of the presbyters.

It stops with one man who commands all authority, Titus.

So we see a structure within Scripture itself of a local church being governed by one man, who is assisted in the governance of the church by several elders and by deacons.

Whether or not the terms bishop, presbyter, and deacon are always used for those offices is a different question.

As I said, in Acts 6, we see the calling of the first seven deacons, but they're never actually called deacons in the text.

So in Titus, it isn't important whether Saint Paul calls Titus a bishop.

What matters is that he has put him in the role of a bishop.

And Titus isn't a one-off example.

If you look at the instructions Saint Paul gives to Timothy, he's clearly the man in charge in Ephesus.

The Church in Jerusalem is led first by Peter and then by James.

The seven churches in Asia Minor are led by what John calls the Seven Angels, but which are almost certainly seven bishops.

And this matches a pattern we see throughout the Old Testament as well, in which God consistently holds one person accountable for the care of His people, from Adam to the patriarchs, to the judges, to the kings, and so on.

So this reading of Scripture shows the harmony of both the Old and the New Testament evidence better than the idea that God quietly switched from governance by one man to governance by committee somewhere along the way.

And this reading also matches the earliest evidence that we see outside of the Bible, and this matters because remember, the Church isn't just an idea that the evangelists wrote about.

It's a lived historical reality that people saw and participated in.

So let's start with St. Ignatius.

Rouslan acknowledges the allegation that

High church folks saying that Protestants run from Ignatius because of his views of the three offices within church.

And it's easy to see why Protestants might want to run from Ignatius.

After all, Ignatius, who is believed to be a student of the Apostle John himself, taught quite clearly that the threefold structure of bishop, elder, deacon in the church wasn't optional.

In his words, Apart from this structure, there is no church.

And he makes it clear that this is not just his personal opinion.

He says, Concerning all this, I am persuaded that you are of the same opinion.

Ig- now, Ignatius has written about 107.

He- he's just taking for granted that this threefold view isn't just universal, but is actually necessary to be a true church, it's necessary for the validity of a church.

Now, I appreciate that Rouslan kind of acknowledges and engages with this evidence, and he quotes from a channel called Biblical Understanding, which argues that the real question is

Do we interpret Ignatius in light of the rest of the Apostolic Fathers, or do we interpret the rest of the Apostolic Fathers in light of Ignatius?

My contention is that we should use the rest of the Apostolic Fathers to interpret Ignatius for a few reasons.

The first is because Ignatius is, again, the only individual who has this distinctive three-office view.

It would be one thing if Ignatius was accompanied by a few other contemporaries and they were a small minority to the rest of the Apostolic Father witness, but given the fact that he is the only individual from this time period that holds to the three-office view, I believe it is more reasonable to use the collective witness as a way to interpret what Ignatius is saying.

But what Biblical Understanding is arguing for doesn't really seem to be harmonizing Ignatius with the rest of the Apostolic Fathers, but instead of rejecting Ignatius, treating him as a loner who believes in threefold governance contrary to the rest of the Apostolic Fathers.

That's not a harmonization at all, and it's also obviously untrue.

Ignatius is not some weird loner here.

We already saw Ignatius acknowledging that his readers shared his views, but we can do one better because he actually names many of these church leaders by name.

For instance, in Magnesia, he greets the Bishop Damas, the Elders Bastus and Apollinis, and the Deacon Sodia.

So as with the example of George Washington and Governor Lee, we don't have to just speculate about whether these are different offices.

We know for a fact that they are because we know by name which people who held these different offices at the same time.

Now, in contrast, Protestants claiming that the early Church was really governed by a board of co-equal elders can never seem to name names of who these co-ruling elders were.

So, it's just not true that Ignatius is the only individual in this time period who holds to this view.

What he is instead is the only individual in this time period to write as explicitly and extensively on church governance.

So what Biblical Understanding is comparing and contrasting is not an explicit threefold view of church governance against an explicit twofold view of church governance.

What he's comparing is an explicit threefold view of church governance to passing references to bishops and elders and deacons, and then guessing what those writers probably believed about church governance.

And you can see that he is doing that in the ways in which some of his interpretations seem selective and maybe even misleading when you look at things like his treatment of First Clement.

So First Clement 42:4-5 writes, Therefore, preaching among regions and cities, they appointed their first fruits, testing them by the Spirit to be bishops and deacons.

So again, it would seem that Clement, an Apostolic Father who's writing very early, is seeing bishops as both presbyters and overseers.

Bishops, right?

One office.

Now, it's true it would seem that way if you read only paragraph 42 of the letter, but if you read the two paragraphs before that, you'll see that Clement says something quite different.

Discussing the need for order in the Church, Clement compares the structure of the Church to the high priest-priest-Levite structure of the old covenant, and that's actually a common theme in the early Church.

Some of the early ordination prayers for bishops compared them to the high priest, and ordination prayers for deacons compared them to Levites.

Remember, throughout the Old Testament, that structure is often shorthanded to priests and Levites, which might mislead somebody into thinking that there were just two offices, but there weren't.

There was a third.

The high priesthood was a unique office with special duties.

Okay, but it's not just that Biblical Understanding is treating First Clement in a way that might be misleading.

He also just kind of asserts.

The same goes for Polycarp in his Letter to the Philippians, and we also see this referenced in the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas.

Now, the Didache has references to apostles and prophets, as well as bishops and deacons, and nothing in the text outlines a particular view of church governance or tells us whether bishops are the same as deacons, say.

Similarly, the Shepherd of Hermas is a kind of prophetic vision, not a treatment of church governance.

It refers to apostles, bishops, teachers, and deacons, and then shortly after that, to bishops and teachers and deacons.

Now, that sounds like a threefold structure of the Church, excluding apostles, but it's frankly impossible to say for sure because, and I can't stress this enough, unlike Ignatius, this is not really a text about church governance.

So that leaves us just with Polycarp.

So, Polycarp was also an Apostolic Father who wrote around the year 120 AD, so after Clement and Ignatius.

The first thing to know about St. Polycarp is that he's a friend of St. Ignatius'.

Ignatius actually writes him a letter greeting him as the Bishop of the Church of Smyrna.

He also writes to the Church in Smyrna, reminding them to obey their bishop, and in that letter, distinguishes the bishop, Polycarp, from the elders and the deacons.

Now, does Polycarp react to all that by saying, Oh, no, you've got it all wrong.

I'm actually just one of several elders here.

We only have a twofold system of governance.

He does not.Instead, he writes a letter beginning, Polycarp and the presbyters with him, to the Church of God sojourning to Philippi.

Sounds like he's writing as a bishop with his elders.

And what did Polycarp think about Ignatius' letters?

Well, we don't have to guess.

At the request of the church in Philippi, he sends them Ignatius' letters and mentions how they're greatly profitable.

This hardly sounds like Polycarp regarded Ignatius as some theological rogue loner, arguing for a false view of the Church.

So the people who believed the early Church was governed by co-ruling elders and deacons are left with just making these elaborate arguments from silence, that sometimes people mention priests without talking about bishops.

But those arguments are weak, particularly when those same people are doing things like sending along the very clear letters of Ignatius that show the opposite.

So the earliest evidence that Protestants can point to in which someone seems to actually argue against the three-tiered view is from St. Jerome, who's writing at the end of the 300s.

But as Ruslan acknowledges

Jerome is writing a couple hundred years after Ignatius and Polycarp and all these guys.

So that's right.

If the question is what the Church looked like in the year 80, say, we should trust people like Ignatius and Polycarp, who were alive then, rather than Saint Jerome, who's writing more than 300 years later.

But just proving that the Church had a threefold structure or that apostolic succession was clearly believed in by the early Christians, while all that's true, it's not enough for Ruslan to know whether or not to become Catholic as opposed to Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox.

As he points out

Most of these churches with apostolic succession all claim to be the one true Church.

Some of them are more friendly with other one true churches than others, but generally, they all claim to be the one true, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

Now, I'm not trying to argue which one is or isn't, and I'm not even saying that Protestants have the one true and holy apostolic Church.

We've never made that claim.

Just interesting that the debates happening online are high church versus low church, where all high churches are exclusive in their claims to be the one true Church.

Now, obviously, three different churches claiming to be the one true Church, that doesn't disprove the fact that there really is one true Church, any more than many different religions claiming to be the true religion knowing the one true God disproves the fact that there's a true religion or one true God.

In fact, we might even say, on the contrary, the mere fact that every form of Christianity older than the year 1500 believes that Christ established a single visible Church is pretty good evidence that Christ established a single visible Church.

But Ruslan is right, this does mean that we have to figure out which of these competing claims is true, and fortunately, we have some help.

Before I give you what that help is, I wanna pose a question for you.

Have you noticed that when Muhammad died, Islam immediately split into Sunni and Shiite?

Or when Joseph Smith died, Mormonism immediately split into LDS and RLDS and a bunch of smaller groups?

Why didn't that happen with Christianity after Jesus ascended or after the apostles died?

Well, remember that biblical principle that I mentioned earlier about how throughout Scripture, God consistently leaves one person accountable for the care of His people?

It turns out Jesus does that with the whole Church.

He leaves the care of the entire flock to St. Peter in John:21, and he entrusts Peter with the care of even the other apostles in Luke:22.

And as Saint Optatus explains back in the early 300s, the reason that Jesus establishes his headship with Peter and then his successors in Rome is so that unity should be preserved by all.

Otherwise, Optatus points out, each apostle might have started his own church, and we'd see schisms of the same kind that we see in the history of Islam and Mormonism.

So you actually don't need to guess which form of governance Jesus wanted for the Church, and you don't even need to guess which church is the true Church.

Optatus, like the various Christians before him, can simply list every pope from Peter down to his own day, and he knows that if he's in communion with them, he's in communion with the Church.

Now, he's writing those words long before the schism with the Oriental Orthodox or with the Eastern Orthodox, and he's not even the first to write these kinda things.

Saint Irenaeus back in the 100s says, It is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church, talking about the Church of Rome, on account of its preeminent authority.

And then he lists every pope.

So my advice to Ruslan and all of you is to listen to the early Christians here and to trust their witness.

Now, if you wanna know more about how we know that the early Church was governed by bishops, elders, and deacons, you can either check out my book, The Early Church was the Catholic Church, or you can check out this video right here.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.