A Few More Dumb Dogs

Tying Up Loose Tails

This argument builds on my last post, “A Thousand Dumb Dogs.”

By way of brief recap, that post began with a list of doctrines held universally by the Churches prior to the Reformation but now rejected by Protestants across the board. From there, I argued that one of two things must be true about these teachings: either they are part of the Gospel as originally proclaimed by the Apostles, or they came in sometime later. If the second were true, there would be a paper trail; a record of disputes, books and sermons and synods taking one side or the other. There would be heretics, excommunications, schisms small and large. But there aren’t. Thus the startling conclusion: it’s all original. In other words (to borrow the title of a Joe Heschemeyer book), the early Church was the Catholic Church.¹

This strategy is, to my knowledge, novel. For that reason I was very interested to see what sort of responses thoughtful objectors would develop. In this article, I’d like to take these responses seriously. In the sections with

this formatting

I adopt the voice of an objector making a version of replies I heard from real people.

First, though, let me briefly clear up a point that confused some: the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches do not have anything like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, so for contemporary sources I often had to draw on official websites belonging to some part of their Churches, such as a diocese, for explanations of their teachings.

That settled, we turn to the first objection.

The No Consensus Objection

Despite the clean picture presented in the post, history is not so neat. There have always been dissenters, there has always been conflict. The fact of the matter is that practically nothing has been agreed upon across any substantial span of time or distance. Presenting these doctrines as universal is just a historical mistake. Your own argument even depends upon the fact that there are long-standing, deep divisions within the Church.

Additionally, even passing familiarity knows that the history of theology itself is usually told in terms of intra-Christian conflict: this theologian against that one, these schools against those ones. Once you see that Protestantism is just another voice in this venerable tradition of disagreement, the idea that it’s somehow the odd man out becomes hard to credit.

We can make our objection even stronger: The post claims that on the “eve of the Reformation” there was a universal consensus. But this overlooks communities and individuals deemed “heretical” by the Roman Church, such as Montanists, Moravians, Lollards, Wyclifites, and Waldensians. And that’s not to mention the diversity of thought within the Catholic Church itself! Irenaeus held to a literal thousand-year reign of Christ at the end of history, a belief now espoused by many Evangelicals but considered heretical by the modern Magisterium, to take just one example. There is hardly any Protestant view that cannot be found in some Catholic theologian at one time or another. In summary: We are your own tradition, subjected to Scripture.

Communion of the Saints, Padua Baptistry

Reply to the No Consensus Objection

The first problem for the objector is that he misses the argument. In fact, he even makes it stronger. Here’s how.

Grant the objector his point. Conflict is a mainstay of theology. You might even say that no doctrine gets worked out in any detail without it. It’s the catalyst for development: Arians arguing that the Son was a mere creature prompted the declaration that He was true God; docetists arguing that the Son took on the mere appearance of humanity prompted the declaration that He was true man. The truth advances one heresy at a time.

About this the objector is wholly correct. So where are the records of conflict over the doctrines listed? What the No Consensus Objection establishes beyond all doubt is that if they were not original, someone somewhere would have raised concerns.

Remember what data we’re appealing to: universal consensus among all the Churches that existed prior to the Reformation. You can see for yourself, in the footnotes and the materials they cite, the reality of this agreement. Consensus exists today. It got there somehow. Showing that its existence is unlikely doesn’t undermine the fact that it does exist any more than learning the vanishingly small odds of life’s formation in our universe would make you doubt the existence of humans. Indeed, the same solution suggests itself in both cases: things have not been left to themselves, but go on under the guiding hand of an Author.

Moreover, if the beliefs were not original, it should be a simple matter to identify when and how they got in. In other cases of heterodoxy (i.e., foreign and false teachings), we have an antagonist pushing heresy, a protagonist defending orthodoxy, and truth’s eventual triumph. Here is my one historical claim: when we turn to these doctrines, we come up empty. Apparently these beliefs, and only these beliefs, came in later without raising a single eyebrow—no fracas about asking saints for their intercession, no schism over prayers for the dead.² But remember: according to the objector, theological progress just doesn’t happen without fighting. The conclusion is that these doctrines are not the result of theological development. But that admits that they are original to the teaching of the Apostles.

It would be one thing if there were a conflict and the objector simply thought that the Catholic Church (and every other Apostolic Church) ended up on the wrong side of it. Then the objection might be made to work. But even a very modest request, “Show me the debate that went the wrong way,” cannot be met. In fact, the few doctrines on the list that did see conflict at any point before the Reformation were reacted against as the already-established position.³ That is to say, they weren’t facing resistance to their becoming established, which is the kind of conflict the objector needs if he wants to show that they were not original. Reactionary conflicts, far from posing a problem for my argument, demonstrate the existence of an earlier consensus and so, again, end up strengthening the position.

In point of fact, I disagree with the objector’s portrayal of history, and his understanding of what “universal agreement” means. But since it doesn’t affect the argument I’m advancing one way or the other, wading into specifics would only muddy the waters. Do not let a swarm of names and claims cloud your vision. We have the relevant consensus ready to hand as a matter of empirical fact right now (again, you can see it for yourself). The task is to consider possible explanations for that consensus, and the only reasonable story we seem to be left with is that this was the teaching of Peter, Paul, John, James, and ultimately Our Lord himself.

The Speed Drift Objection

It is well-known that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” I grant that there is no record of disputes over the listed doctrines. It doesn’t follow that there were no disputes, because there is a reason to expect that even if such disputes took place, we might not end up with their records. Namely, we have very few writings from the earliest days of the Church. This is because the circumstances at the time (constantly being persecuted and martyred) left little time for writing, and because later circumstances (the Great Persecution in the early fourth century) destroyed much of what was written, and then what survived was winnowed down even further by the consuming passage of time.

So if I want to claim that the disputed doctrines have their origin in theological drift, all your argument proves is that I have to place that drift before roughly 313 A.D., when large-scale persecution (the kind that could destroy all records) ended. And given the other wacky heresies Christians witnessed in those centuries, it’s not at all unreasonable to think that the Marian doctrines, the 73-book canon, and the rest popped up during that period. There were disputes, surely—we just don’t, and shouldn’t expect, to have records of them.

And a last thought: if someone thinks it unlikely that the drift happened so fast, they don’t know the history of theology in the 20th century. Every mainline Protestant denomination flipped on basically every contentious social issue, and they let a lot of old Trinitarian and Christological heresies in along the way. So if we are forced to say the drift happened between 33 A.D. and 313 A.D., that’s fine. Living memory shows this is a window roughly three times larger than is required for huge theological mistakes to be made and spread abroad.

“Amusing Gossip,” Antonio Salvador Casanova y Estorach (1847–1896)

Reply to the Speed Drift Objection

The objector misses key details.

For one, the persecutions did not target all Christian writings, but specifically the Scriptures. The works of Justin Martyr, say, were not systematically rounded up and burned.

And we do have surviving Christian works refuting the wacky beliefs. That’s how we know about them. See, for example, Irenaeus’ monumental Against Heresies from roughly 200 A.D. This and other works systematically catalogued and responded to every erroneous belief attempting to attach itself to the Christian proclamation. Curiously absent from this and other works is the flicker of a doubt about the doctrines listed in the original post. Some of the doctrines are even assumed as background information while arguing against heretics.⁴

Even amidst great travail, Christians found time to write. The fact that they chose to use their precious moments of peace to work out comprehensive refutations of heresy suggests that if they were alarmed at the introduction of the beliefs I listed (and they surely would have been if they were innovations), they easily could have addressed them.

Yet even if we grant that no one had any objections to these ideas as they spread,⁵ their geographical dispersal would require a lot of letters, apparently none of which survived anywhere in the entire world. Very suspicious.

As far as the analogy to 20th-century Protestantism goes, it actually gives important evidence for my argument, because in every single mainline church, groups resisted the changes and split off to form their own denominations. If the objector’s parallel case holds, then we should expect to see similar splinters in the first centuries holding to something that looks more Protestant. But we do not.⁶

Another consideration, one I’ve never seen addressed by Protestant apologists, is that the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East all pride themselves on their extreme theological conservatism. They claim a kind of radical sameness across the ages beyond even Catholic claims to continuity. For Catholics, the Church today is like the grown man to the fetus; the two might look different in striking ways, but it is the very same man at different stages of development, all of which are the natural unfolding of what was there from the beginning. The E.O., the O.O., and the Assyrians, however, claim to be something more like a carefully carved statue whose beauty endures unfaded amidst the rolling tide of centuries. So then the Speed Drift Objection has a problem: if substantial change is of Christianity’s essence, or at least of the early Church’s, what explains the swing to being radically allergic to anything that hasn’t already been explicitly defined? And how did that swing happen three different times in three different places, cultures, and centuries? The kind of Church imagined by the objection is one constantly in flux. But when we examine the character of the communions descended from this time period, they could hardly be less in flux.

What all this shows is that locating the alleged drift “somewhere” in the first several centuries relies on a vagueness that even a general understanding of early Christianity cannot sustain. The objection itself pushed the date back to 313 A.D., and then we saw several reasons to think the drift could not have happened before then. The conclusion that these doctrines were part of the original teaching of the Apostles is all that remains.

Or is it? One more response deserves consideration, since I heard some version of it more than once while giving my argument.

The Grand Censorship Objection

There is another reason the disputes may have happened without leaving a historical record. Remember who we’re talking about here: the Catholic Church. The same people who brought you the Inquisition, the Crusades, and thousands of heretic executions are more than capable of deleting a few scrolls from the stacks. Consider the depth of their influence: as the custodians of the sacraments, Catholic higher-ups wielded a kind of spiritual dominance for much of history that is difficult for modern, secularized people to understand. Consider also its breadth: all of Europe and more. The organizational reach extended far enough to successfully quash resistance wherever it sprang up.

Given that, it is not at all unreasonable to think that the Church would have worked to suppress documents that undermined its claims. This isn’t even really speculation: we know a pope forged the Donation of Constantine, a purported letter from the emperor giving care of the western Roman Empire to the bishop of Rome. Saying that men like that wouldn’t have stooped to the comparatively easy task of having some records quietly destroyed is like saying the same man would accept a bribe of $30,000 but not $35,000. The Church has the means and the motive. The lack of documents describing the fight over the introduction of these doctrines is exactly what we would expect: of course those would have been first on the docket to disappear.

Can’t remember where I saw this but it lives in my head for zero dollars and zero cents.

Reply to the Grand Censorship Objection

The objector swamps us with assertions,⁷ but the logic doesn’t hold up.

Let’s start with logistics.

If there was a suppression campaign, it needed to succeed everywhere from France to Ethiopia to Turkey and even India. This gives the Catholic Church too much credit. It would mean finding and overcoming every monastery in every nook and cranny of the world. It would mean securing the agreement of every document holder to first hand their papers over and then suffer them to be burned.⁸ It would mean coordinating efforts in five or six major languages on three continents. And all that without either A) missing a single document or B) leaving a paper trail of any kind on the administrative side. So the objection asks us to assume, off the bat, that the Catholic Church managed a global operation with perfect cooperation and perfect accuracy across thousands of miles and tens of thousands of people. Any organization that could pull that off would have to be divine.

And about the dissenters themselves: what happened to them? If they simply faded away without a trace, it’s hard to believe they were the bearers of the true Christian doctrine. If they were violently repressed, we wonder how the Church of the first few centuries, itself politically powerless, managed to persuade the authorities to persecute internal dissenters even while the Church was itself an outlaw suffering persecution. And that, of course, without a paper trail on the imperial-bureaucratic side.

This invites us to ask: when, exactly, should we place this censorship campaign? If we go with the height of the powers of the papacy in the West, the argument will fail, because the consensus under discussion is shared by Churches separated as early as 431 and 451 A.D. The Catholic Church had no ability to carry out its purported suppression in Assyria or Egypt or Armenia after that. Remember also that Christianity was illegal until 313 A.D. This changes things: now we aren’t looking at combing the world methodically over centuries, slowly destroying all the offending records. Now we have a scant hundred years, assuming the Church had the resources to instantly go from being literally underground to operating on a level unknown to bureaucracies ancient or modern.

Even if the long, systematic approach were possible, the objector still asks us to assume that popes from different centuries, different languages, different cultures, could keep up one long conspiracy theory without any big administrative glitches. They functioned without error and without intermission. Judge for yourself: if we grant the objector impossibilities (like the pope having the ability to enforce his will in Churches lost to schism), and then his argument turns on yet another impossibility, that seems like a sign that we’re not on the right track.

Two more problems.

First, we actually have something a little like this with Islam. It’s a bad look to claim that your holy book was divinely delivered word-for-word and then have conflicting versions floating around. For this reason, a seventh-century caliph named Uthman had all versions besides his authorized one burned. Lots of things, like military might and proximity to the religion’s founding (Uthman was a contemporary of Muhammad), made this more manageable in Islam than Christianity. Even so, his success fell short of the success our objector accords the papacy; Uthman’s victory was not total. Paper⁹ was expensive for much of history, and as a result some unauthorized versions of the Qur’an were not burned but merely erased and written over with other texts. Modern technologies allow us to read the original, so anyone who can google Sana’a Qur’an can see images of an alternate version for themselves. This look at the closest historical analogy to the objector’s scenario gives us empirical reason to heavily doubt that the Catholic Church could have had a 100% success rate eliminating more manuscripts over a larger area with nothing like the caliph’s army, and then cover up the purge itself. That doesn’t seem even distantly possible to me. It’s hard to get much further into specifics than this, because although the objector claims the Catholic Church cleansed the historical record, he does not know when or where or even really how this was carried out. It’s pure, unmixed conjecture.

Second, even if we granted every single logistical fantasy the objector proposes, one more whopping problem remains. Namely, that’s just not how the Church deals with heresy. Even in times and places where heretical texts were burned, there remain the writings of Catholic theologians who rose up to answer them. I think of it like antibodies: when a new heresy pops up (or an old heresy in a new guise), it exercises an initial pull on the population and leads some of them into error. This provokes a defense of orthodoxy tailored to the specific error, and the lesson of the conflict is eventually absorbed into the Catholic immune system as the defense is disseminated throughout the Church. This is why heresies tend to grow and die in waves: they capture an initial chunk, and then find it hard to convert more Catholics to their cause as the centuries wear on. Thus at the Reformation there were initial waves of conversion to Lutheranism or Calvinism, but no mass movements of Catholics after that.¹⁰ Today it’s Evangelicals and Charismatics in Latin America. Tomorrow it will surely be something else. And something else after that.

This process doesn’t work, though, if the writings of orthodox Catholics are themselves suppressed. And indeed, we know about the heresies we do mostly because their memory has been preserved by the Catholics who opposed them.¹¹

Here’s where this leaves us: the objector asked us to believe a success story of wild improbability that becomes more incredible with every turn. And once we have given him everything he asks for, he concludes by asking us to believe, well, what? That only in cases where Catholic theologians of the first centuries were responding to Proto-Protestant doctrines, the Church changed tack and destroyed even the work of her defenders? That she preserved the names of Arius and Marcion,¹² who attacked the very heart of Christianity, but obliterated the names of their contemporaries who (with Apostolic mandate, according to the objector) opposed venerating the saints? It just doesn’t work. We always try to preserve the memory of a heresy because it is crucial for understanding the pressures that forced the Church to clarify her teaching, and to be prepared against similar errors springing up in the future.

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I have tried to give thorough responses to what seemed to me the best objections to my argument. The upshot of all this is that the story about slow accretions and gradual drift peddled by men I otherwise respect, like Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund, relies on making vague historical claims. Once the claims become concrete, the story becomes untenable. The present-day consensus of the ancient Churches must be dealt with, and for my money I can’t see any way to do that besides accepting that in them we hear the voice of those who walked with God in Galilee.

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1. Link to the book. Also worth noting that the argument presented here is strictly speaking neutral between Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Assyrian Church of the East.

2. One draft reader asked for an example of a belief that was proposed later as being implicitly part of the Faith the whole time, passed through the fire of conflict, and in the end was accepted by the Churches. Truthfully, I don’t think there’s any better example of this than the terms introduced by the Ecumenical Councils, namely, “consubstantial” and “hypostatic union.” “Trinity” would be a good candidate as well. There were some who felt that all terms dogmatized by the Church should be biblical. Obviously that crowd lost, or we wouldn’t be saying “The Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate.”

3. See for example this footnote in the original post about the Antidicomarians.

4. Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, disciple of John the Apostle, has the following passage in his argument against those who denied that the flesh could be raised to incorruptibility:

When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made, from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which [flesh] is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him?— even as the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones (Ephesians 5:30). He does not speak these words of some spiritual and invisible man, for a spirit has not bones nor flesh (Luke 24:39); but [he refers to] that dispensation [by which the Lord became] an actual man, consisting of flesh, and nerves, and bones — that [flesh] which is nourished by the cup which is His blood, and receives increase from the bread which is His body. And just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies in its season, or as a grain of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed, rises with manifold increase by the Spirit of God, who contains all things, and then, through the wisdom of God, serves for the use of men, and having received the Word of God, becomes the Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ; so also our bodies, being nourished by it, and deposited in the earth, and suffering decomposition there, shall rise at their appointed time, the Word of God granting them resurrection to the glory of God, even the Father, who freely gives to this mortal immortality, and to this corruptible incorruption (1 Corinthians 15:53), because the strength of God is made perfect in weakness…

Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter 2.3. Emphasis added.

5. “What’s that? The Greeks have started saying that Judith is part of the Bible? I guess that’s just true then.”

6. With the possible exception of the Montanists, who resemble Charismatics in troubling ways. Troubling, because the Montanists were crazy. Yes, they sound like modern Protestants in that they didn’t really go in for Holy Orders (that is, the bishop-priest-deacon system of the Catholic Church) and they rejected the authority of Tradition. But don't reach for them as evidence of an Original Protestantism too quickly: they also thought that the town of Pepuza was literally the New Jerusalem described as coming down from heaven in Revelation, and that God would occasionally possess their leaders to speak through them during ecstatic fits. The “prophecies” received this way could surpass any earlier teachings, including Scripture. Some of the last Montanists in the historical record appear in the 8th century, when the emperor ordered one of their communities to convert to orthodox Christianity. They refused, barricaded themselves in their church, and burned the place down with themselves inside. I can’t emphasize enough how much I recommend not drinking from their well.

7. Many of which are false, such as the claim about the Donation of Constantine. Its origin is unknown, but it was certainly not written by a pope. So far as we know, every pope who appealed to it thought it was authentic (and so did most everyone else). In fact it was Catholics, including a bishop, who later recognized and then revealed it as a forgery.

8. Or, I suppose, using military force. But that would be even harder—monasteries are often essentially small castles in remote locations like deserts and mountains, far from the rest of civilization. And of course, the more people and pressure required to make the suppression campaign work, the harder it becomes to cover up. What would stop the monks, once the soldiers had done their work and were long gone, from recording the event?

9. Actually vellum in this case, a pre-paper material made of animal skin.

10. Yes I know about the Wars of Religion. But even today, with all the exposure provided by the internet, Catholics are not converting en masse like happened in regions affected by the Reformation. Martin Luther just doesn’t move papists like he used to.

11. St. Irenaeus, who we heard from in Footnote 4, systematically works through the heresies of his time in Book I of his Against Heresies. Another milestone text is Epiphanius of Salamis’ Panarion, a massive text which tackles some 80 heresies, many of which left behind no primary documents—their memory is entirely preserved by their Catholic opponent.

12. Arius claimed that the Son was not God, and Marcion claimed that the God of the Old Testament and Jesus were different Gods. Both set up anti-churches with their own hierarchy of so-called bishops and priests.