A Reply to My Better

Answering Jordan Cooper's "Why I Have Not Gone to Rome"

The Reverend Doctor Jordan B. Cooper is the most visible Lutheran pastor in the English-speaking world. At least, that’s how it seems to me, given that I know his name. Recently he posted an article titled “Why I Have Not Gone to Rome.” After reading it a few times and pondering, I have concluded that the reasons Cooper articulates for rejecting Catholicism are not very good.

Before I launch into my apologetic, let me apologize. Although I am unsparing in my evaluation of Cooper’s arguments, I have the deepest respect for Rev. Dr. Cooper himself. He is a highly intelligent man with a deep love for the Lord. His ministry, too is a powerful force for good; thousands of people have found his writing, YouTube channel, and other public-facing works enormously helpful. Not only that, but Cooper’s obvious commitment to clarity and charity comes through strongly in the essay. The Church counts him among the “separated brethren.” Most of this post will deal with the “separated” bit; but this adjective must always be treated within the noun it modifies—“brethren.”

I’ll recapitulate Cooper’s arguments here, but I strongly encourage you to read his thoughtful post first so you can consider it without any bias.

Enough throat-clearing. Let’s get to it.

What Seems to Be The Problem, Officer?

“The problem,” Cooper explains, “is that I don’t even know how to evaluate [Roman] claims such that I could even begin to weigh their veracity. I do not even know what field of inquiry or standard of judgment I am to use in order to determine whether Papal supremacy is or is not a doctrine that is to be assented to.” The argument centers on the papacy because it is with “the doctrine of the Papacy that the Roman Catholic…traditions [sic] stands or falls.” The problem, for Cooper, is that while the papacy does depend on some claims that are falsifiable (or maybe only accidentally unfalsifiable due to lost historical records), the position itself is unfalsifiable. That is to say, if it were false, there would be no way to know. He makes his case exegetically, historically, and philosophically.

Exegetically

FIRST, “any given argument or text is theoretically disposable, while the dogma remains intact.” Imagine a Catholic who holds, as he is permitted to, that Matthew 16 isn’t about the papacy. Maybe he says the papacy is actually mostly clearly attested to by Matthew 17, when Jesus miraculously pays the temple tax for Himself and Peter. Only Himself and Peter, showing that Christ’s provision for His followers comes through Peter. Upon consideration, however, he gives up this text too. It seems his position is unfalsifiable because all supporting verses are non-essential. Whenever you win, he’ll just surrender that verse and move elsewhere.

SECOND, “Rome uses texts—like Matthew 16—to argue for dogmas that clearly go beyond the content of the texts themselves.” Say Cooper grants that Peter is the rock. Are we supposed to go from there to the bishop of Rome being an infallible guardian of Christian teaching for all time? Whatever the basis is for that, it’s not exegetical, and therefore can’t be evaluated on exegetical grounds. Adverting to an extra-textual basis for Catholic claims means that to generate an exegetical argument against the papacy, Protestant exegetes would have to “prove that the text not only does not positively teach the Roman dogma, but positively precludes the RC teaching. Such a thing is basically impossible to do.” Why? Because “[t]he claim that Peter’s confession is “the rock” does not also preclude the idea that Peter himself is also the rock. These types of moves could be made with nearly any Protestant interpretation of common verses used to defend RC dogmas.”

Historical

FIRST, according to Cooper, early Protestant polemics responded to an articulation of Catholicism that thought of the Church’s teaching in the sixteenth century as straightforwardly identical to its teaching in the first century. Their chief strategy therefore turned on identifying some of the obvious differences. But in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman came along with an alternate theory of Church history, the theory of the development of doctrine. If Catholic apologists need only show that the early Church taught in “seed form” what the contemporary Church teaches, then it shifts the burden of proof. Now, “with the near-impossible exception of the discovery of some early second-century undisputed historical text which boldly states “by the way, there has never been a bishop in Rome,” there is no historical argument which would disprove the papal office.”

SECOND, Cooper makes a quick argument that one cannot identify contradictions between infallible pronouncements because there isn’t a clear list of them anywhere. So if two seem to conflict, the Catholic can always just make up a reason one of the two statements isn’t technically infallible.¹

Philosophical

Catholics try to show that leaving the Bible up to individual interpretation creates massive problems; but this is an argument against Protestantism, not for Catholicism. While we’re at it, though, there are plenty of divergent camps in the Roman Church, too. So it really doesn’t count against Protestantism that much.

The Argument So Far

I’ll let Cooper summarize the import of all this in his own words:

Authority, for Rome, is supposedly tied to Scripture, the tradition of the church, and the living magisterium. When the first of these (Scripture) is challenged, RCs often point to the second (tradition), and when those claims are challenged, they ultimately point to the third (the magisterium). As such, the magisterium becomes its own validation.

If the RCC had clear and straightforward claims about its authority and precisely how it is to be proven, I would take claims of its infallibility more seriously. As it stands, no matter which approach to the relationship between Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium the RC defender takes, it appears to me that arguments in Rome’s favor are ultimately circular, leaving no clear and objective criteria by which to judge its claims. And thus, the magisterium becomes its own defense. And that is simply not compelling.

I Answer That…

Cooper’s argument suffers from three underlying problems. Here they are:

• He misses what it means for something to be revealed.

• He assumes Sola Scriptura.

• He doesn’t know about abduction.

I realize these are bold claims. Cooper has several degrees and decades of study on me, so I make them with some fear and trembling. But here I stand; I can do no other.

Revealed Truths

One theme in the essay is frustration that the dogmas and the arguments for them come apart, as if Catholics first commit to the doctrine, and then adopt/discard justifications as needed, like a parasite hopping bodies. Far from finding a damning problem with Catholic thought, Cooper has simply bumped up against how divine revelation works. God does not propose that we believe “X” on the grounds that “A, B, and C.” Far from it. Instead, God most often just pronounces “X” and leaves theologians to contemplate the reasons for it.

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

Proverbs 25:2

Take, for example, the entire ceremonial law. It is reasonable to think that the prohibition against wearing clothing of mixed fabrics is a symbol of the Jewish people’s separation from the Gentiles, and the Christian’s separation from sin. Is this a satisfactory explanation for the revelation? Maybe, but the explanation remains fallible while the revelation itself is not. That’s one way commentaries on the Bible are essentially different from the Bible itself. Even if my gloss on the mixed-fabrics prohibition is wrong, even if I go through a thousand mistaken interpretations and don’t know a single one that’s satisfying on exegetical, historical, or philosophical grounds, it wouldn’t make the prohibition any less divinely revealed.

If the papacy is, as Catholics claim, divinely instituted, then the truth of the claim depends on God’s trustworthiness and not on how impressive any given exegetical, historical, or philosophical argument is. Catholics aren’t being slippery, at least not in any vicious way. They’re behaving exactly as one would expect if their claims were based on divine revelation.²

Aquinas says it best:

“This doctrine is especially based upon arguments from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those to whom the revelation has been made. Nor does this take away from the dignity of this doctrine, for although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. But sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith (for thereby the merit of faith would come to an end), but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine.”³

Cooper is right to the extent that he recognizes that the papacy is not the result of arguments. It’s not something derived from some pre-existing Christian resources. This helpfully brings out a point of deep conflict between Catholic and Protestant theology: Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura

What do you think the Apostles were up to before the New Testament was completed? I’ll tell you what they weren’t doing: they weren’t going around saying, “We’ve got really great news about this guy Jesus. In a few hundred years, when we nail down the list of inspired literature on Him, then things can really get going!” No indeed. One giveaway is that Paul’s letters are to churches he’d already established. So clearly Paul’s work there wasn’t derived from the New Testament. The papacy wasn’t derived from the New Testament any more than the practices Paul handed on to those churches were.

This is obvious once pointed out, but the Church is older than the Bible. Who wrote it? Who discerned which books were inspired? You might say the Holy Spirit, and I’d agree; but the Holy Spirit guiding whom? Cooper wants a definitive cause-and-effect between specific verses and every dimension of the papacy. I can only offer humble apologies. Bilocation, incorruption, prophecy, healing, levitation; these are all known to our saints. But none have yet managed time travel. The papacy is older than Scripture, and since it couldn’t have been established by appeals to the Bible, it’s hardly fair to complain that it’s not.

Do Catholics just not care about the Bible, then? Certainly we care. But Sola Scriptura sends us down the wrong path because it makes us expect the Bible to explain things that it assumes we already know about. Take, for instance, the laying on of hands in the New Testament. If you already know about the seven sacraments, it’s obvious that these are references to either Confirmation or Holy Orders. But if you don’t know about them, you have to reverse-engineer Paul’s references and piece together what he’s talking about. I might be crazy, but if Sola Scriptura were true, I don’t think we’d have to reverse-engineer anything. The Bible would just tell us. In any case, the reverse-engineering strategy has borne some bizarre fruit. Maybe you’re going to hold Sola Scriptura no matter what happens.⁴ So be it. My point is merely that by assuming Sola Scriptura, Cooper has begged the question against Catholicism. Even so, I am sympathetic to Cooper’s frustration: if we shouldn’t expect to derive the papacy from Scripture, how is anyone supposed to be persuaded to believe in it? Unfortunately, the answer requires philosophy.

Philosophical Interlude

There are three kinds of philosophical arguments. The first two, deduction and induction, admit of proof and disproof. Deduction shows that a conclusion follows with mathematical certainty from given premises; think geometry or formal logic. Induction extrapolates universal truths from particular cases; think “All swans are white.” In the third kind, abduction, or inference to the best explanation, we start with a bunch of phenomena, generate various theories to explain them, then choose the best one. What makes a theory “better”? Three things: power, or how likely the observed phenomena would be to occur if the theory were true; scope, or the number of phenomena it explains; and simplicity, or how many new things the theory introduces to get the job done.

Example

Phenomena:

• When I come home from work, my dog Obadiah has a mullet.

• My nephew, who was looking after it, has Obadiah’s fur all over him.

• My nephew himself wears a mullet, and has a record of unauthorized pet grooming.

My nephew’s proposed explanation:

While he was taking a nap, someone broke in, gave Obadiah an unfortunate makeover, spread some of the fur on him as he slept, and snuck out.

My explanation:

It was my nephew.

Both theories explain all the facts, so they score the same on scope. But even if someone did break in for felonious doggy daycare, it’s hard to see why they would sprinkle my nephew with fur. On the other hand, if it were my nephew, it would be unsurprising to find him covered in Obadiah’s lost locks. Thus my theory is more powerful than his. But where I really excel him is simplicity. His theory requires positing an entirely new person, one with motives beyond ordinary human comprehension. My theory, by contrast, introduces nothing new: we already knew about my nephew’s curiously specific vice.

Most abductions will incorporate deductive and inductive arguments into their analysis. But they behave very differently. In a deductive argument, say a geometrical proof, a single counter-example is enough to defeat the argument. Likewise in an inductive argument, just one black swan is enough to show that “All swans are white” is false. Not so in abduction. Although my theory is superior to my nephew’s, enough to warrant vowing never to leave Obadiah in his care again, his theory has not been disproved. It still could be true, it’s just a comparatively poor explanation. Suppose I do some investigation and find every window and door locked. That would further disconfirm my nephew’s theory, as it seems unlikely that the canine cutter would care (or even be able) to lock things up on his way out. But even this wouldn’t disprove his theory; he could make up some explanation that fits with what he’s said so far. But even if he did, it would further weaken the theory’s power, and to that extent make my theory comparatively better.

We can distinguish between three kinds of unfalsifiability:

Total unfalsifiability: A claim is impossible to investigate in any way. “All arguments are merely disguised power plays.”

Accidental unfalsifiability: A claim cannot be verified because while there is or could be evidence for/against it, we aren’t in a position to reach it. This may or may not be vicious depending on the context. “Just before he died, when we were alone, Brent said he wanted me to have the jetski.”

Theoretical Unfalsifiability: A theory is unfalsifiable because we could always add more hypotheses to accommodate new data. But good theories are confirmable and disconfirmable; and if a theory starts relying on a huge string of very implausible claims to deal with disconfirmations, it must either be heavily revised or discarded altogether. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes theoretically cancerous, consumed by its own internal limitations. Unfalsifiable? Technically—but very easy to evaluate as an inference to the best explanation.

And now, patient reader, theology.

The Interlude Applied

Cooper elides the second two kinds of unfalsifiability into the first. Although the papacy is theoretically unfalsifiable, it is very easy to look for confirmation and disconfirmation.

In abduction, we start with the theory, and then test it against the data. Think about it like gathering suspects. You come home and find your window broken and jewelry missing. Obviously you won’t be able to determine much about the thief from this information. But you know that only three people live in a 100-mile radius. So it must be one of them.⁵ Therefore, you will look for information that confirms or disconfirms each person’s innocence. There are, generally speaking, three competing ecclesiologies: Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic. We know probably one of these is right, as they are the only ones that exist. So the thing to do is look for information that confirms or disconfirms each model. This move makes things a lot simpler.

First, it means we don’t have to derive the ecclesiology from the evidence, any more than you have to derive every aspect of a man’s existence from the scant clues of the robbery. This lays to rest Cooper’s objection about the doctrine of the papacy going beyond what Scripture warrants.

Second, it means we can make use of all the evidence. While we can’t deductively proceed from “Peter is the rock” to every claim Catholics make about the papacy, we can show that it confirms Catholicism.

Third, it allows us to properly weigh to what extent arguments against one side count in favor of the other. Because theories compete with one another to be the best explanation, theoretical strength is to some extent zero-sum. Thus for Catholicism to be confirmed is (insofar as they are incompatible) for Protestantism to be disconfirmed. So when Cooper points out that attacking the anarchy of Protestant ecclesiology isn’t technically an argument for Catholicism, he’s mostly wrong. Return to our three suspects. If we suspect each equally, then for each man there’s a 33% chance that he’s guilty. But say we turn up evidence that disconfirms the guilt of one and makes it only 10% likely that he’s our thief. It immediately follows that the other two are each now 45% likely to be guilty. This is why Cooper makes the second move, that Catholicism has just as much infighting as Protestantism. This would put them back on a par—if it were true. It’s not true, but more on that in the next section.

An Offensive Abduction

Reader, I want to congratulate you. You’ve made it far; the payoff is here. It’s time to revisit Scripture, history, and philosophy to see how the papacy fares as an inference to the best explanation.

Scripture

Cooper’s analysis implicitly acknowledges that the Catholic position is totally comfortable with Scripture. Even if we can’t all agree on exactly what’s going on in the famous Matthew 16 passage, it is the Protestant who takes a posture of “explaining away” Jesus’ words. For the Catholic, it is entirely natural that Jesus would use the singular “you” when giving the keys to Peter. Or again take the Temple tax episode in Matthew 17. It doesn’t prove that Peter is first among the Apostles, and even if it did it wouldn’t establish all the claims of the papacy. But it certainly fits better with those claims than the claim that Peter wasn’t special among the Apostles. Or again, when John runs ahead of Peter to the tomb but stops and lets Peter go first, this doesn’t prove that the archetypal beloved disciple necessarily defers to the ecclesial hierarchy, but it does lend the passage an intelligibility beyond what’s typically reflected in (admittedly funny) Protestant memes about the passage.

Given the scope and intensity of Catholic doctrine about the papacy, isn’t it rather surprising that nothing in the New Testament really disconfirms it? Shouldn’t there be something that cuts against what Catholics say? Maybe there is, but Cooper at least thinks it nearly impossible to generate an exegetical claim that positively opposes the papacy, which he has already told us is the most prominent of his reasons for not “going to Rome.” Perhaps one could point to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts, where James seems to be in charge rather than Peter. This is where history can be helpful. If we add in data about how the Ecumenical Councils were carried out, i.e., always with the pope’s approval but not always with his direct leadership, this makes the roles James and Peter play entirely plausible. Speaking of history:

History

It’s odd how little historical data Cooper’s essay actually attends to. Even if the Church Fathers don’t give the definitions of Vatican I verbatim, it’s clear that what they do say fits strikingly better with Catholic than Protestant ecclesiology. I’ll leave you to peruse this for yourself at my favorite website, ChurchFathers.org. One important episode not covered by ChurchFathers.org (my favorite website), is the “Robber Council,” Ephesus II. Non-Catholics have a hard time explaining why this wasn’t a valid council.

In the early Church, disputes of sufficient import were settled at councils, in which the world’s bishops gathered together to deliberate and vote. The Second Council of Ephesus in 449 debated whether (with the Copts) Christ has one divine-human nature, or two distinct natures, one divine and one human. Representatives of all the major patriarchs were present. When Rome’s legate arrived, he announced that he had a letter from Pope Leo on the matter, but he was told to wait until later to read it. Things got heated, and before he had a chance to weigh in, the assembly voted in favor of the one-nature formula. A mob of Coptic monks physically intimidated dissenting bishops into a unanimous vote, and the resistance leader was beaten so severely that he died of his injuries soon after. The legate had to be smuggled out of Ephesus back to Rome, where Leo, furious, immediately declared the council invalid. When a sympathetic emperor ascended to the throne a few years later, Leo took the opportunity to call a new council. That council took place in 451 at Chalcedon, where they hammered out the Christology that is universally accepted today. And I mean universally, because in response the Copts argued not so much against the actual theology of Leo, but rather that the letter should have been read earlier.

This means that arguably the most important council of all time was the result of a pope unilaterally overruling a previous gathering that, apart from the pope’s endorsement, had all the ingredients for a valid council.

“But the Orthodox,” some will cry, “they were never on board with papal supremacy!!” Untrue. Not only did they accept extreme exercises of papal authority like the overturn of Ephesus II, but on two separate occasions reached satisfactory agreements with Rome to reunify. In the first case, it was ruined (ironically) by Pope Martin IV excommunicating the Byzantine emperor, and in the second case it was rejected by Orthodox laity after being initially accepted by theologians and the hierarchy. Clearly they are not the principled resistors to the papacy that Protestants sometimes like to use them as.

In addition to confirming the Catholic position directly, the Orthodox attest to it indirectly, too. Since the Great Schism, how many ecumenical councils have the Orthodox had? A cool zero. There was an attempted Pan-Orthodox Council in 2014, but in the end the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox communion, cordially rejected its authority.

Again, these observations don’t prove the Catholic claims about the papacy. But they are exactly what we would expect to see if those claims were true.

As I noted above, Cooper makes a drive-by argument that since there is no bullet-point list of dogmas, Catholics can always squirrel out of apparent contradictions. All I will say here is that the same goes for the Bible, and gesture at a post I’ve written on a nearby topic.

Philosophy

Cooper’s philosophical argument is a false equivalence. Catholic disagreements differ in kind and in order of magnitude from Protestant ones. They are different in kind because when Catholics today support abortion, gender ideology, and universalism (or alternatively fascism, racism, and neglect of the poor), they are objectively at odds with the pronouncements of the Church whose authority they explicitly identify themselves with. I call this the Argument from Bad Catholics: anyone who consults the Catechism on these matters can easily tell which side aligns with the Church. In others words, we know who the bad Catholics are. In Protestantism, if someone says, “I know what those other guys say it means to be Anabaptist, but we’re telling you what it really means,” there is no definitive way to settle the matter, since there is no living final authority. Please see this joke.

Once we restrict the debate to questions that divide people who seriously subscribe to our respective ecclesiologies, the contrast becomes almost grotesque. The Episcopalians and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are all-in on leftism; fundamentalists think it’s Satanic. Presbyterians meet on Sunday; Seventh-Day Adventists think that’s the Mark of the Beast. Methodists baptize babies; Baptists (ironically) say it’s worthless. Evangelicals think communion is probably just a symbol; on some days Anglicans might even believe in transubstantiation. The present debates between serious Catholics, on the other hand, center on the role of the Church in government, how much Latin should be in the Mass, and how rigorously to police the reception of communion by Catholics who are not in good standing with the Church. Not small issues, to be sure. But claiming that the two situations are on par is… hasty, to put it mildly.

Did We Cheat?

The last claim I want to address from Cooper’s post is that by embracing St. John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine, the Catholic Church unfairly changed its definition of continuity. I have two replies.

First, while I understand that it’s frustrating to feel that the goalposts are being moved, the Church has always used heresies to clarify her own teaching. This sometimes involves discarding theories that were popular in a given time or place. St. Augustine’s view that Original Sin is passed from one generation to the next by the sexual desire involved in procreation is one such example.

Second, I don’t accept the premise. If some kind of “static doctrine” theory was popular at the time of the Reformation, it was not always. Newman developed his theory (and converted!) through reading the Fathers. Here is St. Vincent of Lerins, c.~434 AD:

But some one will say. perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in Christ’s Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For what being is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration, that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.⁶

Moreover, if one doesn’t believe in some kind of development of doctrine, it’s hard to see why the papacy would be as important as the Counter-Reformation apologists argued. If no new questions arise for the Faith, why would we need someone to settle them? And how could Ecumenical Councils declare words that don’t appear in the Scriptures, like “Trinity” and “consubstantial,” necessary to the Christian faith? It is prima facie very difficult for me to believe that defenders of the papacy endorsed a naively static view of doctrine. I can believe they emphasized continuity, perhaps even to a fault, but that’s a different matter entirely.

In Summary

Rev. Dr. Cooper’s core claim was that he didn’t know by what method or standard he was to evaluate the doctrine of the papacy. I submit that the answer to his question is “Abduction, drawing on exegetical, historical, and philosophical data.” I am grateful for Cooper’s thoughtful engagement with Catholic teaching, and am relieved to report that his worries are not too worrisome.

1. Actually, I’ve improved his argument a little bit. He focuses on ex cathedra statements, but in Catholic theology this became a technical term reserved for statements pronounced following the forms set out in Vatican I. Thus to talk about historical ex cathedra statements is a little bit confusing. It’s not the subset of infallible dogmas pronounced ex cathedra we’re interested in, but all the infallible dogmas. This is a pretty small nuance and doesn’t really affect Cooper’s argument.

2. There is a very nice explanation of the distinction between “teaching” and “persuading” in Fr. Mike’s opening interview with Bishop Cozzins for the Catechism in a Year podcast. Listen here!

3. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 1, Article 8.

4. Including the realization that it’s not derivable from anything in the Bible. I know that “all Scripture is God-breathed,” but that doesn’t establish either that A) Scripture is the only thing that’s God-breathed, or B) the 66-book list is the right one. Insofar as Cooper says the papacy goes beyond what can be established by Scripture, I return the charge back on his own methodology.

5. Note that an infinite number of theories could fit the phenomena. Paratroopers (or aliens, for that matter) could have descended on your house and absconded with the booty. But merely knowing that other possibilities exist won’t give you pause about the conclusion that it was one of your three neighbors.

6. The Notebooks, ch XXIII.