The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign
Showing posts with label Apostles' Creed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apostles' Creed. Show all posts

Friday, August 22, 2025

Who is the Heretic?

The sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant” to be entitled “Catholic Not Roman” is, as it was when I mentioned it in my last essay “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, about half to three quarters written.  That it has not advanced any further than this in over a month is due to the fact that the twelve books that I have been reading during this time each is potentially relevant to the topic and so I thought it best to defer completing the essay until I had finished reading all of them.

 

In the mean time, a controversy has developed on social media that is remarkably similar to that between myself and those against whom I have been arguing in this series of essays.  What I have been arguing in this series, remember, is that the first tier of Christian truths, those that are de fide, essential to the faith, are the Catholic truths, this is to say, the truths that have been confessed by the Church in all places and all times since they were deposited with the Apostles.  These are the truths confessed in their most basic form in the Apostles’ Creed, in a more nuanced form to guard against the heresies of the fourth century (primarily Arianism) in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed more commonly called the Nicene Creed, and in their fullest so as to guard against any error regarding the Trinity or the Christological errors addressed by the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century in the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.1In the early twentieth century, in response to those who were peddling a theology revised to accommodate the presuppositions of post-Christian liberal philosophy, conservative Protestants began calling themselves “fundamentalists.”  This term indicates that one is standing for the “fundamentals” and the fundamentalists had to identify what the “fundamentals” were.  While different lists were drawn up, the one that was most influential in the movement was the list of five fundamentals published by conservative Presbyterians in 1910.  Instead of drawing up a new list they would have been better to say that there are twelve fundamentals – the twelve articles of the Creed.2 The teachings of Rome against which the Reformers protested in the sixteenth century are not Catholic truths because most of these are unique to Rome and not taught by the other ancient Churches and none of these is confessed in the ancient Symbols.  Neither, however, are the doctrines of the Reformation, and while I would say that the distinctives of Rome that the Reformers opposed are errors and the doctrines central to the Reformation are truths, these must be regarded as secondary truths to those confessed in the ancient Symbols.  I have been arguing this against those who maintain that the Reformation doctrine of sola fide is itself “the Gospel” and that therefore those who do not confess the Reformation doctrine do not have the Gospel even though they confess the Creed which contains the truths that St. Paul identifies as the Gospel in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3ff).

 

Recently, the online personality who goes under the handle “Redeemed Zoomer” was accused of heresy by James White for saying that someone does not have to confess sola fide and penal substitution to be a Christian and that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are Christian.  The controversy has been conducted through at least two social media platforms, that formerly known as Twitter and that still known as Youtube.  Both individuals belong to the big-R Reformed branch of Protestant theology, although to different denominations within that branch.  Redeemed Zoomer is a Presbyterian.  James White is a Reformed Baptist.  Both could be described as apologists and in the case of White, who is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, he is so in a professional capacity.  Five years ago I addressed arguments from two of his books in an essay entitled “Black and White.” 3 My opinion of his apologetics can be summarized in the words of Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much.” 

 

It was Redeemed Zoomer’s Youtube response to White’s accusation on 19 August that brought this to my attention.4It is an excellent response, and he covered much of the same ground that I did in “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, such as that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ not by faith in sola fide and the Heidelberg Catechism’s use of the Apostles’ Creed to define the content of the Christian faith.  He also did an excellent job of showing that White had accused him of heresy, not for denying a true doctrine or teaching a false one, but for saying that two doctrines that he himself affirms and regards as important – sola fide and penal substitutionary atonement – are important but not so of the essence of the faith that one cannot be a Christian without them. 


I have not said anything about penal substitutionary atonement in my series, but will address it now.  That “Christ died for our sins” is, of course, de fide.  It is the first thing mentioned in St. Paul’s definition of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, and is the fourth article of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  “Penal substitutionary atonement”, however, is not merely the belief that “Christ died for our sins” but a specific explanation of what this means. 

 

The simplest way of demonstrating how one can affirm that “Christ died for our sins” without necessarily holding to penal substitutionary atonement is by contrasting penal substitutionary atonement to the theory that is closest to it.  That would be the satisfaction model of the atonement.  It was expounded in the treatise Cur Deus Homo which St. Anselm began working on in his first year as Archbishop of Canterbury and which he completed in 1098 AD.  As indicated by the title5, St. Anselm’s subject was the reason for the Incarnation.  It was not necessary, St. Anselm argued, that God become Man, in the sense that He was under some kind of external compulsion to do so, since God is never under external compulsion, but it was “fitting” or “suitable”6, because man’s sin was an offence against God’s honour for which restitution ought to be made before man can be forgiven but since man has no resources sufficient to satisfy the demands of God’s honour, only by God becoming Man could said satisfaction be made.  St. Anselm wrote this in the early days of the East-West Schism – the mutual excommunication of Rome and Constantinople had taken place less than fifty years previous – and his satisfaction model of the atonement gained widespread acceptance in the West.  The difference between it and the penal substitution model is that the satisfaction model explains the vicarious nature of the atonement in terms of offended honour, the penal substitutional model explains it in terms of strict, courtroom, legal accounting.  This difference is not such that the Christianity of those who understand the atonement in terms of St. Anselm’s model can be denied.

 

Penal substitutionary atonement, therefore, is not the only way in which one who faithfully confesses that “Christ died for our sins” can understand these words.  While we should be wary of going too far in the other direction and saying that any theory or model of how the Atonement works is acceptable, St. Paul’s expression “died for our sins”7 is certainly broad enough to include both the penal substitution model and the satisfaction model from which, from a historical perspective, the penal substitution model developed.  Indeed, while both of these models develop the image of vicarious suffering found in such verses as 2 Cor. 5:21 and 1 Pet. 2:24 and 3:18 this is not the only imagery the New Testament uses of Christ’s death.  Origen explained the Atonement in terms of a ransom paid, and while this explanation created problems if the metaphor was pressed to the point that the question of to whom the ransom was paid was raised, which was one of the reasons St. Anselm found it deficient, it too is an image taken directly from Scripture.  “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24).   “Redemption”, here, translates the genitive form of the word ἀπολύτρωσις, which is derived from the word λύτρον which means “ransom” and which occurs twice in the NT in Matt. 20:28 and 10:45, both of which record the same saying of Jesus that He “came not be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  Nor is Rom. 3:24 the only occurrence of ἀπολύτρωσις in reference to Christ’s death.  Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, and Heb. 9:15 all use it this way. The ransom model, therefore, despite the problems when it is pressed, cannot be legitimately said to be an unacceptable explanation of the Atonement that invalidates a confession of faith that “Christ died for our sins.”

 

White, therefore, is as wrong in declaring Redeemed Zoomer to be a heretic for saying that penal substitutionary atonement is not of the indispensable essence of the Christian faith as he is declaring him to be a heretic for saying the same about sola fide.

 

Indeed, by making this accusation James White has demonstrated himself to be a heretic.  Heresy is what you get when you put so much stress on one truth that this truth becomes distorted and other truths are downplayed or denied.  Praxeas, Noetus and Sabellius so stressed the unity of God that they denied the Personal distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, conversely, Arius so stressed these distinctions that he denied that the Son was of One Being with the Father.  The Docetists has so stressed the deity and the spiritual nature of Jesus Christ that they denied His humanity, teaching that He merely “appeared” to be human, Apollinaris did not go that far, but in his dotage he stressed Christ’s deity to the point of denying that Jesus had a human mind. Under Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochian School of Theology stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point of teaching that there were two Sons, the divine Son of God and the human Son of Man, inhabiting the same body, the heresy which bears the name of Nestorius of Constantinople who was condemned for it in the fifth century.  Conversely, disciples of Nestorius’ opponent St. Cyril took their teacher’s stress on the unity of the Person of Christ to the point of denying a distinction between His two natures.  If truths as important as the deity of Jesus Christ, His humanity, the unity of God, the distinction between the divine Persons, the distinction between Christ’s natures and the unity of His Person, all of which are de fide, can each become a heresy by exaggeration, then Reformation doctrines can certainly become heresies by exaggeration, and that is exactly what happens when someone makes doctrines such as justification by faith alone and penal substitutionary atonement, important in themselves as they are, to be so important that their denial negates the Christianity of those who confess the truths that are confessed as de fide in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

 

Redeemed Zoomer is in the right and James White is wrong.  For his sake, let us pray that he repent of his heresy and acknowledge that the truths of the Reformation, important though they are, must take second place to the truths that are of the essence of the Christian faith, the Catholic truths of the ancient Creeds and embrace the fundamentalism that is true Catholicism and the Catholicism that is true fundamentalism.

 

 

1 The term “creed” comes from the Latin word credo/credimus (“I believe”, “we believe”).  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are called such because this is the first word in each in their Latin text.  Symbol is the earlier designation of these “rules of faith”.  Since the Quicumcque Vult (“Whosoever will”) is written in the third person rather than the first person, Symbol is a more accurate designation for it than Creed. ↩


2 Interestingly, this corresponds with the number of booklets in the series The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer and R. A. Torrey and published between 1910 and 1915.  This is only a coincidence, the number of number of booklets was not intended by the editors to indicate the number of fundamentals, nor did each booklet focus on a single truth.  In later editions, the essays were rearranged and bound into four volumes.↩


3 https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2020/08/black-and-white.html↩


4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkiyVxT6o5Y↩


5 If understood as a question the title means “Why did God become Man?” and as a statement “Why God became Man” or “Why the God-Man”.  Either way, it clearly identifies the reason for the Incarnation as the subject of the treatise.↩


6 The Latin word St. Anselm used is the source of our word “convenient” which no longer means “fitting” or “suitable” in an absolute moral sense but in a sense relative to the purposes of the individual for whom something is “convenient.”  It retained its original sense, however, as late as the early seventeenth century and should be understood in this sense when encountered in the Authorized Bible.  This concept of “fittingness” or “suitability” became very important in Scholasticism because it allowed for intelligent discussion of the question of God’s motivations. ↩


7 ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν↩

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Friday, July 18, 2025

Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth

I have been working on a sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant.”   In that essay I argued that the Anglican Church, contrary to the types of Churchmen who eschew one or the other of these labels, should embrace both, defining Catholic as that which belongs to all the ancient Churches since the earliest Christian antiquity and Protestant by the two fundamental truths of the Reformation, the final authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and the freeness of the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ which can only be received by faith.  The sequel, which I have given the title “Catholic not Roman” will concentrate more closely on how the errors of Rome rejected in the Reformation were distinct to Rome and late innovations rather than belonging to all the ancient Churches since the earliest times.  The death of California pastor, seminary president, and Bible teacher John F. MacArthur Jr. this week has prompted me to first address the objection that has been raised to a point I made in my first essay.  That point was that it is wrong to describe the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification in the Reformation as a recovery of the Gospel because the truths St. Paul himself identified as the Gospel he preached (that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of the eyewitnesses he enumerated)[1] were never lost by the Church and are confessed to this day even by Rome in the ancient Creeds.

 

There was a point behind this point and that is that there is a hierarchy of importance to Christian truth.  The truths that are the most important are the Catholic truths.  These are the truths confessed in the ecumenical symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.  That these outrank justification by faith alone in terms of importance is acknowledged by the formularies of each of the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation.  Our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 acknowledge it by placing the Catholic truths in the first eight articles (Article VIII is the reception of the ecumenical symbols) and the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 places the three ecumenical symbols at the start before any of the distinctly Lutheran confessions.  


Indeed, I can hardly think of a better way of making the point than how the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 makes it.  This is one of the Three Forms of Unity that the Reformed Church acknowledged as its basic formularies at the pan-Reformed Synod of Dort in 1618-1619.  Its twenty-second question asks “What, then, is necessary for a Christian to believe?” The answer is “All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in summary.”  The next question asks what those articles are and the answer is simply the text of the Apostles’ Creed.  The twenty-fourth through fifty-eighth of the questions and answers probe deeper into the meaning of each of the simple assertions of the Creed.  It is only then in the fifty-ninth question which asks “What does it help you now, that you believe all this?”, that is, the faith confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, that justification by faith alone, the topic of questions fifty-nine through sixty-four is raised.  


It should not require an appeal to the Protestant confessional formularies, however, to make this point.  According to the doctrine of justification by faith alone it is faith in Jesus Christ that is the hand with which a sinner receives everlasting life and the righteousness of God freely given in Jesus Christ.   It is therefore, by the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, more important to believe in Jesus Christ, to believe what is confessed about Him in the faith of the ancient symbols, than to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself.


Consider what the Scriptures themselves teach us about the content of saving faith.  The object of saving faith is, of course, Jesus Christ.  The object of faith is the answer to the question of Who is believed.  The content of faith is the answer to the question of what is believed.  St. John tells us at the end of the penultimate chapter of his Gospel “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name”[2]  The predicate about Jesus in this verse contains two assertions placed in apposition to each other so as to identify them with each other.  The Christ is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the Christ.  Each term brings its own connotations to the overall concept.  Christ is the Greek word corresponding to the Hebrew Messiah.  It literally means Anointed One, and the anointing primarily referred to is that of the kingship of Israel.  Priests were also anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus as the Christ is the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek and in one instance a prophet was anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus is the Prophet that Moses predicted God would send.  First and foremost, however, the Christ or Messiah is the promised heir to David’s throne Who would establish the Kingdom forever.  That the Christ/Messiah would be the Saviour not just of Israel but of the whole world is indicated by the very first prophecy found of Him in the Old Testament in God’s judgement on the serpent in Genesis 3.  The Christ, therefore, is the Saviour Who God had promised He would send the world since the Fall of Man.  Jesus as the Christ is the fulfilment of those promises.

 

What it means for Jesus to be the Son of God is established in the first verse of the same Gospel.  The Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  This Person St. John identifies as the Word (Greek Logos), is eternal since He was there in the beginning with God and is Himself God.  St. John’s use of the word Logos/Word here, like the phrase “In the beginning” points back to Genesis, since in the second verse he says that is through the Word that everything that was made was made.  In Genesis 1 God speaks (“Let there be light” for example) all of Creation into existence.  The Word is identified as Jesus in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel after which the relationship between the Word Who is God and the God Whom the Word is with is spoken of as that of Father and Son.  In a few places St. John modifies “Son” with the Greek word rendered “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.  This expression indicates that Jesus is God’s Son in a way no one else is.  All humans and angels are sometimes spoken of as God’s sons by right of creation.  Christians are God’s children by adoption.  Jesus, however, is the only natural Son of God, the kind of Son Who shares the nature of His Father.  That this does not mean there are two Gods is the significance of Jesus’ saying “I and my Father are one”[3] and St. John’s Gospel also identifies the Third Person Who shares in the unity of the Godhead with the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit or Comforter.

 

The words with which St. John identifies the content of saving faith are familiar from elsewhere in the Gospel records.  They are identical with the confession St. Peter made at Caesarea Philippi in response to the question addressed to Jesus’ disciples “but whom say ye that I am?”[4]  Jesus’ immediate response to St. Peter’s confession was to say that St. Peter was blessed, that this revelation had not come to him from “flesh and blood” but from the Father, to declare that He would build His Church which the gates of hell would not overthrow on this rock, and to give St. Peter the keys.[5]  This marked the point where Jesus began teaching His disciples that He would suffer and be crucified and rise again the third day.[6]  These are, of course, the events that make up the content of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul.  That Jesus revealed them in advance to His disciples upon St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” establishes a connection between the two.  For Jesus to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” means to be He Who was crucified for us and rose again the third day.  The end or purpose of St. Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day was that those who heard would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  This was also the end or purpose of the Gospel Jesus Himself preached, the content of which was that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.[7]  This content pointed to faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God because what the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand meant was that the promises of it had been fulfilled because it was present in His Own Person, the promised Christ.  Jesus preached this Gospel to the Jews who were anticipating the coming of the Christ and the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul preached the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ to both Jews and Gentiles because it revealed what it really meant for Jesus to be the Saviour, to be the Saviour of everybody from the bondage of sin which has afflicted the whole world since the Fall rather than a political deliverer of a single nation.

 

There is one other prominent confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and that occurs earlier in St. John’s Gospel in the account of the raising of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter.  It is the confession of St. Martha of Bethany in response to Jesus’ words “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”[8]  St. Martha’s confession was the only possible response for someone who believed these words.  Only the Christ, the Son of God could truthfully say He could guarantee resurrection and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.

 

My point, once again, is that what St. John identifies as the content of saving faith – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and what St. Paul identifies as the Gospel – that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead the third day – are all confessed in the three ancient ecumenical symbols of the faith.  It is therefore a gross exaggeration of the important of the doctrine of justification by faith alone to say that its formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of a lost Gospel.  The Roman Church, as corrupt and in serious error as she had become by the sixteenth century, still confessed as she confesses to this day, these ancient symbols.

 

This does not mean that justification by faith alone is not important.  It is a truth taught in the Scriptures.  The claim of the Roman apologists that it is only mentioned when St. James denies it[9] is most kindly described as simplistic.  One could just as simplistically respond that the claim is not true because Jesus said (to the ruler of the synagogue seeking healing for his daughter) “Be not afraid, only believe”[10] and that since this appears twice and comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself it negates the verse in St. James’ epistle.   A more serious answer would be to point out that since the Roman Church has re-iterated her official belief in the inerrancy of the Bible at least on matters of doctrine and morals in the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and her 1992 Catechism she is not free to choose St. James over St. Paul but must find a way to affirm both.  It is insufficient to point out that St. Paul does not use the word “alone” or “only” as it is more accurately rendered in the Authorized Bible[11] because St. James specifies “by works” thus including the very thing excluded by name in St. Paul.  The question, therefore, is which of the two writers explains the other.  The answer is quite clear.  There is nothing in the Jacobean epistle which could be understood as saying “St. Paul said this in Romans and Galatians, but what he meant is this, which does not contradict what I am saying here.”  St. Paul, however, includes just such an explanation of St. James at the beginning of his argument for justification by faith without works in the fourth chapter of Romans.[12]  His explanation is that justification by works, such as is affirmed by St. James, is “not before God.”  St. James, therefore, by the authority of St. Paul, was not talking about the righteousness of God which is given in Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him apart from works.[13]  This is also evident by taking note of what is missing from James 2:14-26.  Such words as “justified”, “faith”, and “works” are common to both this passage and Romans 4, as are the Old Testament references.  The word “grace”, therefore, is conspicuous by its absence from the passage in St. James.

 

Grace is the key concept here.  St. Paul doesn’t just assert that justification is by faith and not works he gives an explanation as to why this is the case.  He writes “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness”[14] and later “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.”[15]  Grace has a number of connotations, including the love of God revealed in His blessing His creatures, the act of God blessing His creatures, the blessings themselves, and even the thanks offered back to God for His blessings.[16]  When St. Paul says that justification – or salvation in all of its aspects for that matter – is by grace, he is saying that it is a free gift.  That is why it is by faith and not by works.  If it were by works it would not be a gift but a reward, payment, or wage.  Faith, by contrast, is not something offered in exchange or something that merits reward, but merely receives what is given.

 

This is a very important truth and I have not the slightest desire to diminish its importance.  It is possible, however, with any truth to exaggerate it and when this is done that truth becomes distorted.  That is the very nature of heresy – the exaggeration of a truth in such a way that other truths are denied and the exaggerated truth is distorted into error.  


Consider the basic heresies the Church contended against in the early centuries.  Sabellianism[17] exaggerated the unity of God to the point of denying the Threeness of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Arianism, the heresy that the first two Ecumenical Councils addressed,[18] was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction that stressed the distinction between the Persons to the point of denying the fundamental unity in being of the Father and the Son and so posited that the Son was a lesser, created, god.[19]  The orthodox response stressed the unity of being between the Father and Son and so the full deity of Jesus Christ but even this could be exaggerated as it was in the teachings of Apollinaris of Laodicea who taught that the Divine Logos took the place of the human nous (mind or reason) in Jesus thus denying that Jesus' humanity was complete.  The Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzus expressed the orthodox response “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” and the second Ecumenical Council condemned Apollinarism.  Nestorius of Constantinople stressed the distinction between the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that compromised the unity of His Person.  Nestorius’ orthodox opponent was St. Cyril of Alexandria whose orthodox response was itself exaggerated by Eutyches of Constantinople in a way that erased the distinction between the natures and fused them into one.[20]  In the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, a supplement to the Nicene Creed was produced that defined the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of Jesus Christ – that the Son, Who is eternally God of one nature with the Father and Holy Spirit, in taking to Himself true humanity in the Incarnation, remained the One Person He eternally was and is but with two natures that remained distinct being neither confused, divided, changed or separated.  The monk Pelagius stressed human moral responsibility to the point that he denied the hereditary taint of Original Sin and the need for God’s grace.  The heresies of monothelitism and monoenergism condemned at the sixth ecumenical council[21] were variations of the error of Apollinarism.[22]

 

If the unity of God could be exaggerated into a heresy (Sabellianism) and the deity of Jesus Christ could be exaggerated into a heresy (Apollinarism) then by all means justification by faith alone can be exaggerated into a heresy and those who elevate it above the Catholic truths of the ancient symbols of the faith by saying that its re-formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of the Gospel are at least in danger of doing just that.

 

There is a particular school of evangelicalism that clearly does this.  Note that in this context by “evangelicalism” I mean what was called “the new evangelicalism” in the 1950s when it began as a kind of softer fundamentalism although the “new” or “neo” was eventually dropped by everyone except those who continued to claim the label “fundamentalist” for themselves.  By softer fundamentalism I mean less militant and separatist.  The leaders of this new evangelicalism also claimed that they were more academically and intellectually respectable than the old fundamentalists although I have seen no evidence that would convince me that they were more so than the contributors to The Fundamentals[23] and certain books that were published about the time I was doing my undergraduate work in theology rather laid waste to the idea.[24]  By the 1970s it was evident that the doctrinal drift the old fundamentalists warned would happen in the new evangelicalism was indeed taking place.[25]  In response to the doctrinal, moral and intellectual shallowness of the broader evangelicalism a school of conservative evangelicalism arose around the 1980s and 1990s that called for a renewed commitment to standards.  This school tended to draw its inspiration primarily from the Reformation and the second-generation Calvinism of the English Puritans.


The way these evangelical leaders treated the doctrine of justification by faith alone was very interesting.  They ran it up the flag pole and demanded that everyone salute it.  If someone did not loudly and publicly affirm it his evangelicalism and even his Christianity would be suspect.  No similar allegiance was required for all of the tenets of the ancient symbols and no wonder.  These leaders were almost to the man Nestorians.  This was most evident in their rejection of the honourific Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin[26] although in the case of the late R. C. Sproul it was also expressed in an ill-conceived diatribe against Charles Wesley’s wonderful lyric “Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”  Some of them including the late John F. MacArthur Jr. taught Incarnational Sonship, the heresy that Jesus was not the Son of God prior to the Incarnation but became the Son of God in the Incarnation, although MacArthur did recant this early in the new millennium after teaching it for over twenty years, something that cannot be said of “cults” expert Walter Martin who taught the same heresy.[27]  They demanded allegiance to justification by faith alone while themselves teaching serious heresies concerning more important Christological and Trinitarian truths.  Allegiance was all they demanded for justification by faith alone, however, not comprehension or understanding.  When John F. MacArthur Jr’s The Gospel According to Jesus was published[28], it came with glowing endorsements from John Piper, James Montgomery Boice, R. C. Sproul, et al., and even an introduction from J. I. Packer.  Perhaps these Calvinists were too busy cheering MacArthur’s blistering attack on the Dallas Seminary crowd to notice that he still essentially subscribed to Dallas theology himself with regards to the worst elements of that theology and that he had gutted justification by faith alone of all meaning by redefining it so that "faith" is unrecognizable as what is meant by the rather simple concepts of “belief” and “trust” and so as to include in faith the very thing that the Reformation doctrine excludes.  One Calvinist who did notice this was John W. Robbins[29] whose scathing review of this awful book is a must read.[30]

 

This school of evangelicalism both exaggerated the doctrine of justification by faith alone by treating it as more important than such basic truths as the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Unity of the Person of Christ and distorted the doctrine beyond recognition by redefining faith to mean something other than “belief” and “trust.”  On both counts it is guilty of heresy.[31] 

 

 

 


[1] 1 Cor. 15:3ff.

[2] Jn. 20:31. Authorized Bible.

[3] Jn. 10:30.

[4] Matt. 16:15.  St. Peter’s confession is in verse 16.

[5] Matt. 16:17-19.  After the Resurrection the keys were given to the Apostles’ collectively Jn. 20:23.

[6] Matt. 16:21.

[7] Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:14-15.

[8] Jn. 11:25-26.  St. Martha’s confession is in verse 27.

[9] Jas. 2:24.

[10] Mk. 5:36, Lk. 8:50.

[11] The underlying Greek word is an adverb not an adjective.

[12] Rom. 4:1-2.

[13] That St. Paul explains St. James rather than vice versa only makes sense considering the apparent timing of the writings.  Although Galatians is relatively early in St. Paul’s corpus, Romans indicates the time of its writing as during the journey to Jerusalem that culminated in St. Paul’s arrest.  In the book of Acts this is the time period of the 20-21 chapters.  This is approximately 57 AD.  The Epistle of St. James, however, was most likely written before the Council of Jerusalem in 50 AD.  The reason most New Testament scholars think this is that the epistle, written by the man who presided at the Council of Jerusalem, is addressed to a Church that does not seem to have incorporated the Gentiles as of the time of its writing and takes no account of the various issues that the Church had to deal with as a consequence of the incorporation of the Gentiles.

[14] Rom. 4:4-5.

[15] Rom. 4:16.

[16] This is why thanking God before a meal is called “saying grace.”  This double usage of the same word for God giving and man returning thanks indicates the range of meaning of the words used in the original Scriptural Hebrew and Greek, as well as the Latin word from which the English “grace” is derived (the Latin expression that is the equivalent of our “Thank you” is “Gratias tibi ago”).  The Greek word for grace is charis.  Note how this is the main part of the compound word that is the traditional name for the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table, Eucharist.  Eucharist means “Thanksgiving.”

[17] Also known as Patripassionism in the early centuries, today it is more commonly called modalism.  It has been revived in Oneness Pentecostalism.  The feminist theology that replaces Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” in order to get rid of gender-specific terminology for God is also a move towards Sabellianism because these terms are not the names of Persons but denote functions or roles.

[18] First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), these are the Councils that gave us the Niceno-Constaninopolitan Creed, more commonly called the Nicene Creed.

[19] This heresy has been revised in the teachings of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, whose followers are the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[20] The heresy known as Eutychianism or Monophysitism.  Whether those who were accused of teaching this heresy were guilty or just misunderstood is a matter that historians debate as is the case with Nestorius.  The ideas that are called Nestorianism and Eutychianism, however, depart from the orthodox truth of the Hypostatic Union in opposite directions in a manner rightly condemned, regardless of whether or not the condemnation of those whose names they bear was  historically justified.  Nestorianism and Eutychianism were the subjects addressed by the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) respectively.

[21] The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681 AD).  The fifth ecumenical council had been the Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) which was more about reaffirming and clarifying the decisions of the previous councils than anything else.  It did condemn the writings of older theologians, primarily Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died shortly before the Council of Ephesus) although the errors were for the most part one’s that had already been dealt with.  The seventh ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was the last council received as ecumenical before the Great Schism – and thus the last true ecumenical council.  It condemned iconoclasm, which has more to do with practice than doctrine, although there was a doctrinal element.  In this case the error was less an exaggeration of a truth than a failure to see one, namely, that Incarnation meant that what God stressed to Israel in Deuteronomy, that at Sinai they had heard the voice of God but not seen His similitude, could no longer be said under the New Covenant because God had become visible by assuming humanity as expressed by the Lord Himself in the words He addressed to St. Philip in John 14:9 “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”

[22] Monothelitism denied that Jesus had a human will.  Monoenergism was the idea that everything that Jesus did in both of His natures was done through the same divine energy.

[23] A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, R. A. Torrey eds. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, 12 volumes (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1910-1915), since 1917 published as 4 volumes. 

[24]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1993) and  Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

[25] See the criticism of such in Harold Lindsell The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) and Francis Schaeffer The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

[26] The denial that Mary is the Mother of God is a denial that Jesus is God.  Attempts to evade this, by saying for example, that she was the mother of His human nature, reduce to nonsense.  The mother-son relationship is a relationship of persons not natures.  While it is obvious that Mary gave birth to Jesus in His humanity and that He did not get His deity from her (Anabaptist heresiarch Menno Simons denied that His humanity came from her), Her Son is God, making her the Mother of God, which is essentially the meaning of the phrase St. Elizabeth uses of her, “mother of my Lord” in Luke 1:43.  The sixteenth century Reformers, who all had a High Mariology, would be appalled at the direction evangelicalism has taken since their day. 

[27] That so many evangelicals who did not teach Incarnational Sonship themselves nevertheless defended MacArthur from the charge of heresy when he taught it reveals just how poor a grasp of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine they had.  The Holy Spirit is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Agent of Jesus’ conception.  If Jesus Sonship is derived from the Incarnation this would make the Holy Spirit His Father.  This confuses the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit ala Sabellianism.  Furthermore, if Jesus was not the Son prior to His Incarnation, the Father was not the Father prior to the Incarnation, because for Him to be the Father requires that He have a Son.  Since the Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son, precisely as is confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Symbol.

[28] John F. MacArthur Jr. The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).

[29] John W. Robbins was to Gordon H. Clark what Greg Bahsen was to Cornelius Van Til.

[30] https://www.trinityfoundation.org/ journal.php?id=193 

[31] It also tended to view justification by faith alone as being opposed to the sacraments as means of grace.  The sacraments as means of grace is Catholic and not merely Roman, being the doctrine of all the ancient Churches.  That this truth is not in conflict with justification by faith alone can be illustrated by the fact that in the giving of a gift there are two hands involved, the hand of the giver and the hand of the receiver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver (God working through His Church), faith is the hand of the receiver.

 

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Friday, October 11, 2024

The Bible and the Church Part One: A False Opposition

In an Anglican Facebook group, the same one that I mentioned in the introduction to my last essay, I recently saw the question posed of whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible.  These alternatives were presented in such a way as to make clear the underlying assumption that they are mutually exclusive and that it must be one or the other.  Anyone fortunate enough to have studied under the late Dr. Chuck Nichols will remember how fond he was of posing questions like this then answering them with “yes.”  I was very much tempted to follow his example but instead replied by saying that both positions are wrong, that the right way of looking at it is that God gave us both the Bible and the Church.  In thinking more about it I realized that rather than having recourse to an undefined “we” a better way of wording it would have been to say that God gave the Bible to the Church.  Since this was yet another Protestant versus Catholic dispute among orthodox Anglicans who for some reason or another are unwilling to accept that the Anglican Church is both Protestant and Catholic, but a different kind of Protestant from 5-point Calvinist Presbyterians and Baptists and a different kind of Catholic from the followers of the Patriarch of Rome, this answer would probably not have satisfied either side although it ought to satisfy both.  Either side can accept the wording, depending upon how the word Church is defined.   If Church is defined as a synonym for the word “Christians” then the Protestants would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  If Church is defined more narrowly as the society of Christian faith founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and continued to the present day under the leadership of the three-fold ministry established in the Apostolic era then the Catholics would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  As to the question of which definition of “Church” is the right one, in Dr. Nichols’ memory I shall give the answer “yes.”

 

Both the Bible and the Church possess authority.  These authorities differ in kind rather than degree so it is pointless to argue about which is the higher authority.  Both derive their different types of authority directly from God rather than the one from the other.  The Bible’s authority comes directly from God because the Bible is the written Word of God.  When you read the Bible or hear it read what you are reading or hearing is God speaking.  The Bible is the written Word of God, not because the Church says it is or somehow made it to be so but because the Holy Ghost inspired its human writers, not just in the sense in which we say Shakespeare was inspired, but in the sense that the words they wrote were not just their words but God’s words as well.  This is not just the Protestant view of the Bible.  The Roman Catholic Church officially declares this to be its view of the Bible in its Catechism, indeed, it even uses the “fundamentalist” language of the Bible being “without error.” (1)  The Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible, whatever David Bentley Hart might have to say about it, is no different.  Liberals in each of these ecclesiastical groups reject this view of the Bible, but this is because liberalism is unbelief wearing a thin guise of faith and so their defection does not take away from the Scriptures as the written Word of God being the common view of Christians.  The point, however, is that the Bible’s authority comes from the fact that it is God speaking, the written Word of God, and that it is God Himself and not the Church that makes it such.

 

The Church, however, also gets her authority directly from God.  When it comes to Church authority, we can speak either of the authority of the Church, that is to say, authority vested in the Church as a whole, organic, society, or we can speak of authority in the Church, which is the authority exercised in that society by the Apostolic ministerial leadership that Christ established.  The distinction is not hard and absolute because for the most part the authority of the collective body is exercised through the ministerial leadership in the body.  Those who erroneously think that the King of all creation, the King of Kings, established His Church as a type of democratic republic, think, equally erroneously, that authority in the Church is delegated to the ministers from the larger body.  This is clearly not what is depicted in the Scriptural history of the Gospels and the book of Acts.  This same Scriptural history testifies to the Church’s receiving her authority directly from God.  God the Son commissioned the Apostles before His Ascension, God the Holy Spirit descended upon them and empowered them on the first Whitsunday, and they exercised this authority and power long before the New Testament which testifies to all this is written.  

 

The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a key event when it comes to grasping this.  The Council took place around the year 50 AD, almost two decades after the events of the Gospel and the birth of the Christian Church.  While the Gospel of St. Matthew was probably written already at this point in time, at least in the Hebrew or Aramaic form attested to by the Church Fathers, (2) and possibly St. Mark’s Gospel as well, the only book of the New Testament about which we can say with anything like certainty that it predated the Council is the epistle of St. James.  This is because St. James writes in that epistle as if the Church was a Jewish body that had yet to experience any significant influx of Gentile converts.  It was the first such influx that generated the controversy that the Council of Jerusalem, over which St. James presided, convened to address.  It is therefore extremely unlikely that St. James wrote the epistle after the Council.  All of St. Paul’s epistles were written after the Council, however.  Chronologically his first epistle was 1 Thessalonians which was written in his second missionary journey at some point in the time period covered by the seventeenth chapter of Acts. The book of Acts itself was obviously written in the ‘60s because it ends with the arrival of St. Paul in Rome which took place around the year 60.  St Luke wrote his Gospel first but probably just prior to writing Acts and so that Gospel can be dated to the late 50’s or early 60’s.  The epistle of St. Jude seems to have been written around the same time as St. Peter’s second epistle which was written shortly before his death around the year 67.  St. John’s writings were the last of the New Testament books to be written, traditionally ascribed to the very end of the Apostle’s ministry in the last decade of the first century.  The bulk of the New Testament was written after the Council of Jerusalem and most of it at least a decade later.

 

The Council of Jerusalem was not the first time the Apostles exercised the authority that Jesus Christ had given them in the Church.  They had exercised that authority, for example, to establish the order of deacons within the first year or so of the Church as recorded in the sixth chapter of Acts and to convert the existing office of presbyter (elder) into an order of ministry in the Church beneath themselves and above the deacons as attested by SS Paul and Barnabas ordaining such over the Churches they planted on their first missionary journey leading up to the events of the Council and by their association with the Apostles in the Council, thus completing the three tiers of ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to those of the Old Testament Church.  In the Council of Jerusalem, however, we find the Apostles, in council with their presbyters, exercising not merely their authority in the Church, but the authority of the Church, in order to settle a major controversy.  The controversy was over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to also become Jews in order to become Christians.  After the fall of Jerusalem, 70 AD, the rabbinical leadership of those Jews who rejected Jesus as the Christ would redefine Judaism in such a way that a Jew who was baptized into the Christian faith ceased to be a Jew.  Clearly such rabbis were on the same wave length as the synagogue leaders who drove the Apostles and their converts out in the book of Acts.  In the century or so after the Council of Jerusalem the possibility of being both a Jew and a Christian was removed by the leadership of the Jewish side.  In 50 AD, however, two decades before the fall of Jerusalem, the Church had to contend with the question of whether her Gentile converts had to become Jews by being circumcised and agreeing to follow the ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic Law (the kosher dietary code, the Sabbath, etc.)  The controversy broke out first at Antioch, from where SS Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to consult the Apostles, who after hearing their case and the arguments of the other side, hotly debated the matter until St. Peter addressed them and made the case for the Gentiles not being made to become Jews based upon his account of the conversion of Cornelius the centurion and how that had been brought about and upon salvation being by grace rather than Law.  SS Paul and Barnabas then added their testimony about their ministry among the Gentiles to his and St. James, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem had presided over the council and in ruling spoke for the council and the whole Church, ruled against the Gentiles being made to become Jews.

 

St. James referenced the Scriptures in his ruling.  He quoted Amos 9:11-12, a Messianic prophecy in which the Gentile nations are said to be called by the name of the Lord.  When he instructed the Gentile Christians to abstain from the pollution of idols, fornication, and eating things strangled and blood, these prohibitions come from the moral Law (both tablets of the Ten Commandments are represented) and from the Noachic Covenant made with all mankind after the Deluge.  The purpose of these Scriptural references, however, was not to show that the Council had found the answer spelled out for them in the pages of the Old Testament.  The Council had not found their answer there because it was not there to be found, at least not in the way one would think it to be if certain extreme versions of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura were correct.  The Scriptural references are to show that the Council’s decision was in accordance with the Old Testament, in harmony with the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than contradictory to them or seeking to overturn them.


St. Paul in his epistles would provide a doctrinal foundation for the Church’s ruling on this matter.  The Mosaic Law had been a wall of separation between the Jews and the Gentiles.   Jesus Christ had nailed the Law to His cross and in His death had removed the wall, uniting Jews and Gentiles to each other and Himself in His one Body, the Church.  That Jews and Gentiles were to be united in this way had been a mystery in the previous age before Christ had come, but now that Christ has come it is revealed.  In the unity of the Church, on those external and ceremonial matters where the Law had previously separated Jews and Gentiles, liberty was now to reign.  These ideas are taught by St. Paul throughout his epistles.  The Church’s ruling in the Council of Jerusalem had preceded the writing of these epistles, however, and it did not include this sort of doctrinal explanation.

 

This illustrates how the authority that God has given the Church and the authority of the Bible with differs in kind.  The authority of both pertains to doctrine.  Doctrine comes in two basic kinds, doctrine regarding the faith, and doctrine regarding practice. Regardless of whether it consists of truths to be believed and confessed, or commandments to be followed or done, sound doctrine comes from God through revelation.  It is through the Scriptures that this revelation comes because the Scriptures are the very words of God which the Holy Ghost inspired the human writers to write.  This is the nature of Scriptural authority.  The truths about Christ removing the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles and uniting them in one body were written by St. Paul in his epistles rather than declared by edict of the Church at the Council of Jerusalem because St. Paul was writing Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 

 

This is not the nature of the authority given to the Church.  St. Jude speaks of the faith has having been “once delivered to the saints.” The faith, the body of truths which we believe and confess as Christians, was delivered to the Church by Jesus Christ in the days of the Apostles.  She was charged with safeguarding it which is the effect of St. Jude’s injunction to “earnestly contend” for it and so charged was vested with all the authority necessary to carry out this task. This includes the kind of authority on display in the Council of Jerusalem. 

 

A controversy had arisen.  It was a doctrinal dispute, having to do primarily with matters of practice although it also touched upon matters of faith particularly with regards to salvation.  The Church heard both sides, deliberated, and issued a judicial ruling.  While her ruling was not taken from the Scriptures in the same sense it would have been as if the dispute had been about whether or not one is allowed to help himself to his neighbour’s belongings and the ruling of no was taken from Exodus 20:15 she did cite the Scriptures to show her ruling was in harmony with them.  Despite not being taken directly from the Scriptures, neither did her ruling add to the teachings of Scriptures in a revelatory way in the way St. Paul’s epistles later would. 

 

The Church has no revelatory authority to add to the faith she has been entrusted with.  She can however exercise her judicial authority in safeguarding the faith to define it, and she has been called upon to do so time and again, especially in the centuries after Scriptural revelation had been completed in the first.  This includes identifying heresy as heresy, such as when she defined Arius’ doctrine (that there was a time when the Father was without the Son) as heresy.  It includes clarifying sound doctrine, such as when she issued the Definition of Chalcedon explaining that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, Who in the Incarnation added a complete and perfect human nature to Himself in such a way that He remained the one Person He had always been, but with two natures that retained their differences and distinctions, but were now in His Person indivisible and inseparable.  It also involves summarizing the truths that are de fide, of the faith in such a way that rejection places one outside the faith, such as was done in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  None of this added anything to the content of the Apostolic faith and we should be very grateful that the Church put this effort into contending for the faith rather than saying something to the effect of “eh, they have the Bible, that’s good enough, they don’t need us to do anything about it.”

 

The two types of authority clearly complement each other.  It is wrong to pit them against each other as is so often done by both sides in these “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” disputes.  Since they differ from each other in kind, it is also wrong to try and rank them as if the difference were one of degree.  Neither the Bible nor the Church gives the other to us.  God has given us the Christian faith.  The “us” to whom He has given the Christian faith is not merely “us” as individuals but also and even more so “us” as the community of faith that is the Church.  We, both as individual Christians and as the Church, have been charged with sharing the Christian faith with the world through evangelism.  The Church has been charged with keeping the faith with which she has been entrusted safe from error. To assist her in keeping this charge, God has given the Church the necessary tool of His own written Word, the Bible.  The Bible was primarily given to the Church as a society rather than Christians as individuals.  Protestantism tends to see it otherwise, but it was not until the eve of the Reformation that the printing industry developed the technology that would make it practical for every Christian to have a personal copy of the Bible.  Ancient Israel had received her Scriptures from God as a national community and in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry they were read, heard, and studied as such, or sung in the case of the Psalter, in the communities known as synagogues.  It was no different for the Christian Church when she inherited these Scriptures from Israel as her Old Testament and as the Apostolic teachings were written down and received by the Church as the New Testament that completed her Scriptures they were received as writings to be read and heard and studied as a community in just the same way.

 

In Part Two we shall look at the how the proper view that God has given the Bible to the Church relates to the question of how we know what belongs in the Bible.  This question is frequently raised by those arguing for the “Church gave us the Bible” position.  Usually when this question is raised in this way it is canon that is in view.  When the question is presented with a narrow focus on canon it becomes “which books belong in the Bible?”  Canon is not the only aspect to this question, however. There is also the matter of text.  The two largest examples will illustrate what I mean by this.  Do the long ending of St. Mark’s Gospel (16:8b-20) and the Pericope de Adultera (John 7:53-8:11) belong in the Bible or are they interpolations? They are found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts as well as the ancient translations and in quotations by the Church Fathers but are missing from a couple of very old manuscripts.  Does the age of these manuscripts outweigh all the other evidence?  The question of text and the question of canon are two sides to the same question of what belongs in the Bible. We shall, Lord willing, see how the matters discussed in this essay inform the answer to this question in Part Two.

 

 (1)   Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2nd Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 107.

(2)   Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” or father of Church History said that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew prior to leaving the Holy Land (Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.24.6).  This would date the Hebrew original to about a decade prior to the Council of Jerusalem.  There is a general Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s was the first Gospel written  which is an excellent commentary on the worth or lack thereof of Modern scholarship which disagrees and says St. Mark wrote first.  There is also a Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s Gospel was written in Hebrew – they may have meant Aramaic although St. Jerome who saw the original in the library of Caesarea (De Viris Illustribus, 3) would have recognized the difference – before being translated into Greek.  St. Irenaeus, however, said that both SS Peter and Paul were in Rome at the time of its composition (Adversus Haereses, 3.1.1) which would have be 60 AD or later.  Although St. Irenaeus was talking about the original Hebrew composition he could have gotten the time confused with that of the Greek composition. 

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