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. ↩
