When (online) RC Apologists Don't Admit Their Mistakes

A Reply to Joe Heschmeyer

In this blog post, I’m going to respond to Joe Heschmeyer’s ridiculous reply to Gavin Ortlund. I really hate these back-and-forth responses, but man…given the state of online RC-Protestant discourse right now, I wanted to churn this out to hopefully raise the discourse (plus, everyone is taking a nap right now for fourth of July activities, and I was writing something else anyway when I got the notification). To get his argument exactly right, we’ll summarize what he says starting at around 2 minutes and 3 seconds.

Joe argues that given Gavin’s position that Moses, although using fallible methods to receive God’s revelation (e.g. like receiving God’s Word with fallible ears), can still be trusted to give us God’s infallible Word apart from infallibly means of receiving that Word, the Protestant who agrees must say that what God reveals is fallible.

His argument is the following. He asks us to imagine 3 sorts of persons who are examining a series of 3 books.

Person 1 says “these books are all man made. They might teach truth or error or maybe a mixture of both.”

Person 2 says “two of these are divinely inspired” but I don’t know which ones these are.

Person 3 says “all three are divinely inspired and I know this with certainty."

He argues that Person 2 ends up in the exact same place as Person 1. Now, on the face of it, this is an absurd claim. But how does Heschmeyer seek to establish this claim?

“If the author of the book has the capacity to err when writing the book, Person 2 cannot just uncritically accept that any book is divinely inspired.”

Unsurprisingly, Heschmeyer did as Heschmeyer does: completely miss the point. To any listener, the point was not that “an author has the capacity to err when writing a book of Scripture.” For those who, like Joe, seem to have trouble understanding analogies specifically when their ideological-others use them: an analogy locates a relevant similarity and seeks to articulate a particular point. Gavin’s point was this: that Moses could rely on fallible means—his ears, his mind, etcetera—and yet come to the conclusion that he was receiving the infallible Word of God shows that relying on fallible means does not mean you cannot have confidence that what you are receiving is the Word of God. The relevant similarity is this: fallible means of receiving the Word still allows for recognition and reception of that infallible Word.

This says nothing about whether the author of Scriptures could err when writing down Scripture. I have no idea where on God’s good earth Joe got that idea.

Now, Joe argues that Gavin thinks the church has failed in discerning which books belong to the canon, and as such allowed in the deutero-canon which is in fact not Scripture. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that argument from Joe. Of course, Gavin, Javier, Ben, or other Protestants doing retrieval do not think that the Church failed. We think the Roman Church did specifically at Florence and Trent; it is incredibly question-begging to argue that because we think Rome failed at discerning the canon, that therefore the Church failed (since we do not think the Roman communion exhausts the Church, and appeal to Church History in excluding the deuterocanon).

Joe seems to think—at least per the implication of arguing that if the Council of Trent got it wrong, the whole Church did—that any Protestant who thinks the deutero-canon is not of the same authority as the proto-canon thinks the Church therefore got it “hopelessly wrong” (his words). But that’s also obviously untrue. We think even the Tridentine church got it right on the New Testament, and we agree on 39 of the OT books (and don’t have books Rome doesn’t have).

And even the disagreement about the deuterocanonical books is not one that says Rome is “hopelessly confused”, since Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Methodists can admit the apocryphal books as good, edifying, and helpful for moral instruction (with Lutherans and Anglicans even esteeming them as valuable, holy, and belonging to the lectionary).

So, to sum up: don’t be a sophist. It doesn’t help ecumenical discussion. Joe wrongly argues that Gavin thinks a prophet or apostle was fallible when they wrote down or taught the Word. That’s obviously untrue. Gavin was drawing an analogy to show that “fallible means of recognizing the infallible Word” does not mean that one cannot be confident in their recognition of that infallible Word. That’s it. That’s all the analogy was supposed to show.

Questions of charisms/writing/etcetera are different questions. Protestants agree that the Holy Spirit so worked through the prophets and the apostles such that they were infallible in their teaching office (e.g. when they intended to teach the Word of the Lord), and so it wouldn’t even make sense to say Gavin (or any of us) believe that they were fallible when they were writing/teaching the Word. Nor does it make any sense to say “well if you think they used fallible means to receive God’s infallible Word, then you must believe they were fallible when they taught that Word.” Why on earth would that follow? That’s an utter non-sequitur, and Joe offers no argument beyond “well trust me bro”.

But this is typical of CatholicAnswersInc as represented by Heschmeyer. We won’t make progress until we do better.