https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jTld1nmkq4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpVz4okhdRU
Several weeks ago I caught Jordan Cooper's videos dealing with the Ethiopian Orthodox man and the Knechtle's over questions regarding the Early Church. The videos of the exchange went viral and have been the source of considerable discussion. It's been something of a boon to Orthodox and Catholic apologists at the Knechtle's were demonstrably incapable of defending their position.
I saw Cooper was talking about it and listened - just to hear his take on things. He's a Confessional Lutheran and I don't always agree with him but he's often interesting so I decided to investigate his response. I found myself more or less in agreement with his position. In his videos on the the Real Presence in the Eucharist and Baptism he interacts with an Australian apologist - Ryan Hemelaar, who was offering his own commentary on the exchange over the Early Church and Scriptural authority. He's defending the Knechtle's and critical of the Ethiopian man's arguments. Though at the time I had no idea who Hemelaar was but I found myself (like Cooper) pretty frustrated listening to him. I assumed he was just some kind of Evangelical-type as his arguments more or less line up with that camp's thinking and approaches to theology and such questions. The bottom line is this - the Ethiopian Orthodox man is wrong, but Evangelicalism is incapable of offering a solid argument against his position on either theological or historical grounds.
Then just the other day I happened to be listening to Iron Sharpens Iron - hosted by Chris Arnzen. As regular readers will know, I'm not a fan of the show and don't hold Arnzen in high regard, but he occasionally will cover topics that interest me or maybe I should say I'm interested in what is being said by voices in the circles he inhabits. Arnzen is a Calvinistic Baptist who touts Calvinism, Reformed Theology, and Right-wing political positions and yet is more than a little ignorant about any and all of them. He's a terrible interviewer and his drawn out plodding manner is pretty frustrating. The show is two hours long but between his way of doing things and the ads - there's usually about 30-45 minutes of actual content.
This episode was no exception. He was interviewing an Australian apologist about conditions within Australia and issues connected with street preaching etc. The voice of the guest sounded awfully familiar and so when I got home, I checked and sure enough the Ryan Hemelaar he was interviewing was the same Australian who published commentaries defending the Knechtle's - and was being critiqued by the Confessional Lutheran Jordan Cooper.
I was very surprised to learn (via the Iron Sharpens Iron interview) that Hemelaar considers himself to be 'Reformed' and he received considerable praise from Arnzen who considers him brilliant - a point he revisited more than once. I found Hemelaar's arguments (as per the Cooper video) to be not only unsound, but actually pretty awful. I never for a moment thought that Hemelaar would actually consider himself to be Reformed. His views regarding the sacraments and salvation are not at all in accord with Reformed Theology but smack of Cheap Grace Decisional type soteriology and pure memorialism - in other words perfectly in keeping with modern forms of Evangelical theology.
It revealed (as I have so often suspected) that Arnzen's own understanding of the Reformed tradition is rather weak and how under the auspices of New Calvinism there is now a general confusion as to the meaning of the term and its relation to a larger theological tradition. Hemelaar is not Reformed by any stretch of the imagination and while Arnzen is Calvinistic in terms of soteriology, his understanding is very limited and probably tends toward a hyper-Calvinistic orientation. I'm not suggesting he denies things like the Free Offer of the Gospel and I am unaware of his position on the infra-/supra-lapsarian debate (or whether he rightly rejects it), but rather his emphasis on decretal theology to the exclusion of all other means as well as a flattening of the various dynamics and dichotomies at work in New Testament soteriology.
Cooper does a decent job in explaining some of these issues and while he's obviously not Reformed - nevertheless traditional Reformed theology tends to be something a bit closer to what Cooper is saying than any position held by Arnzen, let alone Hemelaar. The Evangelical view is shaped by a context of modernist individualism with no small dose of rationalist tendency. It is humanist and thus ultimately bound to proceed down the same road that the Mainline churches did a century ago - something that becomes more and more patent every day.
The Early Church fathers are not the standard but red flags should go up when one reads them and finds they are operating on an entirely different epistemological and doctrinal foundation. The issue is not whether or not they hold Scripture to be authoritative but how Scripture is read. They are not Evangelicals - but they are not Magisterial Protestants or Catholics either. They are most akin to Catholicism but not the Catholicism that emerged a thousand years ago, let alone what it is today.
I think it's also worth noting - something that Cooper touches on in these videos - Lutheran soteriology cannot be understood apart from its concept of sacramental means. Lutheranism advocates Sola Fide - Justification by Faith Alone, but the means of its application are via the sacraments. It's a point I keep coming back to as I reflect on the energized rhetoric that emerged in connection with the debates over Federal Vision - now almost twenty years ago. Men like RC Sproul would invoke Luther's comment on Sola Fide being the article by which the Church stands of falls. Now whether this statement is valid or not, the truth is that the Lutheran formulation (in its full-orbed sacramental expression) is something Reformed men like Sproul would in fact reject - as he also would the Lutheran embrace of theological dynamics and unresolved tensions. When someone expresses the Lutheran view regarding the sacraments they are accused of teaching baptismal regeneration and of holding a view of the Supper that borders on transubstantiation. While the latter is certainly incorrect, the problem (for Reformed and Evangelicals) is Luther held to these views and did not view them as being in conflict with Sola Fide. Likewise the Reformed make a great deal about the issue of assurance and how this was one of the hallmarks of the Reformation - as opposed to the Roman system which does not offer assurance. However, Lutherans who hold to Sola Fide and even the doctrine of predestination, and yet also affirm the possibility of apostasy from the faith - and they do not see this as in conflict with Sola Fide, predestination, or free grace.
For my part, I'll take this moment to offer some explanation as to my own 'placement' in the theological spectrum - something I'm often asked about. I don't actually fit into any of these categories but represent something of a hybrid.
In 2020, I interacted with Mercersburg theologian John Nevin's treatment of the Early Church. While I did not fully agree with his narrative, I granted that there were problems with how the Early Church has been framed and understood by the Reformed world. Contrary to both historic Reformed narratives and Nevin's view, I advocate a First Reformation view which is (I believe) commensurate with the Early Church and yet at odds with both Roman Catholicism and the Scholastic Theology that emerged from the Magisterial Reformation. While I resonate more with the early Humanist impulses of the early Reformers, I find myself in sharp disagreement with the theological assumptions of the Scholastics who emerged by the later part of the 16th century and entered their full bloom during the 17th. This is obviously a hotly debated topic.
Nevin utterly failed to account for the Constantinian Shift and yet rightly posited that one does not read the Early Church fathers and find anything like Protestant conceptions of Sola Fide or its views of the Church and sacraments. For my part while I will grant aspects of Nevin's argument, I do see a divide between the Ante- and Post-Nicene periods due to the profound change that emerged with Constantine. In but a generation the Church completely shifted its views on wealth, violence, power, and notions of cultural standing and respectability. Philosophy had already made inroads to be sure but after Constantine and Nicaea the gates were wide open.
While I don't concern myself with some of the technicalities of the Lutheran formulation of Sola Fide, nor Luther's prioritisation of Romans (canon within a canon) at the expense of other New Testament teaching, I do find myself agreeing far more with the Lutherans on questions of soteriology and sacraments. I believe in the objective Real Presence (as opposed to Reformed subjectivism and memorialism) and yet I don't see the need to fall into discussions over ubiquity and/or some of the debates and accusations that fly back and forth between the Reformed and Lutherans over Eutychianism or Nestorianism - debates which incidentally men like Arnzen and Hemelaar would not even be able to participate in as their views are outside the boundaries of traditional Reformed theological categories.
That said, I hold to an objective Real Presence that is probably more in keeping with Lutheranism and the Early Church. Likewise I more or less share their views on questions of baptism and likewise I fully embrace the paedocommunion practised by sections of the Early Church and the later Hussites. The key issue is not to wrangle over a subjective interpretation of conversion but rather perseverance - something true for infants brought into the faith by baptism as well as adults. In terms of predestination, I certainly hold the doctrine as Biblical but reject a great deal of the hair-splitting that took place among the Reformed - even while I exceed the Lutherans in holding to reprobation as something the New Testament teaches. That said, the Lutherans have a better understanding of the place of predestination in theology - not as a Centraldogma or organising principle for a theological system but as a doctrine of comfort and assurance. That said, I reject some of the Lutheran debates that played a part in the Formula of Concord and undoubtedly I would be anathematized by them as being a Flacian, Philippist, Majorist, or something worse.
The Lutherans hold to a form of Two Kingdom theology and are to be commended for the general rejection of Postmillennialism. That said, their version of Two Kingdoms is not correct and is in reality little more than a nuanced One Kingdom view.
I certainly resonate more with the Reformed when it comes to worship - but this is only in some cases and in part. I reject Lutheran conceptions of adiaphora and yet I do not embrace Exclusive Psalmody or Reformed Sabbatarianism (though I did almost thirty years ago). While the Lutherans focus on their Law-Gospel paradigm, some of the Reformed have a better concept of Redemptive-History which also provides a better basis for interacting with Law-Gospel dynamics. But it's probably safe to say this represents a minority within the Reformed spectrum with most tending toward Mono-covenantal schemes with a great deal of controversy and confusion surrounding issues such as the Covenant of Grace vs. the New Covenant and the Covenant of Works, as well as the debates over the nature and extent of Common Grace. I believe in Reformed simplicity on the basis of redemptive-history and reject the embrace of tradition by Lutherans - something that I think has become more pronounced in recent years as a kind of reaction to Evangelical inroads. Some of the Reformed have grasped that the Supper needs to take place every time we worship but most have not.
Both Lutheran and Reformed Confessionalism manifest extra and often unbiblical forms of polity. Both represent some of the worst aspects of the Magisterial Reformation and its values and conceptions surrounding the nature of the state, the Christian's relation to it, questions of violence, mammon, and the sanctification of the profane through doctrines such as that of Vocation.
Further the Lutherans exhibit a significant shortfall in their lack of a preaching tradition and their embrace of High Church liturgical forms in everything from an altar-style service to the Church calendar, to a revisionist theology regarding things like the cult of saints - the embrace of tradition already mentioned. Their ecclesiology is narrow, sectarian, and schismatic.
The Reformed emphasize preaching but it is often poor and driven by academic precisionism is often lost in the weeds. Hyper-Calvinism is far more common than people realize - with few understanding its rationalist roots that tends to permeate all areas of theology. This often results in what is functionally a Baptistic theology - despite the fact that many still baptize infants. The end result is a kind of wet dedication followed by confirmation - this later 'dry baptism' being the salient event or moment that brings the child fully into the Church.
While I reject almost all aspects of Anabaptist theology, they have historically excelled in the realm of Kingdom ethics though this is often cancelled out by tendencies toward legalism and they are definitely guilty of being schismatic.
As such, my own views are (in contemporary terms) something of a hybrid between Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist theologies and yet all camps would at certain points accuse me of being nigh unto Roman Catholic. However due to my embrace of separatism and Kingdom ethics, both the Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed would say that more than anything my thinking is tainted with Anabaptist thought.
The Anabaptists are known for despising Augustine and while I reject his Kingdom-Christendom views, his overall theological framework of predestinarianism and grace applied through sacramental means is something I resonate with and though it will irk some Reformed to hear it - the Lutherans are probably closer to him than they are. He embraced both predestination and a robust sacramentology as do the Lutherans. While the Anabaptists in some respects retain and perpetuate the Kingdom ethics of groups like the Waldenses and the early Unitas Fratrum, these groups unlike the Anabaptists held Augustine in high esteem. The Waldenses were not Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, nor were they pre-Reformation Reformed types. They were something else and I would argue their views constitute an earlier (First) Reformation theology and ethos that is of a different character than the Magisterial Reformation which emerged centuries later. The First Reformation resonates with the Ante-Nicene Church and while it may seem Catholic to the Reformed and Anabaptists, and too sectarian and ecclesiastically minimalist to the tradition-minded Lutherans, it is a spectrum of doctrine that has historical precedent and stands firmly on the Scriptures. The Early Church was clearly sacramental, you will not find salvation cast in terms of Sola Fide, and yet it was not Roman Catholic either.
As I have repeatedly argued the precious and glorious testimony of the First Reformation was effectively eradicated by the tumult unleashed by the Magisterial Reformation which in turn spawned the Counter-Reformation and the wars of religion. By the time the dust settled at the end of the 17th century, new lines were drawn and something - a long tradition was lost. The testimony of New Testament Biblicism, its approach to doctrine and its Kingdom ethics of non-violence, poverty, and antithesis were lost. The tumult of several generations marked a shift - a second Constantinian Shift as the descendants of the First Reformation became Lutherans and Reformed - and found their security in the new Magisterial Protestant orders. They in turn adopted the sword and coin values of the same. Not a few of the Waldenses undoubtedly made their way into Anabaptism - retaining the Kingdom lifestyle but in reaction to the abuses of the Magisterial Reformation, they migrated into a theology that also represented a departure from what had been the Waldensian norm - which included infant baptism and a high view of the Supper. Those who say otherwise have misread and/or misinterpreted the history - much in the same way one finds with the Donatists of Late Antiquity. Re-baptism may be an expression of craedobaptism but it is not necessarily the case. Likewise groups like the Cathars may have rejected infant baptism but this is to misunderstand the nature of their theology. They rejected all sacraments and so they were not Baptists either. Waldensian paedobaptism is well established by the historical record.
Only in the 19th century did some admittedly flawed attempts appear that challenged the Magisterial Protestant status quo. Free Churches emerged but were not always committed to leaving behind their flawed traditions and status. Restorationist groups materialized but were unable to divorce themselves from either post-Enlightenment epistemology or other narrow commitments. Some flirted with First Reformation ideas (such as separatism, poverty, and non-violence) but never quite got there and would soon be swept away by the deluge of industrialisation and the world wars which turned all of culture on its head. And even now some eighty years later - many of the questions and problems that were born of this period have not only not been resolved, they've often not been properly wrestled with and in some cases even recognized.
As I have touched on in previous posts, I see three options before me. I can either go down the sectarian path - which is what I would actually prefer. I'm more than happy to meet with a few families in a home, garage, store-front, or abandoned building. But at this point in time the people most likely to leave institutional denominations and meet in homes and other unconventional settings are motivated by different extra-Biblical concerns - usually associated with politics, culture war, conspiratorial thinking, and sometimes cultic motivations. This is all I seem to find these days and that option is thus more or less off the table unless I happen to find a rather unique group of people, which is highly unlikely in my very Trumpian part of rural Pennsylvania which represents an overlap of both Appalachia and the Rust Belt - prime ground for the ethos of his political movement.
The second option is to go in the direction of the High Church and justify them move in terms of the Christianity of Late Antiquity - a time of downgrade but far from the kind of pop-culture casual irreverence that characterizes modern Evangelicalism. The latter is not an option for me. I have no interest in the Evangelical camp or its churches. I believe there are Christians within that fold but they would be better served by leaving it. It is (as I will argue in an upcoming series) functionally and practically apostate.
I do not agree with High Church worship but I have attended many an Anglican and Lutheran service over the years and I can endure it and prefer it any day over Evangelicalism. Ironically (for me) these are actual options in my area. I can without too great difficulty get to ACNA and LCMS congregations - but these are not my first choice. And in each of those cases I would function as basically Pietist Dissident within their fold. I can tolerate them knowing that in reality this kind of worship characterizes most of Church history, even if it's problematic. There are additional hurdles with the Lutherans do to their exclusivity and nearly closed communion.
The same is true of the final option that of finding a place within a church that falls broadly within the Magisterial Protestant tradition - a congregation that is not Confessional but not totally given over to Theological Modernist and Humanist proclivities. Usually I would utilize the term Theological Liberalism but this is becoming problematic and confusing and so I'm trying to move away from it.
At present this final choice seems the only viable if somewhat unhappy option I have.
I won't pretend there are many others wrestling with these questions the way I do, but the fact that these debates and controversies are taking place tells me that tangentially - there are people wrestling with these same issues. As always, these are complicated matters and do not lend themselves to social media-style pedagogy. As such, the prospects for the nuanced and dynamic truth to win the day is unlikely at best.
See also:
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2024/09/where-to-go-to-church-my-three-options.html