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Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Gavin Ortlund challenged the Catholic View of Apostolic Succession
Wednesday, May 3, 2023 | Posted by Hans Georg Lundahl at 2:23 AM
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2023/05/gavin-ortlund-challenged-catholic-view.html
In it, I link back to a video by Gavin Ortlund. You see, the post is basically my series of comments on his video. With or without ensuing debate.
This means, someone can go back to the video and answer me, which some guy did. So, the post was updated with that piece of dialogue today.
Unfortunately MTB MTB is both an empty channel (no content viewable on it, neither own videos, nor link to other things by oneself, nor to videos one liked, unlike my own channel Hans-Georg Lundahl which shows my name, which provides 13 links in the description and which also allows you to view videos I liked, more than one playlist of favourites) and anonymous. It would have been fun to shame the actual person of MTB MTB for his ineptitude.
But ineptitude it is.
The comment he answered is:
10:36 Btw, Catholics are not bound by "scholars" as scholars, we are bound by bishops (especially in agreement across centuries) as bishops.
MTB MTB supremely ignores all the dialogue between me and Don Haddix, just answering my actual initial comment. But more than that.
Note, I didn't say "Catholics aren't bound to Protestant scholars" or "Catholics aren't bound to Catholic scholars" but I said "Catholics aren't bound by 'scholars' as scholars." His first words are:
of course you are not bound to any catholic scholars ...
The fact is, he was confused about what I was saying in my comment.
If you want to totally dismiss their opinions or the opinion of Dr. Gaven, guys who have taken the time to study religious history.
I have personally taken the time to study religious history, if not on university levels, at least on a pretty expert amateur level. And as for simple time added up, given that Gavin is 42 and I'm 57, given that I started in my teens, I was studying religious history when he was getting diapers changed. Also, as he is a pastor, he had to study lots of other things, he has to preach on the whole Bible, provide to all needs of a congregation, I could actually concentrate on religious history, which led to my conversion. However, you could state his time spent at university compensates for that. Newsflash. Universities are different. They contradict each other. It's not as if all people who study these things arrive at Gavin Ortlund's conclusions, and then there are Catholics who never bother to open a Bible or study religious history. No. Catholics have universities and university level Seminars too. We invented them, in fact. And among these, not all are Modernists, like the Catholic scholars that Gavin Ortlund finds credible.
I don't dismiss the scholarly opinion of Gavin Ortlund because it's a scholarly opinion, but because it contradicts the unanimous sense of Catholic bishops, who, as per Matthew 28 verses 16 to 20, have a very specific promise that scholars as scholars don't have. Remember, the scholars who rejected Jesus were also competent scholars.
So, his first comment is a non sequitur.
But what about his last one (so far) today?
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @mtbmtb705 "most bishops and popes agree that their dogmas are not found in scripture."
You might want to source that.
Some parts of the Christian life are found in "traditionibus non scriptis" but that's basically Bible canon, the sign of the Cross, what days to fast on, Sunday worship.
The main source of divergence between Catholic and Protestant are exegesis of precisely Scripture.
- MTB MTB
- @hglundahl brother i don't need to source anything. You agree with me on your rebuttal. You said "traditionus non scritis" is basically the same as the bible. You just proved my point. Your church believe that tradition and scripture have the same authority. Therefore, when something you practice is not on the bible, you can always say, well tradition has the same authority as the written word of God. In which i rest my case.
If you want my answer verbatim, go to the post, it's updated to include this bit of dialogue. But the point is, MTB MTB either doesn't realise or doesn't care, to a Catholic, practises are a different thing from doctrine. Jesus is true God and true Man. Doctrine. Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, not just during the service, but also in whatever host is kept afterwards, to give Communion to the sick, to provide if too few hosts are consecrated and so on. Doctrine. Keeping hosts after Mass, practise. Kneeling down to the Tabernacle, practise. We source the first DOCTRINE to John 1, we source the second DOCTRINE to Matthew 26:26. We are OK if the practises are logically consistent with the doctrines, we certainly feel no need to source every PRACTISE to the Bible. We certainly do NOT believe this quote from the Westminster Larger Catechism:
Q. 109. What are the sins forbidden in the second commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counselling, commanding, using, and anywise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself;* ...
Here, that Puritan Catechism states that PRACTISES can only be licit if God Himself (and given the rest: in the Bible) has instituted it. We disagree. The Rosary is not illicit if it was given by the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Dominic of Guzmán in a vision, even if that vision is outside the Bible, and even if that view on the origin of the Rosary should be false (I don't think it is, but it may have referred to a different Rosary), even if the Rosary had been assembled over several centuries by pious men only, it would still be licit. When it comes to the Rosary, Puritans also have a recourse to a fake translation of Matthew 6:7, as if Our Lord had ever forbidden repetitive prayers. But similar things apply to reserving the priesthood for celibates in the Latin rite (Pope St. Gregory IX) or reversing that (Pope Michael I), deciding what languages are used in liturgy and how languages are pronounced**
Is there Biblical support for this doctrine? Yes. The Law of Moses doesn't allow for anyone other than the current High Priest to offer sacrifice on Yom Kippur at the Altar of Incense. Nevertheless, Zachary seems to have done that in Luke 1. It doesn't allow for more than one person to be High Priest at the same time, but Mark 11 speaks of the High PriestS, note the plural.
Given this is the case, when it comes to what we need explicit support for in the Revelation that was closed at the death of the Last Apostle, we do that with doctrine, not necessarily with practise. MTB MTB presumes I share a scruple of conscience with him that I simply don't share. And he believes recalling this scruple gives him some kind of "moral" high ground which it doesn't, and he simply ignored my actual words in the previous comment. I had spoken of dogma, not of practises, and given a short list of practises and one doctrinally relevant axiom (Bible canon) as the things which are obliging on Christians while not being in the Bible. I had very explicitly stated that most differences weren't due to Catholics either having or (on his view) "inventing" traditones non scriptas, but to what we actually find when we open the Bible. I had also explicitated that my view of Protestants "not finding" certain Catholic doctrine in the Bible is identic to my and presumably his view on Jews not finding Jesus in Isaias 53. He just ignored that.
I wonder what type of person it is? A Protestant with Alzheimers and a bad mood? "brother i don't need to source anything." While "brother" seems like an effort to be polite and cordial (I'm not calling him "brother", I am polite but not that cordial), the rashness of "I don't need to source anything" could be bad mood. A teen who is overconfident (in which case the cordiality could be genuine, if naive)? A woman who's a shrink, called in by some of these categories? I don't know. Of late, Protestant families (and yes, I have Protestants in the family) have started to react more vehemently or at least acrimoniously to Catholic conversions. I have this testimony from Sips with Serra, from LizziesAnswers, I think at least one more, but can't recall which one.
Either way, being ignored by Gavin Ortlund and attended to by "nobodies" who literally go through very disembodied youtube channels to debate me, it's a chore. I have had runins with Kevin Henke who's overconfident about how history is or "should be" done. He overproceduralised every response, possibly in reaction to perceiving me as doing so. But he stopped after my mother died. Joseph Foster is older, retired in 2009. David C. Campbell is older, probably also retired, though still digging, not sure when.*** Time that could have been spent on courteous debate, each knowing and to some degree respecting where the other one is coming from, is misspent because people older than me have gathered together to dismiss me before the rest of the world, and risk as little debate as possible with me, and that little spent on "correcting" what they consider as beginner's mistakes in a rooky, and which aren't so.
So, if to them, my views on things aren't relevant as a surprising and enlightening contribution to the conversation, they are at least relevant as a nuisance that should in some way be dealt with. And bad performance, sometimes bad form, in debates on the internet is not the worst I've seen.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Return of Boy Jesus from Egypt
7.I.2026
* The answer goes on, but I cut it short where we can see the difference between Catholics and Protestants in a very sharp light. ** In 800, or just previous years, the diocese of Tours decided to upgrade the Latin pronunciation to a more international and conservative one, as a result this wasn't understood by lay people, and as a result of that, one decided to add a sermon in the popular language to explain the Gospel or Feast day and how it relates to the Gospel. Sermons during Christian worship aren't in the Bible. The Sermons by St. Peter (Acts 2) or St. Paul were missionary and catechetic sermons. *** Kevin Henke is Geochemist as per article, Joseph Foster is a Linguist, David C. Campbell is a Palaeontologist.
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