Gavin Ortlund perfectly illustrates the paradox of "conservative" Protestantism. In some ways, conservative Protestantism is a good thing because it inculcates (certain) good doctrinal beliefs and respect for holy Scripture. In that way, it is very common for conservative Protestantism to be a bridge to Catholicism or Orthodoxy for those who are open to the Fathers. But there is a long-standing and entirely chimerical tradition in Protestantism of falsely claiming that Protestantism originated in a return to the ancient faith, which burns the escape route from objective error. That might have been (barely) plausible during the time of the Reformation, but patristic support for Protestant distinctives has not been a methodologically legitimate historical thesis since the time of St. John Henry Newman ("To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant"). Indeed, I would argue that it hasn't been a serious historical thesis since the posthumous condemnation of Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1638 and 1642, which conclusively defeated the idea that Protestant distinctives came from a common tradition with the East, the delusion that both Luther and Calvin sincerely embraced.
Leaving aside the question of the exact moment when Protestant historical claims were debunked, it remains unquestionable that the neo-patristic revival in Orthodox scholarship has essentially annihilated all of the nineteenth-century Anglican arguments in favor of Protestantism, leaving them with absolutely no historical case. To invoke another sixteenth-century belief that has been entirely debunked, you might as well be a geocentrist today as to be a Protestant claiming that Protestantism existed as an orthodox tradition before the Reformation. The far more plausible Protestant view is the liberal view -- that the subjective disposition of faith can change from age to age based on the meaning of the Gospel in that time, rather than being a fixed body of historical dogmatic teaching, the latter of which is thoroughly untenable if one wishes to remain Protestant.
Ortlund has demonstrated the implausibility of the Protestant position in a recent response to my friend Joshua Charles on apostolic succession in the Fathers. I will focus primarily not on the errors that he makes in interpreting the Fathers but on the methodological errors that cause them.
Ortlund's philosophical position is as follows:
(1) Post-apostolic ecclesial infallibility is a later accretion.
(2) The closure of revelation means that all such later accretions (and all other post-Apostolic developments) must always be subject to correction by Scripture.
(2) necessarily lacks a principle by which correction can take place; it is an explicit concession of the liberal position that the only principle for correction is the personal meaning of Scripture. Ortlund inconsistently claims that he believes in binding doctrine while simultaneously annihilating the only possible principle by which doctrinal correction could be binding, meaning that he has no good reason to believe that Scripture on any other doctrine can be corrupted or changed. That is already the liberal position, but Ortlund's is worse by my lights because he is positively attacking the government of the Church (apostolic succession).
Fortunately, Ortlund has an extraordinarily clear summary of his own argument. These are his words in the last several minutes of the Charles response starting around 27:45 that are directly relevant to this problem:
A third objection is people say "well, if you deny that the Church has post-apostolic infallibility, then what you are saying is that God just abandoned His Church," but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle where people make you choose between two extremes as though the only options on the table are either (A) the Church has infallibility per se or (B) the Church is abandoned. But, of course, those aren't the only two options. Most Protestants hold to the indefectibilty of the church, for example, historically. Basically, our position is pretty simple; we believe the church is alive and well and protected and guided and preserved and watched over by the Holy Spirit, and every nanosecond of church history she is alive, she never dies, her offices are divinely instituted and established, there are authoritative standards within her to be employed like councils, there are expressions of authority within the church like excommunication, but the church is fallible -- that's it. So she's not dead, and she's not abandoned, she's just capable of error so she has to measure herself by the superior standard of God's inspired Word. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
The fourth objection is that people say "well, sola Scriptura wasn't in the early Church either," and my response to that is -- because we're saying post-apostolic infallibility is an accretion, they're saying "oh well, sola Scriptura is an accretion, too." My response to that is pretty simple, I would just say "yes, [sola Scriptura] is in the early church." First of all, it's inherent within the New Testament itself, in the Scripture's claims about itself. Scripture claims to be the inspired Word of God, so it is of unique authority. All sola Scriptura is, is the application of that claim to a very specific question, namely, how does the rule of the church work with respect to infallibility? So the idea is derived from the claims of Scripture about itself. It's not fully laid out, and it doesn't need to be. But the idea in the early church absolutely is present.
If you'd like to give the Protestant view a really good shake and really give it consideration, read this book by William Whitaker written back in 1588, I think, and basically from page 670-704, he gives twenty examples of Church Fathers. He starts with Irenaeus, he talks about Augustine who basically -- they don't use the word "sola Scriptura," it's not always fleshed out with every nuance, and there he recognizes "yeah, they're in a different context, but the basic idea that the inspired Word of God is of superior authority to any sort of ongoing capacities within the church -- whether an office, a council, anything like that -- these things are subordinate under Scripture." We measure ourselves by Scripture, etc., etc. That basic idea is resonant in the thought of early Christians and some medieval Christians as well, and I've talked about that elsewhere. But you could read that as one testimony, and if you want a full case, you can see some of my other videos, like Augustine.
But basically to sum up it up like this, I would say the idea of sola Scriptura does have a good foundation in the Scripture and in the early church, whereas the idea of post-apostolic ecclesial infallibility -- I've got to say this strongly, and I'm not trying to offend anybody or make anybody angry, but I've got to say it strongly, because of the level of triumphalism that comes against us. If you're one of the more gentle critics, let this one slide by you, OK? This is only for the people who are very triumphalist: there is simply no foundation whatsoever for post-apostolic ecclesial infallibility. It is hanging on in midair, off the ground. Jesus and the Apostles who taught abundantly about the offices and nature of the church -- Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12:28, and following the Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews, etc. -- not once is there any hint of this idea that there's going to be offices or capacities in the post-Apostolic church that are infallible. That's simply not present early on in the Apostles or in the early church, so there's just no reason to believe it. It has no foundation. So when you have a claim like the bodily Assumption of Mary impressed upon us on the grounds that it does exist, what can we do but protest?
If you're wondering when it does come in, that's a complicated question: where does infallibility start evolving? I do have a video on papal infallibility specifically where I try to trace out some of that development on YouTube. If you want to -- I won't put it down in the video description, but you can hunt it down, it's not hard to find.... I haven't addressed other aspects like councils. Maybe I'll try to get to those one say to sum it up. As Protestants, we are not trying to reject the Church, we're not trying to be unruly or unsubmissive to the Church, far from it! We want to submit to the Church. We want to submit to Christ. We want to submit to the Apostles. Our desire is to be faithful to what Christianity is. Our desire is to be faithful to what the Apostles taught over and against that which is a later accretion that doesn't have a foundation in what the Apostles taught. That is what we are trying to do; we are trying to be faithful to Christ. We want to place our trust in that which is of divine constitution, not in later human accretion. And in saying that, we're not saying that the church died when those accretions are are going on, but the church can make errors, and errors come in. So that's the heart posture and desire of a Protestant position. So I hope this video will clarify that and commend that for others to consider.
Being one of the said triumphalists, I have to say equally strongly that Ortlund's claims are completely incompetent even from the perspective of mundane history, whatever good intentions he may have. In fact, if you want to see some brutal honesty about exactly how ridiculous Ortlund's claims are as a matter of mundane history from an ordinary person just reading the sources, I strongly recommend the work of "Agnus Domini" on Ortlund's treatment of the apostolic succession here, here and here. I will instead point out that if we applied Ortlund's historical method in a completely mundane context, the results would be laughable.
Analogy to Supreme Court authority
Let's take an example of completely mundane secular authority. The present government of the United States of America was created by the Constitution in 1789. In that Constitution, the judicial power was granted to the Supreme Court, but nothing specifically provided for the power of judicial review -- to "say what the law is" concerning the Constitution. That power was established in the opinion authored by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison fourteen years after; it was technically a "post-Founding development." But it would be absurd to make the legal argument based on history that every Constitutional decision the Supreme Court has ever made lacks legal authority because the Constitution doesn't explicitly provide for judicial review. That argument would be rejected out of hand as a denial of what actually happened in history: the power of judicial review was never really denied but rather accepted as an essential feature of the judicial power.
A competent historian would look especially at two factors: (1) the common law tradition from which the Constitution emerged, and (2) the subsequent acceptance of the authority of Supreme Court decisions as having binding authority in the entire judicial system. That is because good historians look at the reasons for which people accept authority, not viewing it as an imposition of sheer power of one ruling class over another. (Note that I say "good historians" here because Ortlund's account of episcopal accretion would fit well with liberal interpretations in feminist and critical race theoretical approaches to history.) When one actually tries to understand the reasons for Chief Justice Marshall saying what he did, it hardly looks like a deliberate accretion of power by a self-serving Supreme Court. Rather, it is based on a recognition basic to legal systems generally -- and the common law system in particular -- that inability to render binding judgments concerning the law is anarchy. The judicial function is necessary for the rule of law to persist. If we said that Supreme Court decisions lacked authority because judicial review was a "later accretion," not recognizing its organic connection to the judicial authority and the subsequent incorporation into the law of society, we would negate the rule of law. There are certainly people who have complained about judicial review since, but the historical argument supporting the authority remains unshakeable.
The situation is identical with Scripture; the judicial function is necessary for Scripture to function as a rule of faith. Ortlund tries to appeal to the nature of Scripture to make this situation somehow different, but it isn't. Ortlund says: "Scripture claims to be the inspired Word of God, so it is of unique authority. All sola Scriptura is, is the application of that claim to a very specific question, namely, how does the rule of the church work with respect to infallibility?" He has the question exactly right and gets the answer exactly wrong. The Constitution is clearly of "unique authority"; it describes itself and the laws made pursuant to the Constitution as "the supreme law of the land." But the absurdity of concluding from its unique authority that the Supreme Court lacks authority to render binding decisions concerning its meaning has already been demonstrated, nor does it follow that the Constitution itself is the principle of correction for Supreme Court decisions. On the contrary, without the authority of the Supreme Court to render such binding decisions as a normal judicial function, the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, would not have been able to function as a rule of law.
In significant ways, Ortlund has confused the office of bishops with the exercise of its power, in exactly the way one could confuse the exercise of judicial review with the office of Supreme Court Justice. Ortlund equates the office of bishop with monarchial territorial jurisdiction, but that has nothing to do with the definition of the office. It is only one way in which that power can be exercised. As my Orthodox friend Perry Robinson recently pointed out, the requirements are actually that (1) there are three orders, (2) which are obtained by ordination that confers a spiritual gift through laying on hands and (3) only bishops can perform this ordination. But at 15:00, Ortlund offers a definition of apostolic success that doesn't actually correspond to this definition and which is actually misleading.
Its technical meaning has four components.
1. The office of bishop is distinct from the office of presbyter by divine right by apostolic appointment, and so the bishop rather than the presbyter is the successor of the Apostles;
2. Bishops have a regional jurisdiction in a kind of overarching hierarchical unity with one another;
3. Episcopal succession subsists in the laying on of hands from one bishop to another; and
4. Apart from valid apostolic succession, there is normally no validly ordained ministry and thus no efficacious Sacraments.
Baptism will often be an exception to that, but the Eucharist --- for example, no valid Eucharist apart from valid holy orders or ministry, and no valid holy orders apart from valid apostolic succession, this very tight and sort of mechanical way of understanding how the church -- how church ministry is transmitted from one time to another.
(1) is false on multiple grounds. In the first place, Ortlund is using this to argue that the use of the term is exclusive, so that bishops cannot also be referred to as presbyters, which is entirely false. The greater order includes the lesser, which prevents the term itself from only and exclusively being used for the lower order. The word "deacon" is typically singled out because it lacks the fulness of priestly ministry, but it does still consecrate the man to service of the Church, which is why the title "servant" (which is nothing other than deacon translated) is applied to deacons, priests, and bishops. Similarly, both presbyteroi and episkopoi have the fullness of priestly ministry and apostolic succession in this primary sense of Christ's priesthood, which is why it is perfectly acceptable to say that the bishop is part of the priesthood. But it is likewise true that only bishops have the fullness of the apostolic succession in the sense of governance over the lesser orders, which is exactly why the exercise of monarchial territorial jurisdiction is fitting but not necessary for the episcopate. But the true aspect of governance is of the bishops acting collectively in union with one another as the government of the Church. This is why ecumenical councils exemplifying the union of the bishops have final and binding authority in the Church.
(2) is simply false on its face. Regional jurisdiction is entirely inessential to apostolic succession. We could have continued to have multiple bishops governing collegially, as was done in early Rome and Corinth, indefinitely.
(3) is true but misleading, because it fails to point out that not only bishops but all orders are ordained by the bishop. The key feature of apostolic succession is that only bishops ordain others to ministry in the Church, either the ministry of service or priestly ministry of any kind. (Note that election of bishops, which Ortlund mentions at 19:25, has nothing to do with anything; bishop-candidates were elected locally for long stretches of Church history.)
(4) should therefore be stated more strongly: without ordination by a bishop, there is no priestly ministry of any kind, including most especially the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the order of Melchizedek.
With the correct understanding of apostolic succession, then, there is an exact parallel between the office of bishop and the office of Supreme Court Justice:
A. The office is named and described in some detail in the founding documents in a way that clearly conveys governmental authority (the Supreme Court in the Constitution, bishops in Scripture).
B. The process of installation into that office was clearly described, and there are no recorded instances of an office holder being recognized as such without that process (appointment by the President in the Constitution, ordination by laying on hands by an Apostle or bishop in Scripture).
C. Within about a generation after the founding, that office exercised a power that was not explicitly laid out in the founding documents but which was widely accepted as appropriate for the office (judicial review for the Supreme Court, monarchial territorial jurisdiction for the episcopate).
A claim that the power of judicial review was a later ultra vires accretion and that Supreme Court decisions are not valid law would not be taken seriously by any legal historian today, and it is not even three hundred years after the Founding. To say that the analogous claim is ridiculous in the context of the episcopate would be to understate the magnitude of the error; there is vastly more evidence for episcopal government in the centuries since Christ. Denial of this exercise of authority is the same dangerously foolish idea embraced by people who deny the authority of the federal government, such as the "Sovereign Individual" movement that advocates refusal to pay income taxes.
The point is that what Ortlund is doing isn't what we would normally consider "history" at all. Normal history would say exactly the same thing about episcopal authority that it does about the authority of the Supreme Court. The office shows every sign of having been established in the New Testament and operating as intended for its governmental function. Unless we assume that the first century Christian audience simply had no idea what the office was or how it was intended to function other than what was written in epistles, an assumption that is frankly ridiculous to anyone who even reads the plain text of the New Testament, we would handle this historically in the same way we handle any other office. And if we do handle it this way, then the claim that later episcopal authority is an "accretion" is no less absurd than the claim that the Supreme Court power of judicial review is a "accretion" that is legally invalid under the Constitution. That standard for validity would be completely contrary to our ordinary historical understanding of what was believed at the time.
Objections to the analogy
A. Scripture's claims are different than that of the Constitution
The simplest response to that objection is to look at how Ortlund himself characterized the issue: "All sola Scriptura is, is the application of that claim to a very specific question, namely, how does the rule of the church work with respect to infallibility?" I agree; a rule, a law, works the same way in the church as any rule for human beings in any human society. Scripture, qua the supreme law of the Church, works identically with the Constitution as the "supreme law of the land." The written consitution establishes a correlative government, and that is the way in which the written constitution sustains itself as a rule of law. If either Scripture or Constitution failed to do this, it would be a dead letter, incapable of functioning as a rule.
B. Authority is not infallibility
This argument is raised at 15:45; with respect to divine revelation, it is necessarily false for the reasons given in Michael Liccione's argument here -- that is, it would be intrinsically incapable of distinguishing authoritative divine revelation from mere opinion, meaning that it fails to provide a sufficient rational basis for the normative commitment of faith. This is understandable by the same analogy to the Supreme Court within the rule of law.
If one were to argue the distinction that the Supreme Court, as a collection of fallible political appointees is somehow "not infallible," the reply would be the old maxim about the Supreme Court: the Supreme Court is not final because it is infallible; it is infallible because it is final. That is, the Supreme Court cannot fail to be the final authority in the dispute, because that is its function within the rule of law, a rule of orderly behavior in the society. The only difference between rule of law and rule of faith in this sense is that the latter is established by God to lead not only to orderly behavior but also to truth.
Note that "infallibility" in the sense of being incapable of error, which is more correctly called "inerrancy" in the case of writings like Scripture, is known as a consequence of its normative status within the government viewed as a whole. Human government can fail to achieve true "infallibility" in this sense in that it might be subject to future revision, but divine government as guarantor of truth cannot, which is why what the Church upholds as Scripture can be trusted as the divine law. Ortlund's claim that "receiving a gift of truth and promulgating infallibly are not the same thing" is radically false if Scripture is to serve as a rule of faith. This is why St. Augustine correctly says that his respect for Scripture is on account of the authority of the Church: "If you say, Do not believe the Catholics: you cannot fairly use the gospel in bringing me to faith in Manichæus; for it was at the command of the Catholics that I believed the gospel."
C. Augustine denies the authority of the apostolic succession
Note that when dealing with Christian heretics who accept the apostolic succession, such as the Arian heretic Maximinus or the Donatists, Augustine will appeal to Scripture rather than councils (including Nicaea), but he does not do so with the Manichaeans who accept Scripture but reject the apostolic succession. The latter are simply being irrational, as Augustine points out, while the former are essentially in an internal debate about the proper authority of the episcopate. Likewise, when dealing with Protestants, the logical approach is not to dispute with them about Scripture, since there is no fundamental agreement about the authority of Scripture, but why they believe Scripture has authority in the first place.
Understood in that context, it is worth pointing out this howler from Ortlund concerning a quote from Augustine against the Donatists, which is thoroughly debunked by Agnus Domini.
But who can fail to be aware that the sacred canon of Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, is confined within its own limits, and that it stands so absolutely in a superior position to all later letters of the bishops, that about it we can hold no manner of doubt or disputation whether what is confessedly contained in it is right and true but that all the letters of bishops which have been written, or are being written, since the closing of the canon, are liable to be refuted if there be anything contained in them which strays from the truth, either by the discourse of some one who happens to be wiser in the matter than themselves, or by the weightier authority and more learned experience of other bishops, by the authority of Councils and further, that the Councils themselves, which are held in the several districts and provinces, must yield, beyond all possibility of doubt, to the authority of plenary Councils which are formed for the whole Christian world; and that even of the plenary Councils, the earlier are often corrected by those which follow them, when, by some actual experiment, things are brought to light which were before concealed, and that is known which previously lay hid, and this without any whirlwind of sacrilegious pride.
Ortlund makes the absurd claim, which seems to be motivated not by dishonesty but rather but just how oblivious Ortlund really is to patristics, that this is a claim that "ecumenical councils can err." As Agnus Domini points out, it's not likely that Augustine even knew that there could be ecumenical councils, plural, since it is very likely that he didn't even know that Constantinople had happened. What he's referring to here are councils convened to assess the common faith of the entire Church, formed for the whole but not necessarily out of the whole, which are plenary in that sense of representing more than just local opinions. His argument would be senseless for ecumenical councils in which the whole world is present to share knowledge, and he doesn't even take this position with respect to the appeals to Rome, which Augustine sees as an appeal to the shepherd of the whole Church.
The point is that when the bishops are lawfully resolving disputes among one another, they should be appealing to Scripture, just as the Supreme Court should be appealing to the Constitution in resolving legal disputes. But he clearly doesn't think he should deal with opponents within the apostolic succession, who actually accept the offices and the government, the same we he treats those entirely outside the apostolic succession. And this goes double for Ortlund's citation of St. Irenaeus.
D. Irenaeus denies the authority of the apostolic succession
Here is the truly vicious irony. If we interpret Ortlund's claim correctly, he has cited direct patristic support against his own ministry! That's not an exaggeration, and the truly stunning part is that he does it in the middle of falsely accusing Joshua Charles of dishonest quotation. This is the quote from St. Irenaeus in Adv, Haer. 4.26, with the part Joshua quoted in bold:
Wherefore it is incumbent to obey the presbyters who are in the Church,—those who, as I have shown, possess the succession from the apostles; those who, together with the succession of the episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth, according to the good pleasure of the Father. But [it is also incumbent] to hold in suspicion others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves together in any place whatsoever, [looking upon them] either as heretics of perverse minds, or as schismatics puffed up and self-pleasing, or again as hypocrites, acting thus for the sake of lucre and vainglory. For all these have fallen from the truth. And the heretics, indeed, who bring strange fire to the altar of God—namely, strange doctrines—shall be burned up by the fire from heaven, as were Nadab and Abiud. But such as rise up in opposition to the truth, and exhort others against the Church of God, [shall] remain among those in hell, being swallowed up by an earthquake, even as those who were with Chore, Dathan, and Abiron. But those who cleave asunder, and separate the unity of the Church, [shall] receive from God the same punishment as Jeroboam did.
Those, however, who are believed to be presbyters by many, but serve their own lusts, and, do not place the fear of God supreme in their hearts, but conduct themselves with contempt towards others, and are puffed up with the pride of holding the chief seat, and work evil deeds in secret, saying, “No man sees us,” shall be convicted by the Word, who does not judge after outward appearance, nor looks upon the countenance, but the heart; and they shall hear those words, to be found in Daniel the prophet: “O thou seed of Canaan, and not of Judah, beauty hath deceived thee, and lust perverted thy heart. Thou that art waxen old in wicked days, now thy sins which thou hast committed aforetime are come to light; for thou hast pronounced false judgments, and hast been accustomed to condemn the innocent, and to let the guilty go free, albeit the Lord saith, The innocent and the righteous shalt thou not slay.” Of whom also did the Lord say: “But if the evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming, and shall begin to smite the man-servants and maidens, and to eat and drink and be drunken; the lord of that servant shall come in a day that he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.”
Such presbyters does the Church nourish, of whom also the prophet says: “I will give thy rulers in peace, and thy bishops in righteousness.” Of whom also did the Lord declare, “Who then shall be a faithful steward (actor), good and wise, whom the Lord sets over His household, to give them their meat in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find so doing.” Paul then, teaching us where one may find such, says, “God hath placed in the Church, first, apostles; secondly, prophets; thirdly, teachers.” Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed, there it behooves us to learn the truth, [namely,] from those who possess that succession of the Church which is from the apostles, and among whom exists that which is sound and blameless in conduct, as well as that which is unadulterated and incorrupt in speech. For these also preserve this faith of ours in one God who created all things; and they increase that love [which we have] for the Son of God, who accomplished such marvellous dispensations for our sake: and they expound the Scriptures to us without danger, neither blaspheming God, nor dishonouring the patriarchs, nor despising the prophets.
Ortlund's supplemental quote is from AH 3.3:
For they were desirous that these men should be very perfect and blameless in all things, whom also they were leaving behind as their successors, delivering up their own place of government to these men; which men, if they discharged their functions honestly, would be a great boon [to the Church], but if they should fall away, the direst calamity.
I'll start from the end; the fact that Irenaeus separately enumerates that "they expound the Scriptures without danger" means that Scripture cannot itself be the basis of judging Scripture, because this statement would be superfluous if it were impossible to expound Scripture with danger. So this is an assertion that their authority, their "gift of truth," makes them reliable expounders of Scripture, not the converse proposition claimed by Ortlund that reliably expounding Scripture gives one authority. But the truly important phrase that Ortlund has completely glossed over is that these reliable teachers are "those who, together with the episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth." The apostolic succession, which does include both bishops and presbyters, is collectively infallible by their shared faith. Individual bishops and presbyters can fall away through evil conduct, but the apostolic succession as a collective never can, which is the basis for the indefectibility of the Church. Anyone who believes in the indefectibility of the Church apart from the apostolic succession is simply irrational and fideistic.
This is why Irenaeus explicitly condemns "others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves together in any place whatsoever," which is a perfect description of Ortlund's congregation. And if Ortlund were to do so willfully, Ortlund would a man we must "hold in suspicion," among those we should view "either as heretics of perverse minds, or as schismatics puffed up and self-pleasing, or again as hypocrites, acting thus for the sake of lucre and vainglory." To be clear, I think that Ortlund is clearly oblivious, albeit so prone to engage in "motivated reasoning" that it frankly appears like dishonesty to people who know better.
Along those lines, even with respect to the evil presbyters, Irenaeus tells how we can judge those who are instead good: "Paul then, teaching us where one may find such [faithful servants], says 'God hath placed in the Church, first, apostles; secondly, prophets; thirdly, teachers. Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed, there it behooves us to learn the truth, [namely,] from those who possess that succession of the Church which is from the apostles.'" As with the heretics, we judge goodness by unity with the Church, how that presbyter reflects unity with the one government of the Church. We do not judge them by expounding the Scriptures, because that cannot be done without danger by evil men; rather, we judge all things by unity with the Church government, and the Church within that unity judges rightly according to the Scriptures. It is that right judgment of the Church as a whole, as a single government, in which the indefectibility and infallibility subsists. Ortlund's self-contradictory position that "receiving a gift of truth and promulgating infallibly are not the same thing" could only be true if that authority were not intended by God to function as the once-for-all-time means of divine revelation. And that brings us to the Old Testament.
E. The Old Testament did not have a final infallible authority
But what about the Old Testament lacking final infallible authority? Just as the government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation was in some respects incomplete in its function, which is why the Constitution was written, so Israel was incomplete as a self-sustaining divine government. This is exactly why revelation was open: because the revelation was incomplete at that time. Thus, the principle of correction was subsequent special divine intervention through offices like prophet, judge, and king. But once revelation in closed, the rule of faith, the apostolic government, must be complete. There will no longer be any special divine interventions, but rather the stable presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church founded on Pentecost. Ortlund therefore denies the fulfillment of Israel in the Church of the New Covenant.
If this apostolic succession, the plenary government of the New Testament instituted by Christ and inaugurated in their full office by the Holy Spirit, needed correction about the faith, then there would be no principle by which such correction could take place. This is why Ortlund's position necessarily degenerates into no rule of faith at all. By Ortlund's lights, the Incarnation and subsequent closure of revelation left us even worse off than Israel in the Old Testament, because we have neither self-sustaining government nor divine promise to specially intervene. By contrast, the Old Testament clearly demonstrated that the Scriptures alone were not sufficient to maintain the rule of faith without special divine intervention. In 2 Kings 22, Israel had degenerated into Ba'al worship and had forgotten the Law completely. Josiah's reforms on the discovery of the Book of the Law in chapter 23 were essentially immediately undone by his son, leading to the Babylonian captivity. 2 Kings 24:3-4 says "Surely this came upon Judah at the command of the Lord, to remove them out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done, and also for the innocent blood that he had shed. For he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord would not pardon." This is an example of God's ongoing special intervention with Israel in the Old Testament, and it demonstrates that with respect to the ongoing application of the rule of faith, Israel was defectible and corrigible, while the New Testament Church is indefectible and therefore incorrigible in principle.
And just as separation from Israel would have been separation from God, so is separation from the one government of the Church. Indeed, without its government, the Church doesn't even exist as a polity. The idea of "Church" in Ortlund's mind is not merely invisible; it's not even real! It's like a square circle, a nonsense object collected from incompatible properties in the Meinongian sense. At least Israel was a real polity; Ortlund's view of the Church lacks even that level of reality. So we can return to Ortlund's vapid claim on indefectibility:
Most Protestants hold to the indefectibilty of the church, for example, historically. Basically, our position is pretty simple; we believe the church is alive and well and protected and guided and preserved and watched over by the Holy Spirit, and every nanosecond of church history she is alive, she never dies, her offices are divinely instituted and established, there are authoritative standards within her to be employed like councils, there are expressions of authority within the church like excommunication, but the church is fallible -- that's it. So she's not dead, and she's not abandoned, she's just capable of error so she has to measure herself by the superior standard of God's inspired Word. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
This is far from a reasonable position; it's a sheerly nonsensical position. In the first place, Ortlund doesn't even believe in a real "church"; he believes in a nonsense object that can't possibly exist. To call this nonsense object "she," as if it were some kind of real thing in the sense that we speak about the federal government of the United States, is delusional. There is no "she" to have offices and standards and authority. The idea that this imaginary "she," which does not and cannot possibly exist, has any real properties at all can't even rationally be discussed.
If Ortlund thinks that the Church, like Israel, lacks infallibility, then Ortlund believes that the Church, like Israel is defectible and can only be brought back to the rule of faith by special divine intervention. But if Ortlund thinks that revelation is closed, then special divine intervention concerning the rule of faith is impossible. Those do not constitute a mutually compatible set of properties, so Ortlund believes in something that can't possibly exist.
Conclusion
If you had someone telling you that the federal government were not actually the federal government but that the United States were actually run by a "shadow government" described by a contradictory and impossible set of properties, you would not accept that person's account as true, and you would likely have concerns about that person's mental health. But when Ortlund makes religious claims that are every bit as delusional, no one blinks an eye. That is a sign of how modernism has turned religion into something like aesthetic taste, like what flavor of ice cream one prefers, rather than real claims about reality. If Ortlund's (or any Protestant's) claims were treated as scientific rather than rhetorical, they would be laughed out of the discourse.
The Reformation is over. "Semper reformanda" is as historically relevant as "the South shall rise again." There are people who believe it, and they are wrong from perspective of brute historical fact. At some point, we need to start dealing with it and not treating these claims as intellectually serious. A Protestant who is not knowingly and consciously liberal is either ignorant or incompetent concerning patristic history. There is no other option.
