Steelmanning and destroying the Protestant argument - Fr. Stephen De Young & Jonathan Pageau
Overview
This conversation is a methodological one: Jonathan Pageau asks Fr. Stephen De Young to steelman the Protestant position — specifically the “Bible only” instinct and the messy, sifting character of tradition — and then to say where the argument fails. FDY grants that the Protestant move was eminently reasonable in 16th-century Western Europe, given the mass of pseudepigraphal and forged texts and the inability to date or authenticate them, but argues that the conditions that justified it no longer obtain: we now have the manuscript, textual, and historical data the Reformers lacked, so walling off that data is no longer defensible. He then traces the deeper cost — a post-Enlightenment embarrassment about the “supernatural,” a Calvinist cessationism that functions as a burden on conscience, and a circular hermeneutic in which “the correct way to interpret Scripture” is defined as whatever yields the 16th-century conclusions. The through-line: the Protestant principle made sense as a response to a real textual crisis, but has become a club for warding off evidence, and the recovery of the “divine council”/principalities framework is exactly what the present moment needs.
1. The steelman: tradition as a messy, Spirit-guided sifting process
Pageau frames the task as steelmanning the Protestant position, noting that Orthodoxy’s account of tradition has a “messy aspect” — things get taken in, rejected, kept — rather than a hard “Bible and only the Bible” line 0:00. FDY agrees and illustrates from the Apostolic Fathers: ideas in the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas “get dropped,” while other material is picked up and continued 0:52. The same is true of Second Temple literature, and within Christianity: Tertullian is not St. Tertullian and Origen is not St. Origen, yet elements written by both end up being important while other things are dropped 0:52. From the Orthodox perspective this sifting is the Holy Spirit guiding the Church through history 0:52.
He draws a contemporary application: this is the problem with internet circulation of quotes from living elders — “some of the stuff that contemporary elders are saying will still be around 500 years from now and be being quoted, and some of it will not” 1:46. We don’t yet know which is which; the sifting takes time.
2. Why the Protestant position made eminent sense in the 16th century
FDY’s steelman proper: the Protestant position “made eminent sense in the 16th century in Western Europe” 1:46. The reason is textual — there were forged writings of the Church Fathers “all over the place”: fake works of St. Augustine, the Donation of Constantine, and “all kinds of stuff that people were using to bolster the claims” of Rome 1:46. Crucially, these were things “not only the Protestant reformers thought were wrong, but that we as Orthodox Christians also think are wrong” 1:46. There were also fake epistles of St. Ignatius 2:40.
The decisive point is epistemic: in 16th-century Geneva, Germany, or France “you don’t have any way to establish” what was actually written by St. Augustine and what wasn’t 1:46. Even the 16th-century Latin Vulgate, having been hand-copied across the centuries, “was not identical to St. Jerome’s translation” — “and we know that for a fact now” 2:40. So if you wanted material you could be confident went back to the apostles and hadn’t been “fiddled with by Rome,” what did you have? 2:40
- The Hebrew text of the Old Testament, obtainable from the local synagogue — and “nobody in Rome could read Hebrew really,” so the Jewish people’s custody of the text guaranteed it hadn’t been tampered with 3:27.
- The Greek New Testament manuscripts that had just arrived in Western Europe after the fall of Constantinople — and “they knew well that the Greek church had that,” so Rome hadn’t been fiddling with it 3:27.
On that basis the Reformers concluded these would give “a direct window… at least the most direct possible window available to them into apostolic faith… without any pseudo and false writings” 3:27. FDY’s verdict: “that makes eminent sense if you’re living in western Europe in the 16th century” 3:27.
3. The conditions have changed — the onus has shifted
“But I don’t live there” 4:14. In the 21st century — the US, Canada, Great Britain, Western Europe, Australia — “we have access to copious amounts of data about the biblical text in all of its translations and versions over time, over centuries. We could watch things happen” 4:14. We now have “a pretty good idea which ones are authentic and which ones aren’t… pretty reliably,” with some things still argued about 4:14. Therefore “it doesn’t make a lot of sense now to wall off certain data, to present certain data as irrelevant” 4:14.
The onus, FDY argues, “kind of goes back onto the Protestant scholar to justify isolating the biblical text from its historical context” — “what justifies that?” 6:19. If you take even just how the Greek words used in the New Testament were used by other Jewish authors of the period, “that bodes ill for a lot of Protestant” exegesis 6:19. Hence sola scriptura “has become this kind of club just to ward off that argument entirely” — the move being that such data is “completely irrelevant… we don’t even consider that when interpreting the Bible” 7:24.
4. The seminary anecdote: Ignatius and “how did things go so wrong so fast?”
FDY offers a personal domino: in an ancient church history course at “probably the most prominent on an academic level Protestant seminary in the US,” a professor — “a very intelligent man, very well-read” — said that “at the very beginning of the 2nd century AD, in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, we have spelled out in detail the role of the magisterial bishop governing the church,” then paused and asked, “How did things go so wrong so fast in the second century?” 5:12. FDY’s point: because the professor already assumed episcopacy is “an unbiblical form of church government,” seeing it at AD 100 generates the question “how did things go wrong so fast?” rather than “maybe I’ve interpreted the Bible” wrongly 5:12–6:19. The data is not allowed to revise the conclusion.
5. Sola scriptura’s original purpose vs. its later use
FDY distinguishes the original intent from the later function. The original purpose of sola scriptura “was to have confidence that we were getting sort of directly from the era of the apostles” 7:24. That was a 16th-century answer to a 16th-century problem. But the “16th century consensus” — what he calls, following a current label, the “anti-Wright” position (over against N. T. Wright) — amounts to saying “these may be the best answers from a 16th century perspective to these theological questions” 7:24. FDY’s reply: “it’s not the 16th century” 7:24. He concedes he doesn’t think they’re the best answers, while noting the “anti-Wright” people are still Protestants 7:24.
The deeper problem is the freezing of that moment: treating the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude) as though it were “once and for all delivered in the 16th century,” with the framing “put forth by Luther and/or Calvin and/or Zwingli, whoever” as “the perfect framing on all these points” 8:11–8:58.
6. The circular hermeneutic
FDY names the resulting structure explicitly: “you get this circular reasoning.” The claim is “well, yes, because that’s the teaching of scripture” — but any reinterpretation of Scripture “gets ruled out because it doesn’t match those conclusions. So, the correct way to interpret scripture becomes the way that produces the correct conclusions, and those are the correct conclusions because that’s what we get from interpreting scripture the correct way” 8:58. The conclusion both generates and is generated by the method; no external data can break in.
7. “Principalities and powers” as mere human princes
Pageau recalls being taught, as a young Christian, that when St. Paul speaks of “powers and principalities” he means “princes in the world… kings and princes” — “as if there were a lot of those in the era of the Roman Empire,” where “there’s kind of just one guy ruling the world” 9:45. This is offered as an example of the flattening that the recovered divine-council framework reverses.
8. The recovery of the divine council and the present moment
Pageau argues from the Orthodox side that “a lot of the things that were forgotten in Christianity in the modern age are these blind spots that led to certain types of arguments that led to some aspects of atheism or some aspects of modernism” 9:45. Reopening these spaces — “the idea of the council around God,” “how these intelligences influence the world” — puts us “in the exact spot we need to be in right now” 10:43. His example: for centuries we have lacked the language to talk about principalities and non-human intelligence, and now “we’re building a non-human intelligence and we have no way of understanding what we’re doing… We’ve lost theological language. We don’t understand how intelligences affect us” 10:43–11:31. He notes this recovery is happening across traditions — Michael Heiser is cited as a Protestant example — not only in Orthodoxy 11:31.
9. “The West,” the Enlightenment, and embarrassment about the supernatural
FDY offers “a couple non-controversial statements” 11:31. First, he doubts “how real any concept of the West is” — “mainly a discourse that doesn’t have any reality behind it” 11:31. But if we mean Western European culture, then the rhetoric of “saving the West” is “fundamentally feudal,” because the contemporary scene is not a subversion or falling-apart of that culture but “the duma” — its culmination: “Western European culture gave us the Enlightenment too” 12:19.
Second: post-Enlightenment Western European culture left even “thoroughly devoted Christians embarrassed of the whole concept of the quote-unquote supernatural” 12:19. Their worldview “was so deeply informed by enlightenment rationalism that believing in a god was kind of embarrassing. But you start talking about angels and demons… that’s getting pretty close to ghosts and goblins… demons, next you’re going to be telling me there’s witches” 13:11. His aside: “look at us now… talking about ghosts and goblins and we’re fine” 13:11.
10. Evangelicalism, “that’s not in the Bible,” and the burden of conscience
FDY’s third “non-controversial statement”: “I don’t believe [evangelicalism] is a religion — evangelicalism now is a political movement in the United States that has little to do with religion” 13:11. By contrast, old-school evangelicals — “Bible believing and anti-theological liberalism” — when told of a miracle “in the second century, the 11th century, or last week Tuesday,” respond: “Well, that’s not in the Bible. I don’t have to believe that” 14:08. FDY’s retort: “who came up with the idea that there are no miracles anymore?” 14:08
He answers his own question: John Calvin 14:08. Calvin held that miracles ceased around AD 70 — “70 AD it all stopped” — precisely “because he wanted to rule out all of the miracles within the Roman Catholic Church that they were using as arguments against him” 14:54. FDY characterizes the counter-miracles Calvin faced as “pretty sus eucharistic miracles” of the “my cousin got possessed by a demon and the priest held up a host and said ‘What is this?’ and he said ‘It’s the body of Christ’” variety 14:54. But Calvin’s approach “wasn’t to just say, ‘Seriously, man’” — it was to deny all post-apostolic miracles: they were “just for the age of the apostles… to confirm the apostolic witness to the resurrection of Christ and then that’s it” 15:49.
The pastoral cost: a Presbyterian minister friend read the Martyrdom of St. Polycarp at a non-main service, and congregants were “really upset” — “by reading that to us with all those miracles and stuff, you’re binding our conscience. You’re telling us we have to believe in it” 16:46. FDY’s observation: “This is throwing a burden on them by asking them to believe that God did a miracle right in the past” 16:46. And these same people would say they are anti-Enlightenment-rationalist, yet “that’s just embedded. Stuff like that doesn’t happen” 16:46.
11. Trajectory: the collapse of that element of Western culture
FDY hopes “the west in that sense… gets broken down and ceases to exist… that whole element of western culture,” and thinks that is the trajectory 17:37. The gender ideology of “my biology doesn’t matter, I’m whatever sex I claim to be or invent” is “downstream from the Enlightenment” — from liberté, égalité, fraternité 17:37. The point is genealogical: the same rationalist substrate that produced cessationism and “that’s not in the Bible-ism” also produces the contemporary dissolution; the “other stuff” (angels, demons, divine council) is not foreign to the tradition but is what was lost.
FDY’s positions in brief
| Topic | FDY’s view | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Tradition’s messiness | Sifting of Barnabas, Hermas, Tertullian, Origen is real; the Holy Spirit guides it over centuries | 0:52 |
| Quoting living elders | Premature — we don’t yet know what will survive 500 years of sifting | 1:46 |
| Protestant origins | Made “eminent sense” in the 16th century given forged patristica, Donation of Constantine, fake Ignatius, corrupted Vulgate | 1:46–2:40 |
| Why Hebrew and Greek then | Hebrew (from synagogue) and Greek NT (post-1553/Constantinople) were seen as untampered by Rome | 3:27 |
| Present-day status | The justifying conditions no longer obtain; walling off data is indefensible | 4:14 |
| Burden of proof | Now on the Protestant scholar to justify isolating the text from historical context | 6:19 |
| Sola scriptura | Original purpose (direct access to the apostolic era) has become “a club” to ward off evidence | 7:24 |
| 16th-century consensus | ”Anti-Wright” position; best 16th-c. answers, but “it’s not the 16th century” | 7:24 |
| Hermeneutics | Circular: correct method = whatever yields the correct (16th-c.) conclusions | 8:58 |
| ”Principalities and powers” | Not merely human kings/princes; the flattening was a modern blind spot | 9:45 |
| Divine council recovery | Exactly the framework needed now, esp. re: non-human intelligence; happening across traditions (Heiser) | 10:43–11:31 |
| ”The West” | Concept largely unreal as discourse; as Western European culture, its collapse is its culmination, not its subversion | 11:31–12:19 |
| Enlightenment legacy | Produced Christian embarrassment about the “supernatural” (angels, demons as “ghosts and goblins”) | 12:19–13:11 |
| Evangelicalism | Now a US political movement with little to do with religion | 13:11 |
| Cessationism | Traced to Calvin, who needed to nullify Catholic miracle claims; miracles limited to confirming the apostolic witness | 14:08–15:49 |
| Cost of cessationism | Makes belief in past miracles a “burden on conscience” (Polycarp case) | 16:46 |
| Gender ideology | Downstream of the Enlightenment’s liberté, égalité, fraternité | 17:37 |
References surfaced
Biblical
- St. Paul on “powers and principalities” 9:45
- Epistle of Jude — “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” 8:11
Patristic and early Christian
- Epistle of Barnabas 0:52
- Shepherd of Hermas 0:52
- Tertullian 0:52
- Origen 0:52
- Pseudo-Augustinian writings 1:46
- Donation of Constantine 1:46
- Pseudo-Ignatian epistles; the authentic letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (episcopacy, early 2nd c.) 2:40, 5:12
- St. Jerome’s Vulgate 2:40
- Martyrdom of St. Polycarp 16:46
Scholarly / modern