Frozen leftovers

Perry Robinson Says:

“I’ve read what they have to say and will provide a response for you below. I have decided to stop interacting with Triablogue for a simple reason. I don’t take Steve Hays to be an honest interlocutor any longer.”

Actually, I’ve never mistook Perry for an honest interlocutor. He always trots out the same 3 or 4 objections to the Protestant rule of faith. Even though I’ve responded to his stale objections on multiple occasions, he simply repeats himself the next time around, without modification. Copy/paste objections.

Here is Perry’s apologetic methodology:

Freeze leftovers
Defrost/reheat leftovers
Freeze leftover leftovers
Defrost/reheat leftover leftovers
Repeat as necessary

“Steve will never admit when he’s in the wrong theologically even when he’s clearly pegged. Just go search for the post he did ‘Chicago Overcoat’ and look at the comments…Now if that isn’t the kind of gymnastics that will win the gold, I don’t know what will.”

When Perry can’t win the game on the field, he tries to win the game in the booth, with his tendentious characterization of how the argument allegedly went.

“There I gave him a test case for Sola Scriptura: The Filioque. Now Steve admits it can’t be justified by Scripture alone and yet he justifies it by an appeal to left over Catholic tradition or a half dozen of other excuses. If you read the exchange its obvious that Steve simply can’t bring himself to admit that his own confessions are inconsistent and teach false doctrine. All he had to say was something like, sure it is wrong and we should remove it. Its clear that he knows it can’t be justified by Sola Scriptura and yet he won’t protest it as an extra-biblical doctrine simply because its part of his own tradition. There’s no point to really dialoging with him any further.”

What a thoroughly incompetent summary of my stated position on the issue.

i) The Bible uses double processional language. The standard prooftext is Jn 15:26. Since the Bible itself uses that language, there’s nothing wrong with a creed which reproduces or paraphrases the same language.

ii) Beyond the linguistic question of Scriptural usage is the further question of what the language means, both in Scripture and in the creed. Does it have reference to eternal procession or economic procession? In John, it has reference to economic procession.

iii) What about the creed? To my knowledge, that was meant to denote the eternal procession of the Spirit.

iv) The next question is whether someone who recites the creed is bound by the original intent of whoever introduced that article into the creed.

I don’t see why. Why would the intention of the framer obligate the intention of the someone who reciting the creed? The creed is not a contract between two contracting parties, the force of which is contingent on mutual agreement. Whoever introduced that article into the creed doesn’t have the authority to make his intentions binding on a second party.

There’s no reason why someone who recites the filioque can’t mentally affirm the economic double procession of the Spirit rather than the eternal double procession of the Spirit. The former would be consistent with Scriptural usage and Scriptural intent alike. And, ultimately, that’s what the creed is supposed to reflect. The original intent of Scripture is authoritative in a way that uninspired creed are not and cannot be.

v) Whether we retain the filioque or remove the filioque is of no consequence to me. The mere wording of the filioque doesn’t teach false doctrine.

vi) I didn’t justify the filioque by appeal to Western tradition. How does Perry place such a totally inept construction on what I said? I merely pointed out that that’s how it became a nominal part of the Reformed tradition. Whether or not it can be justified is dependent on other considerations, which I discussed.

I don’t object to removing unscriptural articles from a creed, if there are any. I’ve cited the “Descensus ad Infernos” as a case in point.

vii) Perry also plays a double game. On the one hand, he accuses you of being a partisan traditionalist if you refuse to disown some aspect of your theological tradition. On the other hand, if you do disown some aspect of your theological tradition, then he discounts what you say on the grounds that, in that event, you’re not a real spokesman for the tradition in question. Perry has never been arguing in good faith. He’s just a demagogue.

“This is a question and not an argument. First the same solid evidence we have for the gospels being written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Ireneaus, Papias, etc.”

This assumes the only evidence we have for the traditional authorship of the Gospels is patristic testimony. An example of Perry’s self-reinforcing ignorance.

“Why is it that those aren’t ‘self serving legends’ too I wonder?”

Of course, that piggybacks on the ignorant claim he previously made.

“As for Constantinople, this was transferred from Ephesus.”

i) Of course, that’s in point blank contradiction to his original claim. He originally said the sees of the pentarchy were “founded directly by the apostles.”

By contrast, “transference” from Ephesus to Constantinople would be, at best, indirect rather than direct founding.

ii) So if he’s going to attenuate the principle from sees directly founded by the apostles to sees indirectly founded by the apostles, then restricting the principle of patriarchal ratification to these five sees is even more ad hoc.

Remember, it was already ad hoc when he appealed to sees directly founded by apostles, since the pentarchy hardly corresponds to those and only those sees–whether in Scripture or tradition.

iii) In addition, notice that he’s far more rhetorically confident in his statement to me than in his subsequent statement to another commenter. In responding to me, he makes the self-confident statement that “As for Constantinople, this was transferred from Ephesus.”

But when he replies to “John,” we get a far more tentative claim: “The apostolic lineage of Constantinople is obviously not from any direct founding. I can’t recall the sources at the moment but my understanding was that Ephesus was transferred to Constantinople. If so, we know that John and Paul play significant roles in founding the church there.”

iv) For that matter, what does it mean to “transfer” an apostolic foundation from one see to another? Do you remove the foundation from the church of Ephesus, transport it by oxcart to Constantinople, then slide it under the church of Constantinople?

v) If apostolic foundations are transferable, then why can’t other churches get in on the act? Perhaps the apostolic foundation was transferred from the church of Ephesus to First Baptist Church.

“Perhaps Steve doesn’t think that Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome and Ephesus weren’t founded by an Apostle. If so, then the NT is clearly wrong.”

i) Where does the NT say the church of Antioch was “directly founded by an apostle”? According to Acts 11, the church of Antioch wasn’t started by apostles. It was well under way when Paul finally arrived on the scene.

ii) And, of course, his remarks are an exercise in misdirection. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that 3 out of 5 or even 4 out of 5 were directly founded by apostles? That still falls short of the mark.

The whole point of a “pentarchy” is that it’s supposed to be a unit–a unit of five. It functions as a unit.

But if only 3 or 4 of the pentarchial churches were directly founded by apostles, then the pentarchy fails to meet the conditions of pentarchial membership which Perry stipulated at the outset (“directly founded by an apostle”). 3 out of 5 or 4 out of 5 does not a pentarchy make. A pentarchy can be no more or less than 5. And each of the 5 must meet the conditions of direct apostolic foundation that Perry himself insisted upon.

Remember, that’s the reason the pentarchy is special. That’s what sets it apart. Makes it more authoritative. So there’s no give on this issue. Not as Perry framed the terms of the debate.

“Perhaps Steve thinks we have no solid evidence for the Apostles founding any historical churches, but this seems to be the direction his line of reasoning would take him, which is absurd and borders on the kind of reasoning found in atheistical works like The Jesus Myth.”

Having lost the original argument on his own terms, Perry is reduced to diversionary tactics. The question at issue is not whether the apostles founded any historical churches. The question, rather, is whether Perry can make good on his own claims regarding the direct apostolic foundation of the pentarchial churches.

“As for Alexandria, this is founded by Mark, the disciple of Peter. Perhaps he doesn’t think Mark wrote that Gospel and didn’t get his material from Peter. I do. Perhaps he thinks the account of Mark going to Egypt entirely false or lacking historical value.”

i) Irrelevant. To make good on his pentarchial claims, Perry needs a perfect score: 5 out of 5. Nothing less will do. Even if Perry could make a good case for the church of Alexandria, that doesn’t salvage the case for Constantinople.

ii) And if, for the sake of argument, we say the church of Alexandria was founded by Mark, then to be founded by a disciple of an apostle would be indirect rather than direct apostolic founding. So by Perry’s own, backdoor admission, 2 of the 5 churches of the pentarchy fail to meet the condition of direct apostolic founding.

iii) Thus, Perry has given us a triarchy in lieu of a pentarchy. But if he attenuates the principle of patriarchal ratification to include sees indirectly founded by apostles, then the viable candidates certainly outnumber of the five sees of the pentarchy. Yet the reason to treat pentarchial ratification as uniquely authoritative was because the pentarchial sees were directly founded by apostles. Or so he said. Of course, Perry has a habit of going back on his word when he traps himself in a dilemma of his own making.

iv) Moreover, why did Perry appeal to the NT for Rome, Ephesus, Antioch, and Jerusalem, but switches to tradition for Alexandria?

“Again, this is a question and not an argument. I don’t deny other churches founded by Paul have apostolic succession, such as Thessaloniki and that they too have great weight. But following Ireneaus and others, the line of reasoning was that the apostolic deposit in those patriarchial churches was the most sure. Steve is free to reject Ireneaus and others in terms of historical data, but then it starts to look like special pleading.”

i) I’ll tell you what looks like special pleading: Perry tells us that pentarchial ratification is a necessary condition for a church council to be ecumenical. And the pentarchy has that authority by virtue of the fact that these particular sees were directly founded by apostles. When, however, I point out that other sees meet the same condition, in which case there’s nothing special about those five (even if all of them met that condition, which they don’t), then Perry’s appeal to pentarchial ratification falls apart.

ii) In addition, Perry doesn’t think the apostolic succession is “most sure” in all five cases. He clearly doesn’t regard Rome as a trustworthy conduit of the apostolic deposit.

“Let’s suppose that it is arbitrary. Does this imply that Steve would accept it if we widended it to sees like Thessaloniki? And Steve here simply makes an assertion that it is arbitrary. He provides no argument.”

Notice how miffed Perry gets when I answer him on his own grounds. But I’m simply holding him to the terms of his own argument.

Can Perry substitute different sees and shore up his core argument? If he can, let’s see his argument. If not, then his original argument doesn’t measure up to his own yardstick.

“And second, it doesn’t beg the question any more than appealing to the historical data of the NT is question begging when establishing the authority and inspiration of those texts.”

i) Of course, that’s not a counterargument. It doesn’t rebut the charge that his own appeal is question-begging. It’s just a tu quoque maneuver. But even if the tu quoque succeeded, that wouldn’t vindicate his own position. That could just as well demonstrate that both positions beg the question.

ii) And, yes, his position does beg the question. If the question at issue is authoritative criteria, by which you ratify a church council, and if you appeal to a church council (2nd Nicea) to authorize the authoritative criteria, then you’re reasoning in a vicious circle. 2nd Nicea would need to be authoritative to issue authoritative criteria (of ecumenicity). But unless you have independent criteria to establish the ecumenicity of 2nd Nicea, you can’t very well grant the authority of Nicea to authorize the criteria. So Perry’s argument generates a dilemma: he can’t get the criteria part from Nicea, but he can’t get Nicea apart from the criteria.

“2nd level induction comes to mind, but Steve for some reason thinks that kind of method is fine with the NT but it never occurs to him that the same kind of reasoning, which I have employed is available here.”

That’s too vague to merit a response.

“Once we’ve established things like Apostolic Succession by a historical and biblical route, then it isn’t question begging. I framed my point in terms of the context of Orthodox theology. If Steve doesn’t accept those presuppositions, that’s fine, but we already knew that we disagree over things like apostolic succession. So the real disagreement is factual, not logical, as I pointed out above.”

i) He’s rewriting the terms of the thread. Here is how he originally framed the issue:

“When I was first seriously considering becoming Orthodox, how the Orthodox understood church authority was an important area to map out. In discussing the matter with Catholics that I knew, they often objected that Orthodox ecclesiology falls prey to the same problems as Protestantism. There was no locus of authority in the offices of the church, but the source of normativity was ultimately to reside in the judgment of the people.”

So it wasn’t just a case of taking his Orthodox presuppositions for granted–since he wasn’t taking that for granted prior to his conversion to Orthodoxy. Rather, that’s one of the hurdles he had to overcome.

ii) And the question at issue is both logical and factual. What makes a church council ecumenical? According to Perry, a necessary condition is pentarchial ratification. And Perry grounds the special status of the pentarchy in the underlying claim that those 5 sees were directly founded by apostles. But if one or more fail to meet that condition–and even one is sufficient to scuttle his principle–then Perry’s argument is internally falsified. Likewise, if others sees, besides the pentarchy, meet that condition, then, once more, his argument is internally falsified.

“Once we’ve established things like Apostolic Succession by a historical and biblical route, then it isn’t question begging.”

Which he hasn’t begun to do.

“As for there being rival criteria, that by itself isn’t an argument. And I already noted that I reject receptionism and other Orthodox theologians who do and some of the reasons why.”

So Perry has no fallback position. He’s pinned his hopes on pentarchial ratification. If that principle falls through, he has nothing in reserve.

“I am not sure how mentioning the duration of time is pertinent, unless he thinks that divine gifts come with an expiration date.”

Well, he thinks the authority of Ephesus had an expiration date. That was “transferred” to Constantinople. Moreover, Perry seems think the passage of time can make a difference in other cases. In reponse to GS, he said, “In principle yes, but the situation now is different than in say the fourth century.” Furthermore, he clearly thinks the church of Rome lost her claim to apostolic succession long ago. So, yes, it does have a shelf-life.

“If Steve could for just a moment imagine how I am thinking of it, instead of how he wishes to argue, he would notice that this is within the context of apostolic succession. It isn’t too hard from there to see how it amounts to apostolic ratification since the episcopate is a continuance of the relevant portions of the apostolic ministry.”

Except that Perry thinks apostolic succession broke down in the case of Rome. rome didn’t preserve the deposit of faith. Same with the Oriental Orthodox.

So, even on his own grounds, he doesn’t think an apostolic foundation amounts to apostolic ratification centuries after the fact.

“As to whether I think that an institution can stray form it mandate in the case of purely humans ones, yes I think this can and does happen. But the church is a special case, even by Protestant lights. Perhaps not by Steve’s more baptistic Protestant lights, but that just shows how far outside the Protestant polis Steve is.”

Of course, that’s a bait-and-switch tactic. Perry isn’t appealing to “the church,” per se. Rather, he’s appealing to a few patriarchates. And he doesn’t think an apostolic see or patriarchate is indefectible. Take Rome.

“I didn’t aim to interact with Steve’s presuppositions about his Nestorianizing division between the earthly and the spiritual in ecclesiology.”

Whenever Perry senses that he’s losing the argument, he reaches for his dog-eared “Nestorian” trump card. Unfortunately, his trump card is a deuce of spades.

“As for institutions straying, would that be like practically all of the Protestant Confessions teaching non-biblical doctrines like the Filioque and yet failing to remove them or protestant against them when they know they are non-biblical? Physician, heal thyself.”

Straying institutions would also include the church of Rome, even though that was one of the pentarchial sees whose ratification is necessary to confer ecumenicity on a church council.

“Otherwise the falling away of this or that particular see or church isn’t a defeater for my view since my view doesn’t rest on the success of any one see. The fact that one could fall away though doesn’t count against my model.”

His model rests on a set of five specific sees–comprising the pentarchy. So where does that leave his argument? Where is the locus of authority if loci are unstable?

“Irenaeus gives us a rough and ready criteria for such cases when I have mentioned before and alluded to above.”

So he’s now appealing to one set of criteria to authorize another set of criteria. His original criterion (for ecumenicity) was pentarchial ratification. But now he’s invoking another set of criteria to ratify the pentarchy. Irenaean criteria are necessary to verify or falsify pentarchial criteria.

In that event, what authorizes the Irenaean criteria? Can Perry avoid a vicious regress or vicious circle?

“The distinction between metaphysical conditions and epistemological conditions is not a false dichotomy.”

i) I didn’t say the distinction was a false dichotomy. Rather, I said the distinction is useless unless and until Perry knows how to apply it.

What’s the point of the pentarchial ratification? Is the point to secretly make a council ecumenical? Or is that action also meant to lend public, official recognition to the council?

ii) Moreover, even on the order of being, pentarchial ratification can’t be a necessary condition if Perry’s criteria for membership in the pentarchy disenfranchises one or more of the five sees.

“Moreover, even if it were the case that I couldn’t fulfill the epistemic conditions finding out what the metaphysical conditions are isn’t useless…Perhaps there are moral values and we can’t know about them or perhaps its hard to know, but getting clear on what the conditions have to be for there to be such things is a good first step.”

i) The first step is useless unless he take it a step further–which Perry never does.

ii) Moreover, since Perry’s criterion is unstable, he can’t even take the first step. Perry’s very first step was a misstep.

“I am not clear on how exactly we get from Steve’s assertion of what I must do to a demonstration to what I must do. This is a bald assertion.”

I did more than assert. Rather, I pointed out the logical demands of his position. As I said: “Moreover, he needs to know that the council (2nd Nicea) which laid down these conditions is, itself, ecumenical. If he doesn’t know that, then he can’t invoke this council to authorize the conditions.”

Continuing with Perry:

“Second, this might be true if I thought that the normativity of those conditions had to be established by an ecumenical council. But I have already stated explicitly that I don’t think they do.”

After backpedaling from his original argument, where he appealed to 2nd Nicea.

“Hence Steve’s claim of vicious circularity falls flat. Imputing to me positions that I explicitly deny without demonstration is not a sign of a good dialog partner nor of good reading comprehension. It is a sign of prejudice.”

Perry staked out a position. After he couldn’t defend his original position, he retreated to a different position. He then tried to backdate his revised position as if that’s what he said all along.

BTW, I’ve never thought of Perry as a dialogue partner. He’s just a foil.

“We first need to get clear on what the conditions have to be met for a council to BE ecumenical or normative.”

He appealed to pentarchial ratification. That’s a bust. So even if that’s what we “first need to get clear on,” he got off to the wrong start, with no viable alternative.

“There are other conditions along this line that need to be discussed before we even get to epistemic concerns.”

A ratification process is epistemic as well as metaphysical. If the pentarchy ratifies a council, then that approval process is a public acknowledgement that this church council is an ecumenical council, ib distinction to other church councils which lack that sort of authority.

“There are other conditions along this line that need to be discussed before we even get to epistemic concerns.”

Perry is like a guilty child whose defense mechanism is to clam up lest he say anything incriminating. So Perry tries to comparmentalize the issues since he can’t take the next step.

“This kind of tu quo que is one Steve often uses so I am a bit shocked to find that he objects to it. At worst, Steve would be in the same position with the same problem. If the problem is a problem for me at worst, then it is a problem for him.”

Tu quoque won’t work for Perry since he set the bar higher for himself. Remember the point of his post? Catholics accuse the Orthodox of being in the same boat as the Protestants. Perry was trying to show why their accusation is mistaken.

However, a tu quoque response to me would simply concede the Catholic allegation. If Catholics accuse the Orthodox of being in the same boat as the benighted the Protestants, and Perry’s response to me is to say that Protestants are in the same boat he occupies, then that doesn’t refute the Catholic accusation. To the contrary, that corroborates the Catholic accusation.

“It is telling that he doesn’t show how exactly this isn’t a problem for Protestantism, which would be the appropriate refutation of the argument. Such a demonstration would show that only my position has the problem of circularity, not his, but he doesn’t do that. Why? Here I think I have shown that the objection therefore that he lodges against Orthodoxy is really a problem for his Protestantism. If this weren’t so, why didn’t Steve just show us how Protestantism escapes the problem?”

i) I don’t have to refute it on my own terms. If I can refute Perry on its own terms (as I’ve done), that’s more than sufficient.

ii) Moreover, I’ve defended the Protestant rule of faith on many occasions. I don’t need to repeat myself here. Perry welcomes a digression because he can’t defend his own position. He’d like me to buy him some time, to take the pressure off.

“This is true in so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go as far as Steve wishes to take it. If I specify the conditions for a council to be ecumenical and normative in a way that can bind the conscience, that all by itself is sufficient to show that it isn’t vulnerable to the same charge as Protestantism, especially in light of the fact that at worst on the epistemic front neither Catholics nor Protestants are in any better position.”

i) Perry is giving us an “iffy” IOU in lieu of cold hard cash. But he lacks the credit rating for me to accept his IOUs.

ii) And he needs to do more than merely specify a set of hypothetical conditions. He needs to show that his conditions are coherent and applicable. He also needs to avoid ad hoc caveats. And he needs to meet his own conditions.

“Let me repeat since he doesn’t seem to get the problem. If God lays down the conditions for knowing when God is speaking, how will having direct knowledge of rocks make this any less circular for a Protestant? Steve doesn’t tell us.”

i) Since Perry doesn’t seem to get the problem, let’s walk him through his own argument Perry first appealed to pentarchial ratification to field the Catholic objection about the locus of authority. When challenged, he then repaired to Irenaean criteria to verify (or falsify) pentarchial ratification.

So he’s falling back on nested criteria as if the only way to know something is through the application of suitable criteria. But that generates an infinite regress. Unless you can know something without having to apply nested criteria, then it’s turtles all the way down.

Perry is the one who framed the issue in terms of criteria. First pentarchial, then Irenaean.

ii) How does anyone know that God has spoken? How did Adam know that God was the speaker? Or Abraham? Or Isaiah? Or John the Revelator?

Did they start with nested criteria?

iii) Epistemic criteria can be very useful to verify or falsify a claim. But unless we enjoy some immediate (e.g. tacit, innate) knowledge, there is nothing to underwrite the criteria.

“Steve knows what he does by reference to and thru his worldview.”

i) That’s a serious overstatement. There’s a basic difference between reflective and prereflective knowledge. A 2-year-old enjoys a pretheoretical knowledge of many things. It’s not as though a 2-year-old can only know something to be the case by reference to and through his worldview.

ii) Moreover, if we knew whatever we do by exclusive reference to and through our worldview, then no unbeliever could ever come to a knowledge saving knowledge of God inasmuch as his godless worldview would the source or standard of whatever he knew or already believed.

To the contrary, Scripture ought to be the primary resource for forming, reforming, and informing our worldview. Of course, I realize that, from Perry’s perspective, the word of God is simply fish wrap for his sectarian traditions.

“How does Steve know that his worldview is true? By reference to his worldview in that no other worldview can fulfill the conditions that his worldview sets out to meet.”

Perry confuses knowledge with proof. Formal analysis can be a way of coming to know something, but it can also be a way of proving something you already know to be true prior to proving it.

A great scientist relies on physical intuition. Likewise, a mathematician may discern the answer long before he can prove it.

“So in that sense, there is no direct knowledge of things to have unless Steve wishes to start endorsing things like the myth of the ‘Given’.”

Irrelevant since Sellars was targeting radical empiricist theories of sensory perception–which is hardly the point at issue here.

“Of course, he is free to do so, but then Van Til, Bahnsen and the vast majority of Reformed Apologetics is hopelessly wrong.”

Even if sensory perception were the issue, Bahnsen, Van Til et al. don’t put forward any particular theory of sensory perception, so the objection is moot.

“I think it’s a pretty good argument that forces your opponent to abandon his apologetic strategy in order to make his objection to your view go through.”

Sorry to disappoint you, but that hasn’t caused me to abandon my strategy.

“My point was about normativity and not reliability.”

If he stated criteria are unreliable, then he can’t use them to access normativity.

“Second, reliability isn’t relevant to normative claims but peformative ones. What is normative isn’t constituted by reliability. Something normative isn’t so because more times than not it turns out to be obligatory and so it is obligatory because it turns out to be so more often than not. Steve here makes a category fallacy. Reliability is relevant to questions of performance, if something is operative or functional on most occasions and not whether I am obligated to do something on all relevant occasions since reliability allows for failure on all relevant occasions and normativity doesn’t.”

Did I say it was constitutive? No. So not the point.

Did I conflate reliability with obligation? No. So not the point.

Let’s remind Perry of his own argument. What constitutes an ecumenical council? Well, according to him, pentarchial ratification is a necessary condition.

But, in that event, pentarchial ratification also functions as an epistemic criterion to ascertain which councils are ecumenical. To the question, “Which councils are ecumenical?” Perry answers, “Those ratified by the pentarchy.” At least, he regards that as a partial answer.

But what if it turns out that pentarchial ratification is an unreliable criterion (for reasons I’ve given)? Then conciliar normativity isn’t available to Perry.

Did I introduce reliability because reliability is what makes something obligatory or normative? No.

But how would Perry be obligated by an ecumenical council if he were in no position to confirm the ecumenical status of the council in question? Is this a classified norm? What security rating to you need to find out which councils are ecumenical?

“I am obligated to perform certain acts even if I fail to do so on some occasions.”

Perry is so hopelessly confused. Was the question at issue whether or not something is obligatory or normative in case Perry is unreliable? No. Was the reliability (or not) of Perry’s performance the issue? No.

The issue isn’t whether Perry reliably applies the criteria, but whether he has reliable criteria to apply in the first place. Why is Perry unable to grasp that rudimentary distinction? There’s an elementary difference between applying reliable criteria unreliably, and applying unreliable criteria. Do we really need to explain that to Perry?

“Besides, normativity out paces reliability.”

And it also outpaces the subject of knowledge. Perry’s unknown, unknowable obligation.

“And reliability may not even be relevant to knowledge. This is why there was in part a shift from Reliabilism in epistemology to Virtue Epistemology.”

Of course, my objection wasn’t predicated on “Reliabilism” as a theory of knowledge. Rather, it was simply predicted on the reliability (or not) of Perry’s pentarchial criteria.

“It seems entirely wrong to me to attach reliability and it semantic riders of functionality and performance to prescriptive claims. X is moral or immoral and not on most relevant occasions but on all on pain of denying moral universalism.”

And how does Perry access prescriptive claims? Are the pronouncements of an ecumenical council prescriptive?

If so, how does Perry first determine which councils are ecumenical? By invoking the pentarchial criterion? But, for reasons given, that’s not a reliable criterion.

Perry keeps confusing the issue of knowing our duties with doing our duties. The question at issue is not whether we reliably perform our duties, but whether we have some reliable criterion to know where our duties lie. How long does one need to explain the obvious to Perry before the little light goes on in his noggin?

He’s the one who introduced pentarchial criteria into the discussion. So how is he duty-bound to submit to an ecumenical council if he can’t tell which councils are ecumenical and which are not?

Is pentarchial ratification a necessary condition? If so, what if that condition is unstable or incoherent?

“Moreover, reliability has to do with not criteria per se, but processes or procedures. So Steve needs to shift from criteria to processes, but that is not what I put forward. Perhaps then if we were to think of some of the criteria as procedures he’d have a point. But we’d need a demonstration of a case where all of the relevant procedures were followed but we got an obviously wrong outcome.”

It’s both. Pentarchial ratification is a process or procedure. But, according to Perry, it’s a normative process or procedure because the pentarchy enjoys special authority or jurisdiction when it comes to ratifying of an ecumenical council.

Perry isn’t appealing to just any old process or procedure. Rather, he’s appealing to the approval process of pentarchial ratification. Because the pentarchy is (or was) a locus of authority, it could authorize a church council. One locus of authority vouches for another locus of authority. The pentarchial locus of authority vouches for the authority of 2nd Nicea (or whatever).

“I don’t think Steve has done that and I don’t think he can find a non-question begging case.”

Actually, I’ve been using Perry’s example all along. The case of pentarchial ratification.

“To do so, Steve would need to set out all of the procedures and show that they were jointly insufficient, but I don’t think he knows what they are or where to find them.”

i) To begin with, I’m certainly not the one who needs to set out all the procedures which either make or demonstrate the ecumenicity of a church council ecumenical. I’m not the Orthodox apologist–Perry is.

ii) If pentarchial ratification is a necessary condition, and if this condition is fatally flawed (for reasons given), then multiplying additional conditions will not suffice to repair the pentarchial condition. You can’t have joint sufficiency if one or more of the necessary conditions feeding into joint sufficiency are fundamentally defective.

“Steve misunderstands what I wrote. Even if I were to grant that the issue fell under epistemology, it still wouldn’t be about reliability, but normativity. This isn’t hard to see if you read what I wrote with any degree of charity at all. At the least he should have asked for clarification rather than assume I am stupid enough to make an explicit contradiction in two lines.”

Having dealt himself a losing hand, Perry is having to make the best of a losing hand.

“This would be true I suppose for someone who either rejects its normativity or collapses ethical conditions into epistemic ones, but neither of those seem plausible routes either for a Christian or for someone with working knowledge of epistemology. It seems to me that a ‘plain reading’ of text indicates that the council settled the matter in a way that was binding on the consciences of all, present or not, dissenting or not (hence no right of private judgment). So it included things to be known but normativity out paces epistemology. I can know about the law without being a normative speaker of the law. The latter entails the former, but the former is clearly not the latter. If Acts 15 wasn’t about giving a normative answer then the sending out of Paul and Barnabas with letters authorizing them would be just plain stupid. Likewise so would the language of ‘we write’ v. 15 as well as joining their judgment with the Holy Spirit.”

Of course, that’s just a restatement of his tendentious, oft-stated, oft-refuted assumption that normativity is something over and above veracity. For him it’s somehow inadequate to say the council gave a true answer. For some odd reason, Perry doesn’t view truth as obligatory. How he gets that dichotomy out of a “plain reading” of Acts 15 he doesn’t bother to say.

“If this is so, then Steve’s claim of circularity needs to be accurately rendered. It wasn’t on the one hand he speaks of persons doing X and then of un-operative criteria doing something, the charge of circularity could only go through on that formulation if there I isomorphism between the two statements. There wasn’t. So again, Steve needs to reformulate it at best even if it were about epistemology. I didn’t think I should have to spell that out.”

I suppose I could leave a trail of breadcrumbs if Perry is so easily lost in the woods. I don’t think I should have to do that for someone at his point in the education process. But apparently I overestimated him.

“What was significant about 2nd Nicea is that it is a locus for this teaching that both accept.”

So is Perry now saying that acceptance by both East and West is inessential to his argument? But pentarchial ratification includes the Western church via the church of Rome. Does this mean Perry now treating pentarchial ratification as a purely ad hominem appeal which he only broached for the sake of argument when attempting to field Catholic objections?

But if pentarchial ratification is, in fact, expendable, then what constitutes an ecumenical council ecumenical, and how can its ecumenicity be discerned by the faithful?

“The idea is ratification by the episcopate which is why the question of its normativity rests on apostolic succession.”

Except that Perry is narrowing down the relevant unit or subset of the episcopate to the pentarchy in particular–which is arbitrary. That’s severely underdetermined by apostolic succession. And, of course, Perry had to fudge on what constitutes a “direct apostolic foundation.”

“Next to ask why would it artificially be limited to these five is poisoning the well as well as question begging, unless of course I said the limitation was artificial, which I didn’t. Steve needs to show that it is artificial and not simply assume it.”

It’s hardly question-begging when Perry was the one who made a “direct apostolic foundation” the differential factor.

Why does Perry find it so chronically hard to follow his own argument? Why is it necessary to take him by the hand and walk him through his own argument time and again?

“Notice how Steve has constructed a straw man. The original argument was not about how we know a council is ecumenical per se. Nor was the argument about the source of the normativity of those conditions for said councils.”

Sure it was. I’ve quoted him verbatim on those very contentions.

“Notice how Steve has created a straw man. I didn’t say that a council is ecumenical if it enjoys apostolic ratification via apostolic succession.”

Here is what Perry said:

“Now what I have not done is spell out in detail what conditions are necessary and sufficient for a council to be ecumenical and normative. That I am largely leaving for another post. But the answers to that question are not in the main that hard to discover and sort out…So an ecumenical council accepted by East and West teaches that what constitutes the ecumenical nature of the council is pentarchial ratification, rather than papal ratification,” followed by:

“The point of patriarchal ratification is that those sees have been founded directly by the apostles,” followed by:

“So the idea of apostolic ratification is part of the doctrine of apostolic succession in principle.”

Hence, his opening move was pentarchial ratification, which he treated as a special case of patriarchal ratification, which, in turn, he treated a special case of apostolic succession. That’s the constitutive factor.

“What I said was that the apostolic authority is in and comes through the episcopate which is then manifested when certain conditions are met. Those conditions include patriarchial ratification which is through pentarchial ratification.”

Follow the bouncing ball…as it circles back. Apostolic authority is mediate by the episcopate. That is subject to certain conditions, such as patriarchial ratification, which is mediated through pentarchial ratification.

But isn’t the pentarchy itself a subset of the episcopate? Seems like a rather incestuous accountability system, if you ask me. The episcopate polices itself through organs of the…episcopate!

“Nor does it seem to obviously fall into the Protestant doctrine of the right of private judgment, any more than the Acts 15 council did when the Apostles made a decision which was binding regardless of whether people dissented from it or not.”

Of all the clueless statements that Perry has made over the years–and the competition for that distinction is fierce–this statement may set a new standard of cluelessness. The Protestant right of private judgment never meant the private judgment of an individual trumps the judgment of Apostles (or other Bible writers). The point of private judgment is not to deny the binding authority of Scripture on the conscience of the individual, but to deny the binding authority of popes, bishops, and uninspired traditions on the conscience of the individual. How could Perry be so ignorant of what the doctrine means?

“Is the authority of the NT ‘self locating’ in the order of knowing?”

Why does Perry assume the negative?

“He tends to treat it as tactual succession, a mere physical lineage, but AS includes teaching among other things. If some claimant lost the right teaching, then the succession can be lost too.”

The problem with this rejoinder is that if right doctrine is the measure of apostolic succession, then apostolic succession can’t be the measure of right doctrine. In that event, tracing your lineage back to an apostolic see, even if that were successful, doesn’t guarantee, or even create a presumption of, salient continuity between the deposit of faith and later stages down the line.

Yet Perry’s appeal to the pentarchy was grounded in the claim that these five sees were directly founded by the apostles. If, however, that’s inadequate; if, instead, right teaching is the criterion, then how does Perry determine the ecumenicity of a church council? Does it turn on whether or not the council teaches true doctrine? But that won’t do.

i) For one thing, Perry doesn’t regard veracity as a sufficient condition of normativity. So even if a council taught truly, that wouldn’t make it ecumenical or normative in Perry’s eyes.

ii) Moreover, he could only assess the teaching of a council by reference to a source of right teaching which is independent of the council under review. But if he has access to extraconciliar right teaching, then conciliar teaching is, at best, superfluous.

“Consequently, not all claimants are equally plausible, which Steve assumes but never demonstrates.”

“Plausible” by what standard? Right teaching? That only pushes the question back a step. What’s his source and standard of right teaching? Not the episcopate, since he’d have to evaluate the teaching of the episcopate by…right teaching.

Apostolic authority? But isn’t that mediated by…the episcopate?

“But let’s suppose Steve is right, what follows? Does the truth of Protestantism follow?”

I don’t need to prove Protestantism to disprove Orthodoxy.

“If AS were true but insufficient it would sill falsify Protestantism.”

And if Protestantism were true but insufficient it would still falsify Orthodoxy.

What does Perry think he’s going to accomplish by tossing hypothetical defeaters into the ring–much less reversible defeaters, which we can easily toss back in his face?

“In the same way, Steve hasn’t shown that AS is false but only insufficient to select a particular tradition claiming it.”

i) The onus is not on me to prove apostolic succession. Rather, the onus lies on Perry to prove his own sectarian assumptions.

ii) Perry was the one who appealed to the selective power of pentarchial ratification. If that’s insufficient, then that’s a deficiency internal to his own position.

“But that is worthwhile all by itself. If AS is true, at best it only narrows down the choices by eliminating all of Protestantism a viable option.”

Iffy hypotheticals don’t narrow down the choices. Hypotheticals bake no bread.

“Perhaps there aren’t 33,000 Protestant denominations. Suppose its only say 3,000 or 300. Perhaps its limited to three traditions, the Lutherans, the Reformed and the Anabaptists. If I can eliminate all those three with AS, that seems like progress”

If you assume that only one institutional church is the one true church, then–like Perry–you to find some way to fix the lottery so that you have a decent chance at holding the ticket with the winning number.

But from an evangelical standpoint, there is more than one winning ticket. Many of the “33,000” denominations and independent churches instantiate the true church.

“Yes, within the context of Catholic/Orthodox theological discussion. Your objections are outside of that context, which required me to go beyond what these two traditions accept and give a sketch of the argument leading up to it.”

No, my objections were internal to the logic of Perry’s paradigm-case, as I’ve explicated in some detail.

“Nope.”

That’s an impressive counterargument.

“I don’t need Tertullian to be a church father to bear witness to Christian teaching…”

I’ll remember that when I quote Eusebius or Epiphanios on iconolatry.

“Steve also counts Tertullian as a heretic, so why would Steve’s use of Tertullian words against the Orthodox position in the past count for anything?”

If that’s an allusion to Tertullian’s Montanism, then I’d cut him some slack.. That betrayed a lapse of judgment on Tertullian's part. But I’d also make allowance for his early position in church history. He was a theological pioneer. Pioneers frequently make mistakes which subsequent theologians avoid. Those of us who come after them can learn from their experience. Unlike us, Tertullian didn’t have many before him to lean for guidance. He had to blaze his own trail. Given his historical circumstances, Tertullian was a champion of the faith. We should honor his memory and improve on his efforts.

By contrast, Perry can’t plead the same mitigating circumstances to excuse his own errors.

“I gave the reason why it was normative in terms of previous employment going back to Acts 15, Irenaeus, et al.”

Of course, he can’t very well cite Acts 15 to document apostolic succession.