Charity and Ignatius: A Potpourri of James White's Errors

A Lesson in Charity for James White

Those who spend any significant amount of time reading or listening to James White are going to notice a pattern. And that is, he is too quick to accuse his opponents of deliberate dishonesty, even of outright lies. We saw this when Pope Benedict venerated Veronica's veil in September 2006, for example. James White said his venerating a forged relic clearly demonstrates the Pope's deception. Or, rather, it demonstrates that the Pope believes the veil is genuine. Dr. White may believe it is a forgery, but Benedict evidently does not. Next, in a Dividing Line program this May, Dr. White accused Gerry Matatics of embellishing his conversion story. According to Dr. White, Gerry Matatics claims that he used to be an anti-Catholic on no other basis than that, as a Protestant, he did not believe Rome's claims were true. He was a Protestant. This is false. Gerry believed that the Pope was the antichrist and he wanted the Presbyterian Church to return to the original Westminster Confession of faith which said so. This is the basis upon which Gerry claims that he used to be an anti-Catholic. If Dr. White wants to argue that this is insufficient basis, that is his prerogative. But there is simply no justification for Dr. White's accusation that Gerry is embellishing here.

Dr. White has also subjected an Arminian Protestant, Steve Gregg, to the same sort of treatment. He had recently debated Steve Gregg on the radio, with a simulcast on the Dividing Line, and he publicly suggested on his blog on April 8 that Steve Gregg had deliberately determined to talk over him during the cross examination, "perhaps thinking his connection to the studio would trump mine, possibly?" so that the radio audience would only hear what Steve Gregg said and not what Dr. White had to say. That suggestion was just absolutely gratuitous. To be fair, Steve Gregg had also gratuitously questioned Dr. White's honesty, but that in itself does not justify returning the favor. More recently, on May 3, Dr. White accused an Arminian Protestant named Bob Anderson of lying, dissimulating, and deliberately obfuscating. It would have sufficed to say: he fails to accurately represent my position (for whatever reason), his argument is bad, and his conclusion is wrong. Again, to be fair, Bob Anderson had unjustly accused Dr. White of deception, but Dr. White had the high road wide open to him, and chose not to take it.

Dr. White is wrong to make such judgments. As St. Ignatius of Loyola says in his famous presupposition to The Spiritual Exercises, "every good Christian ought to be more willing to give a good interpretation to the statement of another than to condemn it as false." Often times, the words and actions of our fellow men admit of a spectrum of possible interpretations, ranging from interpretations which reflect very badly on their moral character, to interpretations which reflect quite well. It is our Christian duty to seek out the most positive construction which we can put on another's actions, and to hope and to assume that that is in fact the true one. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:7, charity believes all things and hopes all things.

I'll illustrate this principle with a somewhat self-deprecating example. If you've followed my website regularly for the past year or so (hey maybe someone has!), you've probably noticed that a few times I have said that I would finish and publish an essay by such and such a date, and then failed to do so. For example, this February I promised that I would post three essays on the first of March, but then I only posted two. So, how does one explain this anomaly? As I said, my behavior admits of a range of interpretations. The worst possible interpretation, I suppose, would be that I was deliberately lying when I promised three essays. I never had any intention of posting three essays and I only said I would because I like to disappoint people. It brings me pleasure. A somewhat more positive interpretation of my actions would be that I intended to publish three essays, but I got lazy and procrastinated, and by the time I got around to actually doing the work, I only had enough time left to finish two. A still more positive interpretation would be that I am over-zealous, I tend to bite off more than I can chew, and I tend to promise more apologetics essays than I am really able to deliver, given my personal and professional obligations, even though I do work very hard. Finally, the most positive interpretation, I suppose, would be that I was simply stymied by completely unforeseeable circumstances such as a death in the family, which forced me to devote my time and attention to something other than apologetics that month. Now, in this particular instance, the true interpretation, sorry to say, happens to be around the middle of the spectrum. Nevertheless, if I hadn't told you so, it would be your Christian duty to hope for and assume the best.

Now, a while ago, James White posted some videos on YouTube in which he argued that another Ignatius, St. Ignatius of Antioch, believed that the Eucharist is the remembrance and proclamation of Christ's Passion but not His physical, transubstantiated presence. In response to this, Steve Ray, a Catholic apologist, posted a blog article with the title: "Was the Anti-Catholic Right on YouTube? Was St. Ignatius a Reformed Baptist?" Now, this doesn't quite accurately reflect Dr. White's position; he does not assert that St. Ignatius was a Reformed Baptist, because this would imply that White and Ignatius hold to theologies which are identical in most or all particulars, which is obviously false. So, why did Steve Ray misrepresent Dr. White's position? He told me that he was just using a humorous rabbinic exaggeration; it was never his intent to convey the idea that James White literally believes that St. Ignatius was a Reformed Baptist. Unfortunately, a lot of people, myself included, didn’t get the joke, but hey, we all fall flat every once in a while.

Oh, but according to James White his motives were much more sinister than that: Steve Ray was being deliberately deceptive! Steve Ray wants to construct a ridiculous persona of James White in the minds of Catholics; that way, Catholics can just laugh him off as some silly ignorant Babtist and never bother to read what he actually says. This also explains why Steve Ray doesn't like to mention James White's name: he'll stoop to any level in order to prevent and obstruct Catholics from finding and reading what he actually has to say. Yet further, this explains why Steve Ray eventually changed the title of his blog article to "Was St. Ignatius a Protestant." See, now that it doesn't say Reformed Baptist anymore, it's difficult for Catholics to even figure out who he's talking about! Steve Ray really doesn't want anyone to read James White!

This is of course a load of nonsense. The reason Steve Ray doesn't mention James White's name is because that is his way of expressing his personal dislike of Dr. White. Now, I agree that this isn't helpful, and I would certainly prefer that he just use Dr. White's name. But at least he always makes it patently obvious who he is talking about by things like context and what he's linking to. I mean, if he didn't want anyone to find out about James White, why would he link to my article which forthrightly owns to being a response to Reformed Baptist apologist Dr. James White, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries?

Next, the reason Steve Ray changed the title of his blog entry is because, by the new title ("Was St. Ignatius a Protestant?"), he was attempting to more accurately reflect Dr. White's actual position. Dr. White would still reject this characterization of his position, but nevertheless, it's not completely unrelated to truth. According to Dr. White, the five solas of the Protestant Reformation represent the heart of Gospel, the fundamentals of the apostolic preaching. So, to that extent, the statement "the Apostles were Protestants" is an accurate summary of Dr. White's position, although it might be a bit anachronistic to call the Apostles Protestants since, as he sees it, there wasn't yet a Roman Catholic Church to protest against. Furthermore, in so far as particular Church Fathers were fundamentally orthodox, and believed the solas which the Apostles preached, they would be accurately described as Protestants as well. Now, Dr. White will not positively assert that Ignatius was fundamentally orthodox on an issue such as justification, for example, since Ignatius did not directly address this issue in any of his extant letters. Nevertheless, it has always been my impression that Dr. White esteems Ignatius as a brother in Christ and a faithful believer in essential apostolic doctrine. I recall at least Dr. White referring to Mathetes, another Apostolic Father, as his ancient brother. And if Mathetes is his ancient brother, then Mathetes believed in the essentials of Christian orthodoxy. And if the essentials of Christian orthodoxy are equivalent to the essentials of Protestantism, then Mathetes believed in the essentials of Protestantism. So, granted Dr. White's own premises, I do not see how he could consistently deny that he believes that Mathetes was a Protestant. And, again, it has always at least been my impression that Dr. White regards Ignatius as being in the same category as Mathetes.

So, while it is not entirely accurate to state that James White believes the Apostolic Fathers were Protestants, there is at least a significant kernel of truth in that description. Anyway, the idea that Steve Ray changed the title of his article in order to hide the fact that it's about James White is absolutely absurd on so many levels. It is not only uncharitable for James White to say this; it is unjust. And then for White to publicly suggest, in his blog entry of March 6, that Steve Ray forged the e-mail he had quoted from an anonymous theologian, is simply indefensible.

If I were to subject James White to the same sort of treatment he has subjected Steve Ray to, I could easily find occasion to call him dishonest. For instance, he fails to recognize the legitimate plurality of Catholic views on predestination. And he’s read Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, and Ott briefly treats the different views, so he ought to know better. Furthermore, in his blog post of May 21 entitled "The Relic of Relics" he represented Catholics as "praying to dead bones." This is false. Bones are inanimate objects. A bone cannot hear prayers any more than a pen can hear prayers, regardless of whose bone it once was. Catholics do not pray to bones. We reverence the relics of the saints, just as the Jews reverenced the ark of the covenant and the Jerusalem Temple, but we do not pray to relics. We pray to the saint whose soul is in heaven and who will be reunited to those relics on the last day. Dr. White of course would argue that that in itself is sinful, but that's a separate issue. Next, on the May 8 Dividing Line, minute 17, Dr. White represented me as stating, in our private correspondence, "well, I'm perfectly nice, so you should be just as nice as I am." The problem is, I didn't say that. In that e-mail I never held myself up as a paragon of charity (I am not) for Dr. White to emulate. If I were to take the low road right now, I would accuse Dr. White of embellishing. Fortunately, however, God appears to be giving me an actual grace at the moment, because I am going to assume that my words somehow gave Dr. White this impression and that he sincerely believed, at the time he made this statement on the Dividing Line, that it accurately summarized my e-mail.

Lastly, Dr. White complains of the severe shortage of charity within Catholic discourse, and asks me why I am taking the speck out of his Protestant eye when I should be taking the logs out of the eyes of Catholics like Art Sippo. He has a point; Art Sippo has certainly made a number of indefensible accusations against Protestants, such as when he called James Swan "pro-Nazi" for no other reason than that he appreciates the Luther scholarship of Fr. Joseph Lortz, a some time member of the Nazi party. By that logic, the Pope is also pro-Nazi, since he appreciates Fr. Lortz's Luther scholarship as well. So is Karl Adam, and while we're at it, let's throw in Marcus Grodi, since he's mailing free copies of Adam's book The Roots of the Reformation all around the country, and it's full of quotations from Fr. Lortz! Get that Nazi off of EWTN post haste! There is really no substance to this kind of argumentation; it's about on a level with the secularist argument that the Pope is a Nazi because he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and Art Sippo should apologize for stooping this low. So, James White certainly has a point about the deficiency of charity within Catholic discourse, and that is a problem which I will seek to rectify. Nevertheless, I maintain that it is legitimate for me to critique Dr. White on this subject. He has been on the war path lately accusing Steve Ray, Dave Armstrong, and other Catholics of dishonesty, so I am here to defend the brethren and demonstrate that these accusations are unfounded.

James White, you owe Steve Ray an apology. The Lord says in Matthew 12:36 that on the Day of Judgment we will give an accounting for every careless word we speak. This goes in spades for words we speak in public precisely as representatives of Christianity. I fear for your soul, and I will pray for you.

Ben Douglass
April 27, Anno Domini MMVIII
Revised: May 9 and June 7, Anno Domini MMVIII

James White's Anti-Climactic Exegesis of the Epistle to the Smyrnaeans

St. Ignatius of Antioch is widely quoted by Roman Catholic apologists as a witness to the early Church's belief in what has come to be called transubstantiation, that is, the doctrine that when a priest consecrates the Eucharist, the bread and wine are wholly changed, as to their substance, such that they are no longer bread and wine but the physical body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the appearances on bread and wine alone remaining.

Well, James White disputes this. He argues that the Roman Catholic reading of Ignatius is anachronistic. And on the contrary, he argues, since his Protestant religion makes no claims about Igantius' beliefs, he is free to allow Ignatius to speak for himself. He is free to engage in proper, impartial exegesis which draws out from Ignatius' text what is actually there, and nothing more, unlike Catholics who are obliged by the Roman Magisterium to read the text in some sort of tendentious manner.

I think this is a bad argument. First off, a Jew could use a parallel argument against Dr. White. After all, a Jew is free to allow the Old Testament to speak for itself, unlike a Protestant who is obliged by the New Testament to interpret it in a certain way. Dr. White would of course respond to such an argument by asserting that the things which the New Testament affirms of the Old Testament are in fact true. I respond to Dr. White's present argument the same way: the things which the Roman Magisterium affirms of the Church Fathers are in fact true.

Second, I think the Protestant position supplies ample religious motivation for interpreting the Church Fathers in a certain way. Protestants are not as free to let the Church Fathers speak for themselves as Dr. White would like to believe. Because if Protestants were to admit that St. Ignatius believed and taught the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist already at the beginning of the second century, they would be confronted with a tremendous quandary. After all, if the Eucharist is not in fact God Himself in the flesh, then to teach so is equivalent to teaching idolatry. And if St. Ignatius of Antioch taught idolatry, well that wouldn't reflect well on St. John the Apostle, or the rest of the early Christian Church for that matter. See, St. Ignatius was a disciple of St. John, and one would expect St. John to possess sufficient competency as a teacher that his students wouldn't come away from class thinking that mere bread was God. We might be able to exculpate St. John if we suppose that Ignatius was a deliberate doctrinal innovator, that he changed the teaching which he received from St. John, yet that still fails to solve a second problem. If St. Ignatius taught a blasphemous false doctrine, why did the rest of the Church accept him as orthodox? Why is there no record of so much as a peep out of the rest of the Church in protest to Ignatius' poisonous teaching? Recall that this is a period in Church history where the Church was still governed, in part, by men appointed by the Apostles. Didn't the Apostles appoint competent shepherds who would dutifully ward off wolves who were attacking the flock of God? I would certainly expect so.

In summary, James White and I both approach the letters of Ignatius with a theological bias. He is not without religious motivation to interpret Ignatius in a certain way. His position would make it very difficult for him to admit that a man who learned at the feet of the Apostles, and who was esteemed by the universal Church, could have been so wrong about the doctrine of the Eucharist. Although in principle Dr. White's religion does not make any claims about St. Ignatius' orthodoxy, I believe he needs St. Ignatius to be orthodox (from his Protestant perspective) in order to resolve these practical difficulties. I mean, if Timothy or Titus wrote a non-inspired epistle in which he clearly professed Catholic faith with respect to the Eucharist, would this in principle refute Dr. White’s religion? No. But would it make him more than a bit uncomfortable? You bet.

So, I think there is an element of theological bias operative in Dr. White's exegesis of the Epistle to the Smyrnaeans. Dr. White is clearly an intelligent man, and he is clearly willing to pay close attention to a text and to exert an effort in understanding what the author was trying to communicate in his original context. And, certainly, Dr. White possesses the technical skills of exegesis in ample measure. Nevertheless, when I watched his video series exegeting the Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, and he came to the passage dealing with the Eucharist, I was surprised by the weakness of his argument.

Up to that point, Dr. White had been sharing a number of beautiful insights into Ignatius' text: Ignatius' language shows heavy influence of St. Paul, which demonstrates that Sts. Paul and John preached the same Apostolic message; Ignatius’ quotations from Scripture give us a window into the development of the New Testament canon; Ignatius clearly affirms the full divinity of Jesus Christ; he utterly detests false doctrine, and he affirms so fervently the true Incarnation and Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as against the Docetists who said He only had a phantom body; and so on. To all this, I can only say, "bravo, this is real exegesis."

Unfortunately, however, when Dr. White gets to the Eucharistic passage in Smyrnaeans, there is a disjunction in his presentation, and he ceases to do real exegesis. Let me read the passage, in its immediate context: "But consider those who are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come unto us [that is, the Docetists], how opposed they are to the will of God. They have no regard for love; no care for the widow, or the orphan, or the oppressed; of the bond, or of the free; of the hungry, or of the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again."

Dr. White’s interpretation is basically this: in this passage, Ignatius is merely providing the Smyrnaeans with a means of detecting the Docetists. They treat widows and orphans badly, and they refuse to participate in the Lord’s Supper. The reason they refuse to participate in the Lord’s Supper is because the Lord’s Supper commemorates the physical Passion of Jesus Christ, and they won’t commemorate Jesus’ physical body because they don’t believe He had a physical body in the first place. So, Smyrnaeans, if you see someone behaving this way, you know he’s a Docetist, and hence to avoid him.

On the contrary, Dr. White, there is simultaneously less and more in this passage than you will admit. Question: where does Ignatius say that he is done condemning the Docetists' doctrinal heresies, and from henceforward he is only giving the Smyrnaeans a means of detecting them? He never says that. Also notice how St. Ignatius closes this passage. "It is fitting, therefore, that you should keep aloof from such persons." By his use of the word "therefore" we know that in this passage Ignatius has been explaining why we should avoid the Docetists, not merely how.

What Ignatius does say is that, in this passage, he proposes to enumerate various ways in which the Docetists are opposed to the will of God. Specifically, they oppose the will of God by their immoral conduct towards their fellow men, and they oppose the will of God by despising the Holy Eucharist, which is the gift of God given to us so that we might rise again. It is efficacious towards our salvation, and God wills that we partake of it.

And why do the Docetists refuse the Euchairst? "Because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again." Me homologein, they do not confess, they do not profess faith that the Eucharist is the flesh of Our Savior Jesus Christ. "If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved," says St. Paul in Romans 10:9. That’s the same Greek verb, homologeo. See also Matthew 10:32; John 9:22; Romans 10:10; 1 Timothy 6:12; 1 John 4:2. So we see that in this passage, Ignatius is not just giving the Smyrnaeans a means of detecting Docetists; he is denouncing the Docetists for their failure to profess faith in that which has been revealed by God.

Of course, it stands to reason that the Docetists wouldn't believe that the Eucharist is the true, physical flesh and blood of Jesus, since they didn’t believe that Jesus had physical flesh and blood at all. The Catholic interpretation of Ignatius' letter to the Smyrnaeans fits perfectly with its historical context as an anti-Gnostic diatribe, as well as the plain, literal sense of the text. It is Dr. White's interpretation which does violence to the text, since if the Docetists abstained from the Eucharist simply because they disapproved of its symbolic reference to the physical body of Jesus Christ, what St. Ignatius should have said would be, "they abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they know the Eucharist to be [represent] the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ." They know what the Eucharist symbolizes, and they disapprove of its symbolism, so they do not participate. But what Ignatius actually said is that they do not confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of Jesus Christ. The word "not" in that sentence is inconvenient for Dr. White's interpretation, as is the verb homologeo.

Finally, Dr. White asks during his program whether Catholics can prove that St. Ignatius held to Aristotelian philosophical categories of substance and accidents. To his mind it is essential that we establish that Ignatius was a philosophical Aristotelian before we can honestly call him forth as a witness to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which the Church explains in Aristotelian categories. Well, Dr. White is asking too much. It is certainly possible that Ignatius was an Aristotelian. After all, the Apostles themselves made use of conceptual categories derived from Greek philosophy in their inspired explanations of the Christian mystery. We see this in John 1, where St. John calls Jesus the logos. We know St. Paul read Greek literature because he quoted Aratus in the Areopagus: "in Him we live and move and have our being," "we are his offspring." I might even suggest that St. Paul spoke in a Greek philosophical category when he said in Philippians 2:6 that Jesus existed in the form of God.

So, it is certainly possible that Ignatius affirmed Aristotelian metaphysics. However, this is not necessary for the Catholic position. It is sufficient for us that Ignatius and the rest of the early Church believed that the Eucharist is not bread, but is Jesus Himself, even though it looks and tastes like bread. By means of Aristotelian metaphysics, the Church is able to furnish a truly scientific account of the mechanism by which this occurs, how this occurs, and is able to prove that this doctrine involves no contradiction or absurdity. However, the metaphysical explanation of the doctrine is not necessary to, and need not precede, the proclamation of faith in the mystery itself: the Eucharist is God. This is what Ignatius believed: whether he was able to intellectually ground this mystery in a comprehensive philosophy of reality, we don’t know. Most likely he was not, because, certainly, the Church at large was not able to do so in Ignatius’ time. For that, the Church would have to wait a millennium, for that miracle of divine grace which gave us scholasticism, in which we can all take intellectual repose.

Ben Douglass
May 2, Anno Domini MMVIII
Revised: May 10 and June 8, Anno Domini MMVIII

Comments on James White's Response

James White has responded to the videos on Ignatius:

Ignatius, Ben Douglass, Summary Response Part I
Ignatius, Ben Douglass, Summary Response Part II

I have a few comments in response to this response.

Dr. White correctly surmises that the purpose of part A of my presentation was to rebut the argument that Roman Catholics are biased in their reading of the Early Church Fathers due to the dogmatic claims of the Roman Magisterium, whereas Protestants are free to allow the ancient Fathers to speak for themselves. I attempted to establish that Protestants as well as Catholics have a theological motivation for reading the Fathers in a manner which tends toward their own position. This was unclear in the first version of the presentation, but has been made clearer in the revised form.

Next, I am going to retract the argument that, if White's interpretation were correct, Ignatius should have said, "the Gnostics acknowledge the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ," as opposed to what he actually said, namely, "the Gnostics do not acknowledge the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ." When I wrote this argument, I was under the impression that Dr. White believes that "to be" in this sentence means "to represent." However, he has made it clear to me in private correspondence that he does not believe this. As for what he does believe "to be" to mean in this sentence, that is still a mystery to me. But at the very least I know he does not believe it to mean "to represent."

Next, Dr. White asserts that, by interpreting the Eucharistic passage in Smyrnaeans as teaching transubstantiation, Catholics are expanding St. Ignatius' anti-Gnostic polemic into "this entire discussion of something completely different" and outside of the main thrust of Ignatius' argument, which concerns the Incarnation. I grant that the main thrust of Ignatius' argument is to condemn the Gnostics for their Christological heresy, not their Eucharistic heresy. However, I deny that reading Ignatius as condemning the Gnostics for Eucharistic heresy constitutes assigning to Ignatius' text a meaning "completely different" or "completely separated" from the main, Christological thrust of his argument. Rather, I see Ignatius' two condemnations as intimately connected. The Gnostics do not believe that Jesus has a physical body, therefore, a fortiori they do not believe that the Eucharist is His physical body. Of course St. Ignatius is going to spend more time condemning the first heresy, since it is logically prior to, and the root of, the second.

Dr. White notes correctly that I made a number of arguments which were not directly related to exegesis of Ignatius' text. This is because I framed my presentation specifically as a response to Dr. White's arguments, some of which (e.g., the assertion that Roman Catholics need to establish that Ignatius was a philosophical Aristotelian before they can cite him in favor of transubstantiation) are themselves not directly related to exegesis of the text.

Dr. White asks for evidence that Ignatius thought in sacerdotal sacramentalist categories: priest, consecration, sacrifice, transubstantiation, etc. My video presentation was admittedly very limited in this regard. Also, I did not sufficiently justify reading homologeo in a confessional sense. So, I hope to supply what was lacking in my original presentation with a future essay, which will be devoted entirely to exegesis of Ignatius, and not be framed as a rebuttal to any particular person.

Lastly, Dr. White seems to have missed the point of the final section of my presentation. I attribute this to my own lack of clarity. I do not assert that Ignatius held to transubstantiation in its developed form as it was articulated by the Fourth Lateran Council. Indeed, I argued that St. Ignatius most likely was not a philosophical Aristotelean and thus would not have been able to articulate the doctrine of transubstantiation in its developed form, in terms of substance and accidents. Rather, I assert that St. Ignatius held to transubstantiation in an undeveloped form which could be summarized as: "the Eucharist is not bread, but is Jesus Himself, even though it looks and tastes like bread." One need not hold to Aristotelean philosophical categories in order to believe this.

Ben Douglass
June 8, Anno Domini MMVIII
Revised July 12, Anno Domini MMVIII