Calvin and Ignatius: WA's Strange World of History

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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So, William Albrecht sent me a note today with some more of his responses, which, again,

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I would normally not spend time responding to, but since Steve Ray, Catholic apologist extraordinaire, has in essence knighted

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William to defend him, I had to look through them at least to see if there was something to respond to other than uh -uh, which is the primary methodological application that is made.

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And I did find some things that hopefully will be helpful to the average viewer of our videos, because there was some stuff that will help me to illustrate once again that it's important to know something about church history.

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I don't care what apologetic area interests you. Jehovah's Witnesses, any type of pseudo -Christian cult,

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Roman Catholicism, Islam, atheism, you need to know something about our history, and you need to recognize that because of the advent of the internet, there's all sorts of really bad information out there that can be used against you if you don't have some knowledge of who at least some of the early church fathers, when they wrote, what they wrote about, things like that.

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And so we'll take a look at a place where William demonstrates that he doesn't know a lot about Ignatius, or especially doesn't know anything about John Calvin, and the situation at the time of Calvin's writing.

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But there was a lot of just insulting stuff to get through, some of which just leaves you going, really?

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Wow. Fascinating. And so we start off, remember, I identified

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Steve Ray as a liar, because anyone who says that I say that everyone in the early church was a

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Reformed Baptist or something like that is a liar, and that's exactly what Steve Ray said on his blog.

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He said, was St. Ignatius a Protestant? What is that supposed to say?

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What does that mean? Well, unfortunately, poor William doesn't catch the context of a lot of things that we're saying, and well, here's what he had to say.

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One of the main things that we hear from James quite a lot is that if anyone claims that James says that he says that everyone in the early church held to Baptist views, they're liars.

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Well, James, Steve Ray and I have never made any such comment. I don't know why you attempt to imply it or flat out say that we have made such comments.

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We have not. Once again, we're left really wondering, did

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William actually listen to the dividing line that he claims to be responding to? I pointed out that he contradicted

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Steve Ray, and that in fact, if Steve Ray had actually watched the videos, he would have heard that William contradicted

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Steve Ray on this very point, that even William recognized that I was not making the claim that Ignatius was a

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Protestant, and yet, look at the screen. This is straight from Steve Ray's blog, and it says, was the anti -Catholic correct on YouTube?

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Was St. Ignatius a Protestant? Then notice it says, an anti -Catholic recently put up a pathetic

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YouTube video criticizing my recent radio show where I talked about the Apostolic Fathers and how Catholic they really were.

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Some of these angry anti -Catholics tried to twist the early Christians into pretzels, ridiculously trying to recreate them into Reformed Baptists or other such nonsense.

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So, you know, William, Steve, you guys got to get together on how you're going to attack us, because you keep contradicting each other, and it's a little bit of a silly thing to observe.

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But that doesn't change the fact that you, with your Calvinistic views, completely wrenched the early

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Fathers out of context. Your lies are apparent to even your own followers, James. Your failure to deal with anything that I presented in Ignatius, your failure to admit that you misquoted, not just misused, misquoted

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Augustine, is all evidence that points to the fact that you are indeed very dishonest.

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James, I don't understand what your real issue is here. I mean, no one is claiming that you said all the early Fathers tell you to believe, but still, you're the one that comes out with mud in your face.

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You go out of your way, James, to attempt to misrepresent the early Fathers, because you know they're dangerous to your position.

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Well, is James the very first Protestant to become enraged at the fact that the early Church was Catholic? And when

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I say Catholic, I don't mean Roman Catholic, as James White terms it. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that Catholicism encompasses more than just the

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Roman Rite. So you sound foolish and silly when you say Roman Catholic.

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So you're talking about the Roman Rite only? You're not speaking about all of the other Catholic churches around the world?

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Get real. That's something for James and his cronies to think about. But getting back to the point,

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James was indeed not the first Protestant to become enraged at the fact that the early Church was Catholic, and didn't resemble that of Protestantism.

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We have other Protestants before James, and, well, one of them that stips out particularly is

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Calvin. What is particularly enjoyable to read from John Calvin is this particular quote.

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It can be found in his work on entitled institutes. There is,

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Calvin says, nothing more abominable than the trash which is in circulation under the name of Ignatius.

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What was John Calvin's main issue with Ignatius? Well, as anyone can easily tell you, it was a simple reason and issue that Ignatius represented a model of the very early

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Church. An apostolic father that confirmed the Episcopacy and the teachings that the Catholic Church has always claimed could be dated back to the time of Christ.

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Now here is Calvin's actual citation from Institutes Book 1, Chapter 13, Section 29.

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With regard to their citation of Ignatius, if they want to have any weight, let them prove that the apostles made a law concerning lent and like corruptions.

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Nothing is more disgusting than those vile absurdities which have been put forth under the name of Ignatius. Even less tolerable is the shamelessness of those who cover themselves with such masks in order to deceive.

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Now what Calvin is referring to here are not the genuine Ignatian epistles. He did not reject all of them as being spurious.

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What he is referring to are the pseudo -Ignatian epistles, those that were written in later times that anachronistically read back into that time period beliefs that did not exist.

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As one of the footnotes in this particular translation of Calvin says, the can of Ignatius' letters was not determined until the 19th century.

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Numerous spurious epistles were ascribed to him by Jacques Lefebvre in an edition of 1498.

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These are translated from W. Curitin's Corpus Ignatium and the Anonicene Fathers, number 1.

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The spurious letter to the Philippians contains in chapter 8 the injunction, despise not the period of 40 days.

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So this is what Calvin is referring to. He is referring to these ahistorical works, not to the actual works of Ignatius himself, even though William later on in his video accuses

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Calvin of that. Put it very mildly, William is completely missing the point of what

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Calvin is talking about here and therefore really misapplying this in its entirety in making application to me as well.

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Now remember that what I have said concerning Williams is just simply this, that he believes that all the other church fathers believed what he believes, and that if you disagree, you are automatically taking them out of context.

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His phrase, take them out of context, is not what every other English speaking person in the world means by taking them out of context.

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Earlier, we saw him saying, well we never said that you said these people were Reformed Baptists or Protestants.

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Keep that in mind and keep the circularity of his thought in mind as you look at this next clip and hear him saying that I, as a

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Protestant, cannot even read or interpret the early church fathers.

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So what do we do? Well I guess if the early church doesn't agree with you, you simply accuse them of being heretics like Gabe Hunt, or like Mr.

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White, you rip them completely out of context. Mr. White, I'm going to tell you this honestly. I'm going to stare right at this camera and be downright honest with you.

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You have no right to be meddling in the writings of the early church fathers. They were not

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Protestant in any way whatsoever. They didn't provide services on Sundays with grape juice and crackers.

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Never. Keep misrepresenting the church and I'll keep pointing your terrible misusage and misquotations out.

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Well, I have no doubt that William probably will continue to do what he thinks is pointing out tearing the early church fathers out of their context because in the world of William, what they meant in their context doesn't matter.

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What they meant in their language doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what modern

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Roman Catholicism has defined as dogma. That then becomes the milieu in which all the early church fathers to be interpreted and so if you disagree with Rome, well then that means you really can't deal with the early church fathers.

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Now, thankfully, rational folks recognize that that's not a meaningful argument.

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But this is the gentleman that Steve Ray, Ignatius press author, frequent guest on Catholic Answers, directed people to.

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Now he did so by lying about me and then even William doesn't seem to understand that he then continued that lie but that's what you're dealing with when you deal with pop

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Roman Catholicism. It is a system that its entire central locus in the papacy continues this day to be based historically upon fraudulent documents.

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Those documents have been seen to be fraudulent. The Pseudo -Isidorean Decretals, the Donation of Constantine, all were vital in the development of the papacy and everyone today knows they're fraudulent.

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They've been washed away but the structure that was created continues to exist to this day.