What We Learn From the Viral Knechtle-Orthodox Debate

Part 1 of 2 — Theological Letters

The following piece is adapted from a podcast¹ I did on the exchange that went viral many months ago between Cliffe & Stuart Knechtle and an Orthodox Christian at MIT. While my typical written work includes extensive citations, I have not added references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which can be a bit more colloquial than my usual writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I’ll revise this piece to accommodate a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, I trust my prior should suffice to instill confidence that the philosophical, theological, and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified by an investigation of the figures and sources reference.

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Some months ago, a clip went viral, and a number of people weighed in on it, sending it my way, and asking for my thoughts. You might have seen this. The clip features Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle, a father-son duo of evangelical apologists and evangelists. They typically travel to colleges to engage with students, evangelize, and defend Christianity in public forums.

During a recent visit to MIT, the younger of the two, Stuart, engaged in a dialogue with a young Orthodox Christian. This individual is a deacon within the Orthodox Church and an undergraduate at Harvard who was, for some reason, present at the gathering at MIT. He stood up and asked a couple of questions related to the Church Fathers, the early Church, and specifically how the teachings of the Church Fathers diverge from what he was hearing from Cliffe and Stuart.

The exchange goes on for about ten minutes and is quite fascinating for a variety of reasons, covering a lot of ground. Rather than describing the clip, I thought it would be best to share it with you. It’s only about ten minutes long. Now, if you are very “online,” you’ve likely already seen this, perhaps multiple times, so feel free to skip ahead ten minutes, past the clip, and rejoin us after that. But for those of you who may not have seen this clip or heard about this exchange, here it is:

There have been many reaction videos from Protestants, Catholics, and a variety of other people online. What I want to offer here isn’t necessarily a reaction video, as I won’t be sitting here listening to the exchange. However, I do think the conversation is interesting enough that it merits comments on a couple of points. Specifically, I want to zero in on points that I suspect other commentators might be overlooking, particularly some of the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity and some general points about the methodology for approaching and interpreting historical Christianity.

Caveats and Observations

Before I jump into my specific thoughts on this exchange, I wanted to offer a couple of caveats. The first is a recommendation for a little bit of grace for Stuart. I’ve definitely seen a couple of clips that have surfaced since this exchange happened, and I think it’s pretty clear that Cliffe and Stuart suffered some embarrassment, knowing that they didn’t handle this very well. Looking back on how they navigated that exchange is probably a bit of a cringe moment for them. I trust that all of us have memories of things we have said or done publicly that were, to say the least, mortifying. And so, I would recommend a little bit of grace—perhaps the sort of grace and mercy we would like people to give to us if we were in that position. Hopefully, the result is that they can both learn and grow from this.

This brings me to my second point. I have seen a couple of clips that suggest Cliffe has since refined his response, outlining what he considers the non-negotiable points for him as a Christian—points every Christian should hold on to. So, he now has a ready answer should anybody ask these sorts of questions again in the future.

With Stuart, however, I noticed a rather interesting shift in disposition in one of the clips. Here, take a look:

How people read Stuart on this point varies. Some people are cynical, suggesting he’s just taking the cowardly way out and trying to dodge the issue. Other people, like me, find themselves wondering: perhaps that exchange with the Orthodox fellow genuinely rocked his world, and he’s having to rethink some things. This is because he says some rather surprising and extraordinary things in the clip, such as that he doesn’t have a problem with things before 1054 and that he’s not fully decided on some of these issues about historical Christianity. So, that’s interesting.

Any of us who have gone through an honest intellectual journey know that we can look back on past versions of ourselves and say, “I used to defend or say certain things that I no longer think or agree with.” For example, I have shared my own intellectual and spiritual journey on the podcast in my episode on “My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy.” As I am very candid about in that episode, I was a materialist, empiricist, and nominalist, and in terms of theology, I held all sorts of heretical views. Had you met a younger Nathan Jacobs who talked about the views he held back then, he would have said a lot of things that, if immortalized on the internet, I would cringe at and think, “Oh my goodness, how did I ever think that?” But those were part of the steps along a very long journey of evolving into what I am right now: a philosopher of religion who is an Eastern Orthodox Christian.

So, I would say that whenever we see people who have undergone a confrontation with a certain set of ideas, and maybe they haven’t handled it very well, or they find themselves in a position where they are forced to think, be gracious. All of us go through that, and that’s an inevitable part of spiritual and intellectual growth. That’s the journey we’re all on.

The Methodology of History

In terms of my own thoughts and comments on the content of this exchange, I’m not going to focus on the sacramental stuff. I’m sure there are plenty of reaction videos out there online looking at the biblical and historical evidence and delving into whether anything can be said in terms of a purely symbolic view of the Eucharist versus a sacramental view versus Real Presence and Transubstantiation, etc. I’m sure a lot of people are focused on the specifics of the actual sacramental debate.

I want to focus on two other points instead. One has to do with the methodology for approaching any historical system of thought, including historical Christianity. Now, this is a point that I could tell the Orthodox Christian in the discussion was trying to make; he touched on it and mentioned it as a passing aside several different times, but I don’t know how much attention it got or how clearly it was understood by the average onlooker.

He kept talking about the importance of looking at the historical practices and writings of the Church Fathers. And here’s why. If we didn’t have the attachment to Christianity that we have here in the West—as people who are perhaps raised Catholic or raised Protestant, or maybe you’re raised Orthodox, or perhaps you’re in a broadly Christian culture that has been influenced by Western thought and Protestantism specifically—there is a tendency in a culture like that to think that we simply open up the Bible, read it, and it will be self-evident to us. That by doing that, we can arrive at the whole truth.

But let’s imagine we were to step outside of a Christian context for a moment and employ a purely objective, historical methodology. Let’s say we have this historical religion—we’ll call it the religion of Havnir, for example. We’re curious what the religion of Havnir says, and we have some of their sacred and religious texts. So, we start to read the sacred texts of Havnir to try to understand the teachings of that religion. If we were doing that in a vacuum, we would perhaps do the best we could in terms of systematizing what the texts say: trying to understand the original languages, the syntax, the grammar, all the rest—working with lexical definitions of different words, whatever it might be. We might do all sorts of different hermeneutic efforts to try to exposit and understand their original source material.

But it would be hugely important to us if we found out that those texts were assembled and that religion was practiced by people whose writings we also possessed. We could look at that and say, “Oh, this is really useful.” Because some of these statements might seem opaque to us or might seem to be saying one thing to us when read in isolation. But if we know how the religion was practiced, that would be powerful, self-evident evidence for us. We could read their writings and look at their practices, and that would help adjust our lenses and bring into sharp relief some of the things we’re seeing in the text of Havnir.

Historically and methodologically speaking, that would obviously be the best practice. You wouldn’t even argue the point. You’d say this is how you try to do research on and understand a certain religion. And sure, you might expect that when you’re reading a certain text—the text of Havnir—you’re sitting there thinking, “This text sounded to me, when it was divorced from its broader context, like the religion held this or that its practices were that.” But thankfully, we do have some records of how they practiced the religion; we have the writings of the people who were recipients of it. And what we see is that there’s a certain consensus in terms of doctrine or practice or worldview on certain things that bring into sharp relief the things that are being said in this text.

In that sense, it would be very unusual for somebody to say, “Well, even though the religion was practiced a certain way, and the people who wrote about that religion understood that religion in that way, and the people who assembled the sacred text of Havnir and knew the authors understood it that way, I still think they’re all wrong because when I read this text, it sounds like this to me.”

You wouldn’t, as a serious historian, ever do that. You would recognize that “I realize that the text might sound like it’s saying this or that. But given the historical context, given the recipients of the religion, the practices of the religion—those who knew the culture, who knew the original language, who lived in that culture, who received the religion—obviously, the text is not saying that. It’s saying something else.” That “something else” is embodied and fleshed out in the historical practice and lived religion that received, assembled, held, and passed down this text. And that’s how you would approach any historical worldview, religion, or practice.

It’s an odd thing that when it comes to Christianity, there is a tendency to bracket the Church Fathers, the practices of the early Christian Church, and those who knew the original languages and authors. These were the very recipients, protectors, keepers, and practitioners of what was handed down as original Christianity, yet they often get set aside. We then delve into the biblical text, divorced from that very valuable historical context.

Protestantism and the Enlightenment

Now, obviously, the tendency we have to look at the biblical text on our own and try to discern for ourselves what it’s saying—and not rely on the Church Fathers or the teachings of the church or anyone else to interpret it—is really a byproduct of two things. One of those is, of course, Protestantism, and the other is modernity, or the Enlightenment specifically.

In terms of how these two things relate—and I do think they are closely related, historically and intellectually speaking—the Protestant side ends up taking the position that the church itself is not infallible. The Church Fathers are not infallible. Councils are not infallible. The only thing that is infallible is the biblical text itself. And why? Well, the reason it’s infallible is because Scripture is God-breathed. Since God is omniscient and God also cannot lie—something that St. James says—then in that case, what you have is a text, a source material that is ultimately without error and reliable, because the one from whom it originates knows all things and cannot lie. And so, wherever that has been transmitted, we now have a fully reliable foundation on which to build.

Seeing the biblical text in this way, it makes sense that you’d say, “Well, men are fallible. Church Fathers are fallible. Councils are fallible. The church itself is fallible. But the biblical text—God is infallible, and the biblical text is an extension of God, of his divine inspiration.” For that reason, the skepticism about the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation naturally pointed people back to the biblical text. This then started to create this divide and even adversarial relationship between the church and tradition and the biblical text.

And of course, here, the church in this context—the context of the Reformation—means the Roman Catholic Church. Since there was a great deal of suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church, given very genuine corruptions and excesses that had taken place, there was a waning reliance on its trustworthiness as a reliable guide. Once you start to say, “Well, I still believe in God, and I still believe that the Bible is the Word of God,” it’s rather natural; you can see how it emerged that you’d say, “In this sense, I can’t trust the church, but I can still trust the words that God gave us. And so I’m going to delve into those words, hoping that God guides me and leads me into a whole truth. And then once I find that truth, I can scrutinize the Roman Church in the light of what I’ve found there.” And this is where you get the adversarial relationship between the church and tradition on one side and the biblical text on the other.

I said that the other element of this is the Enlightenment and modernity. This is because the way a lot of modern philosophers, people like John Locke or Bishop Berkeley, treated the biblical text was very much related to this Protestant disposition. In the Enlightenment, there was this search for firm foundations. This is probably most easily and readily embodied in René Descartes and his Meditations. This is the famous experiment in hard foundationalism where René Descartes decides that he’s going to try to tackle the specter of skepticism by embracing skepticism. I’ve described this as Descartes doing a Houdini trick, where it’s like, “Go ahead and have the skeptic put you in the philosophical straitjacket and dangle you above the waters of despair and see if you can get out of the straitjacket before you drown.” That’s really what the Meditations are, where Descartes doubts everything—he doubts the external world, the existence of God himself—and he tries to see if he can come up with these firm foundations.

Certain folks within this discussion, whether you’re talking about the idealism of Berkeley or the empiricism of John Locke, had a tendency to appeal to the biblical text as one of these things that could be brought in as a firm foundation. Now, why? The rationale was the same as with the Protestants. The idea was, “Look, if the text originates from God, and God is all-knowing, and God cannot lie, then what we have is a fully reliable text based on those two things.”

What you end up seeing is this interest in a form of evidentialism. Evidentialism suggests you look at the biblical text—things like prophecy and the fulfillment of prophecy—and you say, “See, this is evidence that the biblical text is true historically and archaeologically, and that it contains traces or indications or proofs that it originates from God.” This is because foretelling the future is not something that the average human can do. This is something that only a prophet who is from God could do, and therefore, we can trust that the prophet is really relaying something that they received from God.

If you want to see this perspective get a fully fleshed-out exploration of the modernist notion of divine revelation, I point you to my article on The Revelation of God: East and West.² In that article, I do an entire breakdown of all the different perspectives within the Enlightenment and within modernity generally on divine revelation: how they understood the nature of divine revelation and this evidentialist approach to trying to prove the biblical text in order to make it a reliable reference point in terms of building out your worldview.

For rationalists, empiricists, and idealists engaged in philosophy, the purpose was a little bit different, but closely related. Just like with Protestants, where they want to know, “Well, what is God telling us? What are the true things that God is telling us that we can really hang our hat on?” The rationalists, idealists, and empiricists are all doing the same thing if they’re Christians who are advocating the biblical text—which many of them were. They’re doing the same thing because they’re looking for what are those things that are truly reliable when building a worldview. Is it deduction? Is it empirical evidence? Is it something else? And if the biblical text is derived from God, then it must be fully reliable. And therefore, it should be brought into the fold of reliable data.

In that way of looking at it, putting aside whether or not you’re persuaded by the evidentialist case for the biblical text (if you’re skeptical about the Bible or whatever), granting for a minute the belief that the Bible is defensible as not just historically reliable, but also in some ways containing traces that it has a supernatural origin, you can see why someone would be inclined to bring that text into the fold of either rational data about the world and about God—things that are supremely relevant to building out a worldview—as well as why they would rely on that text, see that text as more reliable than fallible human beings, and differentiate the interpretation of an individual from the biblical text itself.

The problem, of course, is that in practice, while all of that makes sense, we’ve seen the fruit of how that plays out. Once people are unleashed to build their own theologies based on their own private readings of the biblical text, you get thousands of denominations. Every person has their own reading, and those readings don’t align. So, the hope that somehow if we all get out our Bibles and get out our lexicons, and we start to do sentence diagramming, and we treat the biblical text like data to be broken down and analyzed, we’ll get to the truth and we’ll all be on the same page, obviously proved to be false.

It proved to be false immediately. Right out of the gate in the Reformation, you already had opposing denominations. Not only did you have Reformed and Lutheran, who had their own disputes, and then Remonstrant or Arminian and the more contracted, refined form of Reformed thought, you also obviously had the Radical Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church continued to have their own interpretations that were at odds with Protestantism, and so on and so forth. And it continued to fracture until what we have today: literally thousands of different denominations.

The idea that somehow the biblical text alone, handed to every interpreter, will yield the result of a unified understanding of Christianity is plainly false; it’s evidently false. And very quickly, what you ended up finding is that there was a need for different denominations to provide interpretive frameworks. So, very quickly, you ended up having different denominations like the Lutherans developing their own confessions (e.g., the Augsburg Confession) and their own catechisms and their own doctrinal, dogmatic guidelines in terms of what people who are Lutheran are supposed to believe.

The irony was there was this detaching of the biblical text—this pulling of the biblical text from the hands of the church and of councils and of Church Fathers and of tradition and all the rest—only to rebuild a new church, a new denomination, with its own confessions, with its own theologians (or fathers, you might say), with its own dogmatic commitments and so on to provide a guide for how you should go ahead and read the biblical text. And there might be a caveat that says, “Yes, of course, we might be wrong. We are fallible,” but still, in practice, there is a tendency to say, “These are the commitments of the denomination. This is how we are committed to reading the biblical text. And so if you’re going to be one of us, you have to affirm this interpretation of the biblical text because these are the dogmatic guidelines that we ultimately have.”

In practice, what we’ve seen is that the hope—the naive Enlightenment hope that somehow the biblical text would lead us to the unified vision of the truth—failed. Just like modernity in general failed. This was the intention of modernity. The naive hope of modernity was that if we gave reason its say, if we allowed the skeptical enterprise to play out, if we had the rationalists and the empiricists and all the folks build their different systems and go head to head and engage in rational, reasonable dialogue, that eventually reason would lead us home and lead us to some unified worldview system of all knowledge, and ultimately, to Truth with a capital T that all people would be on board with and convinced of by the mere use of reason. And obviously that didn’t happen. That was the naive hope of modernity. And in some ways, what you see in practice is a similar naiveté about the hope of Sola Scriptura and the treatment of the biblical text.

The Historical Advantage

This brings us full circle to the question of how best to understand and interpret historical Christianity—what Christianity is in the objectively historical sense of the term, if we were to engage in the enterprise of trying to understand what it is at its origins.

Whenever I would teach on historical Christianity, I would ask my students a series of basic questions about this. Really, in terms of historical advantage, who has a better lens for interpreting and understanding Christianity: us or the Church Fathers? And here, I would ask certain things like, “Okay, the biblical text is written in Koine Greek. So, who is more likely to understand the grammar and the language of that text: some guy like me, who learned it when he was an undergrad and in his master’s program and things like that, or somebody who grew up in a culture where they learned it and it was a native language?” Well, obviously, the person who is a native speaker understands the language better.

“Okay, who understands the culture better? Literally, people who are digging in the dirt and paging through old texts and trying to piece together in retrospect a couple of thousand years later what that culture was like and what the mindset of the culture was like, or people who actually lived and breathed in that culture?” The answer is obviously the people who lived and breathed in that culture. “Who is more likely to understand the mindset of the Apostles? Is it people who knew them, such as the Apostolic Fathers—like Irenaeus, who was discipled by Polycarp, who was, in turn, discipled directly by the Apostle John? Or is it one of us, who merely sits here now with access only to the Gospel of John and his letters?” Well, obviously, the people who knew John are going to understand his mindset much better than you or I—people who were able to sit with him and listen to him and have a conversation with him and ask questions and so on. “Who has better perspective on what the practices were?”

The discussion between Stuart and this Orthodox Christian raises a valuable point. As I said, this is the point that the Orthodox Christian kept on offering as a quick aside: “No matter what you’re looking at, the historical context should matter.” He kept on pointing to that as something he would return to time and again. It is too important a point to be overshadowed when considering, “What is Christianity?”

This was something crucial to my own journey. Obviously, those who have listened to me and listened to “My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy”³ know that I went through all sorts of philosophical and religious developments for years and years and years. But in the final days—the twilight of my heresies—I was really troubled by a question of asking, “What is Christianity?”

Because, as somebody who had become at this point in my journey a realist, I had this tendency to think, “Well, whenever you’re talking about a thing, like a square, for example, there are essential properties and there are accidental properties.” For a square to be a square, it needs to have four sides, the sides need to be equal, and it has to have four right angles, and so on. But then you have accidental properties: it doesn’t matter what color it is, it doesn’t matter what size it is, it doesn’t matter where it is. Those things don’t affect whether it’s a square. And that’s true of everything. Every real object that you encounter has essential and accidental properties.

Part of the question was, “Well, what is historical Christianity? Obviously, there are all sorts of accidental traits of Christianity. But are there any essential traits of Christianity? Or is it an empty bag that has the label ‘Christian’ on it? And then you put into the sack whatever you want and you take out whatever you want, and as long as it’s in the sack, then it’s Christianity.” The question troubled me because I was inclined at that point in my journey to believe that there was truth to Christianity. But the question was, “What is it?” What are the essential properties?

I wondered, “Is Christianity anything at all? What is this religion that was handed down?” It wasn’t until I encountered the Eastern Church Fathers that I started to get a cohesive answer to the question: What is Christianity? Because all of the Eastern Church Fathers, when I started reading them, I saw that there was a cohesive understanding of this vision of Christianity, of the worldview, of the Trinity, of Christology, of the Gospel, and so on.

And with that, there was an insistence that what they’re saying is a defense of what was passed down. So they said, “Well, Christianity is the thing that was handed down from Christ to the Apostles to us. And we are continuing to pass it down. All of our councils and all of our writings are aimed at defending and protecting and being curators of this thing that was entrusted to us, not inventors or innovators or something like that.”

That was one of the reasons why the Eastern Church Fathers were so refreshing: precisely because I was sitting there in this crisis of asking, What is Christianity? Once I saw that cohesive vision, that’s where that all snapped into place. And it was quite obvious to me that I should relinquish my own innovations and my own innovative ideas to this thing that was handed down and preserved by them.

In that, of course, I also came to see the providence of God in preserving and protecting the Church, which is something that Christ promises to do. And so in that preservation of this religion passed down from one father to the next to the next, and preserved in the councils and so on, I also saw the hand of providence.

But again, putting aside the question of providence, it made sense to me that when you discover a tradition like this that goes back to the start of a religion and is handed down by figures from that start—who have better access to manuscripts, more direct access to the original authors, who are closer to the original practices, who know the language and the culture better than the rest of us who are retroactively trying to understand it—it made sense that their perspective on it is more reliable than whatever I might be inventing and fabricating on my own.

It’s a really important point to grasp. It needs to be taken very seriously. And so I’m glad that it was raised in the context of this discussion, but not knowing whether it might be overshadowed by all the discussions about, you know, baptism and the Eucharist and other such things, I thought it was worth highlighting it here for you because I don’t think it should be missed.

To be continued…

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2. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=philosophy_facpub

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