Erick Ybarra and the Unfair Orthodox Debate

Mr Flanders, like me, is a convert from Orthodoxy. I have come to realise that Orthodoxy is a rudderless group of national churches with no authority.

From One Peter Five

By Timothy Flanders, MA

Who is Erick Ybarra?

I first met Erick Ybarra over 10 years ago after I had left Eastern Orthodoxy and reconciled myself with the Holy Father (“I Left Eastern Orthodoxy for the Church Led by Pope Francis, and I Don’t Regret It”).

Since that time, I have been very blessed to know Erick as a friend and we have met up several times in person. He is one of the most careful scholars currently doing apologetics about the centuries-old east-west debate.

In my view, many Catholic apologists on Eastern Orthodoxy are too triumphalistic. They fail to make the necessary concessions to the Eastern Orthodox or take a view of the Papacy which is, in my view, not patristic and not tenable from the First Millennium sources.[1]

Not so with Ybarra.

He is so concerned with truth that he will admit things about the Catholic side that many Catholics apologists seem embarrassed to admit. Because they do not admit these things, Catholic converts are sometimes converted on false hope, and they can quickly lose their faith when the going gets tough. As such, Ybarra truly converts souls to the very roots of the faith, which is a faith for which a Christian can suffer, not a shallow triumphalism that lacks roots in the Tradition.

Now they upon the rock are they who when they hear receive the word with joy: and these have no roots: for they believe for a while and in time of temptation they fall away (Lk. viii. 13).  

 

Ybarra is one of those rare men who is a self-taught scholar but who has been published by a serious Catholic publishing company (the one run by Biblical scholar Dr. Scott Hahn). When he got published by St. Paul Center, he went from “amateur apologist” to “scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy.”

But he is even more rare in the way that his Christian character and intellectual humility matches his erudition. He’s willing to talk to anyone and act in a Christian manner with the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control.

Unfortunately, there’s many Orthodox and Catholic apologists alike who routinely manifest themselves to be without these vital fruits of the Holy Spirit.

This is why I always recommend Erick Ybarra for anyone looking for answers in the east-west debate, and unfortunately, I cannot recommend many other Catholic apologists on this point.

The Unfair Debate with Mr. Denny Sellen

A few months ago, Erick Ybarra was hosted by Mr. Matt Fradd on Pints With Aquinas in a debate with Mr. Denny Sellen, who goes by the internet alias “Ubi Petrus.”

As for Mr. Sellen (who is Greek Orthodox), I am not very familiar with his work before this debate but our separated brother in Christ should be given credit for his good work in this debate: both his erudition and his gentlemanly character. (“Why are Eastern Orthodox truly our separated brethren?”)

Mr. Matt Fradd should also be given credit for creating a gentlemanly debating environment on this issue. Unfortunately, the Internet has turned the centuries-old east-west debate into a scandal against the faith for both Catholics and Orthodox. It has caused Christians from both sides to act and speak in ways that are not only spiritually immature, anti-Christian, and intellectually shallow, but is also the means whereby souls can be damned (“Don’t Let Social Media Send You to Hell”). So it is a credit to all three men that they all acted like Christians during the debate.

There’s many things to discuss about this debate, but in this post I want to say just one thing: the most basic presupposition of this debate, and many such east-west debates, is unfair.

Here’s what I mean.

The reality of the east-west debate is this: there are two alternatives, the Papacy and the Roman Catholic Church (and our various tensions and divisions) or the Orthodox Churches and their various ideas about primacy and conciliar ecclesiology.

However, in order for a debate to be fair, each side must invite the audience to accept their alternative.

In other words, each side must present something of substance.

The debate is not merely between “Proposition A” and “The Negation of A.”

On the contrary, a fair debate – the real, east-west debate fairly presented – is between Proposition A and Proposition B.

No Christian can enter into an ecclesiology of negation, since negation is non-being. In the east-west debate we need to be presented with real options, not merely negations.

On the Catholic side, we can present to the audience our solution: we represent the first millennium Church because we can speak with ecumenical and universal authority by means of ecumenical councils and the Papacy. Despite the fact that we have a great deal of confusion and division among us, there is still an objective standard which can resolve (most) controversial issues today.

In order for the debate to be fair, the Orthodox must present their alternative. It is unfair if the Orthodox do not need to prove and manifest their alternative. It is not fair if the Orthodox are simply called upon to disprove the Roman Catholic alternative. Yes, they should disprove it, but they must also present and manifest their own alternative.

In the debate with Mr. Sellen, the Orthodox side was not asked to manifest and prove their alternative. The very parameters of the debate were merely proving or disproving the Catholic claim about the events before and after the 5th Council.

Mr. Sellen was not required to prove the Orthodox claim about the 5th Council. Therefore, the debate was not fair and not realistic.

Instead, what often happens in the overall east-west debate is that the Orthodox make claims about their ecclesiology which cannot be proven. They say things such as:

“We have conciliar ecclesiology,” or

“All the Orthodox churches are united in faith,” or

“The Orthodox Church rejects the Filioque,” or

“The Orthodox Church rejects doctrinal development” or

“The Orthodox Church rejects the Immaculate Conception.”

None of these claims can be proven.

Lest someone think I’m falling into the same shallow triumphalism I condemned above, let me quote Orthodox priest and scholar Laurent Cleenewerck:

There are many Orthodox Christians who make the sweeping statement that this Roman Catholic belief is a heresy ‘flatly rejected’ by the Orthodox Church. When asked to point to a local or Ecumenical Council of the Orthodox Church to justify this assertion, they reluctantly have to admit that there is no such authority—only one’s very private opinion.[2]

Rather, the Orthodox simply state claims about their own churches as if they were self evident, but they have no way of proving that they exist. Let’s take an example from the Ybarra-Sellen debate, quoting from Mr. Sellen at timestamp 1:14:00. Here Mr. Sellen is quoting Pope Gelasius I, and he makes comments about the quote (his comments are shown between the quotation marks).

[Mr. Sellen begins by quoting Pope Gelasius:] “They avoid obeying the First See when it recommends what is sound and right, they are the very canons that intend the referral of appeals from the entire church to this see for examination…” he’s referring to the Sardican canons… “but that these people have ordained henceforth on no occasion should be appealed by this see…” So once someone appeals to the Sardican canons, if Rome goes ‘No, this person deserves a retrial,’ you can’t say, ‘No they don’t!’ you have to give them the retrial, that’s part of the system. We don’t want to be Somalia right? [smiles] There are rules.

[Continuing the quote from Pope Gelasius:] “…the canons have instructed that this See is to sit in judgment on the entire Church, to pass nobody’s judgment nor to be judged by its judgment but they have determined that its verdict should never undone and ordered instead that its decisions should be followed.” He says that in the context of the Sardican canons.

“And in this very case Timothy of Alexandria and Peter of Antioch, Peter, Paul, John, and the rest, not just one but several bearing the title of bishop were deposed by the sole authority of the Apostolic See… the Apostolic See did this in conformity with the formula of the synod, so it is most certain that nobody could revile from it.”

Part of synodality is that once the head of the synod signs off on something, it’s law then. You can’t just say, ‘Yeah, well, we’re not gonna go with what the head of the synod says,’ after he’s approved it… part of synodality is going with what the head of the synod says. If you wish to undo that, you have to have the head undo it as well. This conciliar theory.

First, we need to give Mr. Sellen credit: some orthodox apologist are just as shallow and triumphalistic as the Catholic one. They fail to concede to the Catholic side that the Papacy was not invented in the second millennium, but has a basis in the patristics and canons, such as Sardica, as Mr. Sellen notes. More erudite Orthodox, like Mr. Sellen, concede to us that the Pope is the universal head of the ecumenical council (as several ecumenical councils in the first millennium have said, besides the Fathers and Saints).

As I said, I am not too familiar with Mr. Sellen’s views, but typically these more erudite Orthodox concede this point, but further claim that the pope has lost his office as universal head as a result of accepting the heresy of the Filioque. Or some other heresy. In itself, this concept is not entirely unreasonable, since some Catholic Doctors and Fathers would also claim that the Pope would lose his office for heresy.

But here’s where the Orthodox side becomes unfair: Mr. Sellen then makes gratuitous claims. He claims that the Orthodox have conciliar ecclesiology.

If that’s the alternative, then in a fair debate he should be burdened with the proof to prove that the Orthodox have a competent doctrine machine called “conciliar ecclesiology.”

All that he needs to do is point to an ecumenical council (that all Orthodox agree on) which was called without the Papacy or the Emperor. Or a smaller burden would be to provide universally binding councils of any kind which exist without the Papacy.[3] Or maybe he could break down how this conciliar ecclesiology actually works in practice and give us a historical example. He knows that there have been many councils among the orthodox since 787 but he also knows that none of these are universally recognized as ecumenical by all Orthodox.

So the Orthodox position themselves in a way to win an unfair debate. They make gratuitous claims which cannot be proven. If the Orthodox claim to be the first millennium church, they have to manifest the most conspicuous thing about the first millennium Church: call an ecumenical council.

But here’s where the words of Russian Orthodox Vladimir Solovyov ring true:

Why has not the East set up a true ecumenical council in opposition to those of Trent or the Vatican? How are we to explain this helpless silence on the part of Truth when faced with the solemn self-assertion of Error?… while the great assemblies of the Church continue to fill a prominent place in the teaching and life of Catholicism, it is the Christian east which has for a thousand years been deprived of this important feature of the Universal Church, and our best theologians, such as Philaret of Moscow, themselves admit that an ecumenical council is impossible for the Eastern Church as long as she remains separated from the West.

But it is the easiest thing in the world for our self-styled Orthodox to confront the actual councils of the Catholic Church with a council that can never take place and to maintain their cause with weapons that they have lost and under a flag of which they have been robbed… Either we must admit, with our extreme sectarians [i.e. the Old Believers], that since a certain date the Church has lost her divine character and no longer actually exists upon earth; or else… we must recognize that the Universal Church, having no organs of government or representation in the East, possess them in her Western half.[4]

A common argument to justify the current Orthodox schisms is to say that “the early church also had schisms.” True. But the early Church also had the Council of Sardica, which confirmed universal appeals to the “Petrine” authority of Rome. Do the Orthodox churches have that? The early Church also had Ecumenical Councils. Do the Orthodox churches have those?

Here at OnePeterFive we will be the first to admit that we’ve got all sorts of problems here in the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, we have a doctrinal machine that actually works. Yes, our Pope is less than stellar at the moment (to put it mildly – see “The Third Pornocracy: the Current Crisis in the Church”), but a rusty machine is better than a machine that does not exist.

Our Church has the potency for doctrinal unity. We have the power to anathematise heresy, like the First Millennium Church.

The Orthodox churches do not even have this potency, and so every Orthodox Christian must trust his spiritual father’s private judgement for most doctrinal controversies since 787.

Or worse, each Orthodox Christian must trust his own private judgement.

This points to the deeper, spiritual issue behind the east-west schism, which cuts through all the patristic citations: no one born of Adam really wants to be under the Papacy, because our fallen human nature hates authority. The Orthodox believe this too, that’s why they (rightly) emphasise spiritual fathers. But they refuse the universal spiritual fatherhood, codified by Sardica (and other sources), and thus fall into spiritual peril which endangers their salvation. This is why extra ecclesiam nulla salus est.

To his credit, Erick Ybarra agreed to an unfair debate and he still did a bang up job defending the One True Ark of Salvation.

More reflections on the Ybarra-Sellen debate will be forthcoming.   

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[1] Sadly, a good example of this shallow triumphalism is Blessed Pope Pius IX’s “Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarichs.” And thus it received an equally shallow reply from the eastern bishops.

[2] Laurent Cleenewerck, His Broken Body, 1st ed. (Euclid University Press, 2008), 45.

[3] The Palamite Councils and the Raskol Councils come to mind in this case – both involved Emperors but neither are considered ecumenical and infallible. Why not? (Palamas Sunday, moreover, was not accepted in Russia until the Nikon iconoclasm and the Raskol [more than two hundred years later], imposed Greek customs on Russian Christendom – the Old Believers do not have Palamas Sunday). It is important to note that the English-speaking Orthodox scholars of the 20th century sometimes speak of a “western captivity” of Orthodoxy after Florence (to say nothing of the Turkic captivity of the Phanar!) which led, they say, to “too much western influence,” including a marginalising of St. Gregory Palamas. But what makes the current trend in Orthodox scholarship more authoritative than the current trend in the 18th or 17th centuries, for example, when the Immaculate Conception was more accepted as a dogma by the Orthodox? There is no objective, authoritative standard, as we have in Catholicism.

[4] Vladimir Solovyov, Russia and the Universal Church, trans. Rees (London: Centenary Press, 1948), 49, 50. He was Russian Orthodox when he wrote these words in 1889. He later reconciled with Rome in 1896.