He's given a talk on his youtube with the title
Why Protestants Win the Church History Debate (Newman Was Wrong), right now, I'm not answering the video as such, but his "main list", an extract of a few minutes.
His claim is that each of these, Catholicism took time to develop, so Protestantism is a return.
The first problem is, return is not preservation. If you think the original Church had two sacraments, and that the seven sacraments are an accretion and so you join a new Church that has only two, and say it is the original one, just because it has, on your view, the original teaching, you are, whatever your argument about the fact as such, acting as Mormons and JW who openly say that the Church apostatised and needs to be, as an organisation, refounded. And the problem with that is Matthew 28:16—20.
Especially, if you recall, Jesus founded His Church as
one "organisation".
When the reformers themselves faced a similar charge in 0:48 their own day of departing from church history, they carefully worked through the historical data demonstrating that 0:55 what they were departing from were slow late developments within church history.
They had far less data to prove their position (on some of the items) had survived along the "slow late development" ...
1:02 In some cases, developments introduced relatively late in church history. For example, the reformers protested the 1:09 vast sacramental system that had developed way beyond the early church.
Some guys wrote books called "De Sacramentis" and included only Baptism and the Eucharist.
Does this mean they didn't regard Confirmation/Chrismation, Penance, Extreme Unction and the "Social Sacraments" Ordination and Marriage as Sacraments? No.
Chrismation is arguably a way to interpret a thing mentioned in the Baptism section of St. Ambrose' work of this title.
And the only three sacraments "of initiation" are Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist. Then there are two of repair and two social ones.
But "sacramentum" is a translation of "mysterion" and St. Ambrose' work has the title
On the Mysteries. However, a mysterion has or is an initiation. Hence, the Semantics of the word in the title rather than a strict theological difference could be the reason for omitting the two sacraments of repair and the two social ones.
That these other four are acts with supernatural grace directly attached to them is apparent from the Bible.
the swelling expansion of papal 1:15 authority,
Again, defensible more from the Bible than from early Church History, especially the well known parts every one focusses on.
However, there are less known items in Church History that also favour the papacy.
financial developments in how salvation was pursued, especially with the treasury of merit and indulgences. 1:22 I'm sure you've heard of that.
First of all, purgatory and prayers for the dead are not simply about pursuing salvation.
They are about getting to Heaven with less or more ease on the way there.
Second, while indulgences are the general category to which prayers for the dead belong, and treasury of merits is a theory on why the Church can apply an indulgence to certain acts, neither of these is per se financial.
Third, Prayers for the dead is clearly attested before the general category and before this theory on why indulgences work.
Uh biblical ignorance, including overt restriction on access to vernacular 1:29 translations of scripture, especially among the leoty.
For some reason, AI spelled "laity" as "leoty", bear with me, I'm just copy-pasting that passage.
Let's compare to the US.
When would ignorance of the Constitution be more rampant?
1776 or now?
I would say now. The obvious reason being, so many have an interest in being only half and half attentive to what the text actually says, and ready to quote, not the text, but a résumé, which may be a bad one.
A Leftist saying the "separation between Church and State" belongs to the Constitution or the Rightist saying an illegal foreigner is not under US jurisdiction so doesn't enjoy due process are two examples.
Second reason, a hillbilly of 1776 who didn't know the Constitution very well was less likely to get noticed back then than someone displaying an ignorance of the Constitution in 2015 or 2025. When more people overall are recorded, more ignorant people are recorded.
As to restrictions, when these came, one can mention one had recently had problems in certain areas with laymen misinterpreting the Sermon on the Mount and inventing Manichaean heresies around it.
One could also see certain vernacular translations were inserting the misinterpretation. My favourite example is Matthew 6:7, whensoever a translation says "repetitions" it's the wrong translation, even if you add "vain" ones.
The Greek verb or verbal noun means "stutter-speak" or "stutter-speech" and Syriac and Coptic translate "stutter(ing)". St. Jerome doesn't, he supplies "use many words" from the context. There is one kind of verbal communication that can be compared to stuttering and sometimes involve it, and which is wordy. When you are nervously negotiating with someone more powerful than you, that you have to humour. That's very different from repeating simple phrases over and over. Just in case someone were to miss this, Greek and Roman Pagans didn't use any type of repetitive prayer.
Rather, they grouped four religions that did together as Bacchus worship. The very Oriental Hindus and Buddhists. The somewhat closer Oriental Jews and Christians.
Uh an ontological distinction between clergy and leoty. 1:35 This is a big one we sometimes miss.
And Ortlund misses, it's in the Bible.
For which cause I admonish thee, that thou stir up the grace of God which is in thee, by the imposition of my hands
[2 Timothy 1:6]
1) There is a grace remaining in St. Timothy
2) even when it needs to be stirred up
3) and it comes from the ordination and consecration by St. Paul.
The way priests are functioning in a mediatorial capacity between God and the 1:41 people.
The most blatant ways would be celebrating Mass for someone and giving absolution, both of which are in the Bible.
The Lord give mercy to the house of Onesiphorus: because he hath often refreshed me, and hath not been ashamed of my chain But when he was come to Rome, he carefully sought me, and found me The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day: and in how many things he ministered unto me at Ephesus, thou very well knowest
[2 Timothy 1:16-18]
He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained
[John 20:21-23]
uh the way priests are exe exempt from subjection to civil the 1:47 civil magistrate all kinds of implications from that
From the side of the Church or recognised by Civil Magistrates?
From the side of the Church it's there as soon as St. Peter isn't backing down from the Gospel or compromising it was Caesar worship even to save his life.
From the side of the Civil Magistrates, it took some time.
You recall, all you Lutherans and Luther fans, how Luther was received on Wartburg? There was a similar event when a vassal braved an Emperor to hide a clergyman before that.
Adelaide of Italy, in the 10th century the daughter, daughter-in-law, and widow in turn of three kings, was hard pressed by a local nobleman, Berengar of Ivrea, who declared himself king of Italy, abducted Adelaide, and tried to legitimize his reign by forcing Adelaide to marry his son Adalbert; but she escaped to Canossa. From the rocca of Canossa she called for German intervention. Canossa was inherited by Matilda of Tuscany, the principal Italian supporter of Pope Gregory VII, in 1052.
Matilda invited Pope Gregory VII to take refuge in Canossa Castle in 1076/77 during the dispute with Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor.
So, Henry IV was prior to this event asking Gregory VII to recognise his sovereignty, by stepping back when Henry deposed him on false accusations.
Gregory refused. He knew the accusations were false, and he knew Henry was trying to cash in on the very exceptional Sutri synod to make the Pope basically personal chaplain to the Emperor and so enemy of anyone who was the Emperor's enemy. He also knew, even at Sutri, the authority was given to Henry III from above.
Benedict IX has already once resigned before Sutri. Gregory VI resigned because the way he got papacy from Benedict was simoniacal. Sylvester III was banished to a monastery, but resigned for real while serving Pope St. Leo IX or his successor Victor II. None of them was clearly both a valid Pope and validly deposed by Henry III. And Gregory VII was not going to change that.
uh various worship restrictions so Latin only masses 1:54 restrictions on congregational participation
In the Latin rite, or as one would first have called it, the Roman Rite (with Gallican and Mozarabic and Ambrosian sister rites), going from Greek to Latin was a step to get closer to vernacular.
Because, in Rome, Greek had ceased to be commonly spoken, as it had been in the first century. In St. Peter's time, Rome was as bilingual between Latin and Greek as Los Angeles is between English and Spanish. In the time of Pope St. Damasus, Greek in Rome was practically dead.
When the Mass was given to England, under missionaries like Sts. Augustine of Canterbury and Paulinus of York, there were reasons to use Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon.
1) Every missionary was fluent in Latin, they might have spoken Anglo-Saxon with a noted accent;
2) Apart from runes, no one had written Anglo-Saxon yet (all we have of that wonderful literature is later than their time)
3) English was not a single language from Kent to Northumbria (which included both modern Yorkshire and modern Southern Scotland)
4) West of the English, the Welsh and Irish celebrated Mass in Latin, and relations had not yet soured as they would around the Synod of Whitby.
Whether or not St. Gregory I was right in adding that there were three languages on the Cross didn't make much difference. He just gave a more dignified reason than "right now we are not up to it."
As to Gothic, Tolkien notes, it's the only Germanic language that has the distinction of having been a liturgic language. He noted it because he loved Gothic. And Gothic had achieved this, because the missionary to the Goths was Wulfila, a native speaker of Gothic, who was also fluent in Greek. Unfortunately for Gothic, most of the time (at least after Wulfila) this Gothic liturgy was in the Arian para-Church, and so, it was not taken over again into the Catholic Church.
French with Provençal, Spanish with Galician, Italian, all of them came into existence because Latin pronunciation changed in a Roman area, starting with France, where basically the pronunciation of Bl. Alcuin of York, not too different from that of Pope St. Gregory the Great, replaced the pronunciation of the people, i e the vernacular. This led to successful attempts of writing the vernacular on its own terms, rather than as the pronunciation of Latin.
Once the vernaculars did exist on their own terms, they did so in areas where Latin was already the liturgic norm and when clamours for vernacular came around, they were often voiced by heretics. Waldensians, Protestants, and so on.
various legalistic rituals that had occurred very slowly evolving over time 2:01 concerning festival days and pilgrimages and fasts and so forth there are a lot of other examples these are just a few 2:07 representative examples
Are you mad at Christmas existing, even if it doesn't fall on a Sunday? Or are you mad that it became a prolonged holiday of 12 days and then Epiphany took over for another 8 days?
The Reformers were so. They thought this was a waste of time when people could have worked for their employers.
Gustav Wasa reduced Christmas vacation from the 20 days to the first four days (Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John, Holy Innocents) in Sweden, while he encouraged the Reformers.
Pilgrimages are an even better example, if possible, on how the Reformers pushed everyone "back to work" and allowed less free time. Walking to St. James in Galicia takes some time, I took 50 days walking from Pamplona to Santiago, after hitchhiking the first 34 days (some exceptional days on each side).
And they are an excellent example on how gaining an indulgence (if that is what you went for, some went to ask the saint for a favour, which was my case) doesn't involve monetary expenses. Because the person who spends all his money during the pilgrimage isn't obliged to interrupt it and get back to earn more money, from then on he can beg and live off the pilgrimage, in principle all the way to Santiago and back to where he had his work.
The Protestant attitude of employers unwilling to put up with this, has in the meanwhile led to employers who hire women not putting up with pregnancy leaves and maternity leaves, and this has pushed for lots of abortions.
So, the development of pilgrimages certainly took some time (though they started to Jerusalem in Constantine's day), but so did the abolition of slavery, which was NOT the work of the Reformers. Catholics did it from one end of the Middle Ages (before 680 in Francia, now France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and BeNeLux, 1066 in England, late 1400's or 1300's in Ragusa, 1346 in Sweden ...). Evangelicals did it. But Reformers were very much absent from this.
But some of these answers include an appeal to the Bible. Now, Ortlund would say (probably) on more than one, perhaps on all of these "that's not what the Bible actually means" and would challenge me to find early (ideally Ante-Nicene) readings explicitly agreeing with the Catholic sense. I retort the challenge, can he give the early readings explicitly agreeing with the Protestant sense? I don't think so. Or explicitly disagreeing with the Catholic sense other than one secondary questions? I don't think so either. If Jesus promised to be with His Church in connection with His task for Her to teach all truth, it makes sense if a reading consensus emerges later or gets terms later and it's still perfectly good.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Valentine
14.II.2026
Romae, via Flaminia, natalis sancti Valentini, Presbyteri et Martyris, qui, post multa sanitatum et doctrinae insignia, fustibus caesus et decollatus est, sub Claudio Caesare.
[This refers to
Claudius II]
