Truth Unites - The ULTIMATE Case for Sola Scriptura

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Gavin Ortlund makes a case for Sola Scriptura by exploring what Scripture is, how it functions, and why no other authority can rival it.Videos Mentioned:"Obey Tradition!" is LITERALLY IN THE BIBLE! -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29QF5bFT4LE&ab_channel=GavinOrtlundEcclesial Infallibility Has No Foundation! (My Response to Joshua Charles) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8adSmpvwVh0&ab_channel=GavinOrtlundhttps://youtu.be/5myQc93iswI?si=1It8wsZ77nXv1s0UA MAJOR Problem With "Doctrinal Development" -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5myQc93iswI&ab_channel=GavinOrtlundThe PROBLEM with "No Salvation Outside the Church" - History & Critique -https://youtu.be/72vJVTsLYkI?si=kDHgyZbbyW1gKu5HA Fallible List of Infallible Books? - https://youtu.be/rRMgYS1Taes?si=jX0HtbxKZ0izmguHTruth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

The most foundational issue that separates Protestants from other Christian traditions, perhaps is the doctrine we call Soliscriptura, because this doctrine determines the question, what is Christianity? Who or what has the authority to determine what is obligatory for a Christian to believe, what you must believe. Christianity is a divinely revealed religion, and so we want to determine the boundaries by that divine revelation, by what God has said. And so the reason we as Protestants reject the necessity of affirming the bodily assumption of Mary, the propriety of praying to deceased Christians, that the number of sacraments is seven, that indulgences or masses for deceased Christians can grant them reduced time in purgatory, that communion need not be given

in both bread and wine, that the Bishop of Rome has universal jurisdiction over the church, and many, many other related doctrines is we don't believe these doctrines have a foundation to a foundation in divine revelation. We think there are later human accretion that comes in along the process of church history that don't relate back to the period of divine revelation. That's the heart behind Sola Scriptura to not add on human development on top of divine revelation and thus expand what is obligatory Christian belief. In this video, I want to lay out a case for Sola Scriptura.

First, we'll define this doctrine and then we'll lay out the argument for it. For longtime followers, this will not be new content. This will be summative and recapitulating what I've said elsewhere, but I realized I've actually never done a video drawing together my whole case. So this is, I have some overlap with chapter five of my book, what it means to be Protestant, but I've never done this on YouTube before. So I'm pulling from all my work on this to put it into one video hoping this will serve people. First, let's define what Sola Scriptura is. This is really important because it's often caricatured or misframed or misunderstood. It's actually a very modest claim.

it's the idea that scripture is the only infallible rule for the church. A rule is a standard that governs the church's faith and practice. Infallible means incapable of error. So Soliscriptura is essentially saying that scripture is the only authority standing over the church that can't get it wrong, that can't make a mistake that would then need to be subsequently corrected. And this point, let's be clear here that the issue of dispute here with our Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends and others, for example, is the word Sola. We can agree, and historically we have agreed that the scripture is infallible. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, for example, the concern is that the church is also infallible,

as you can see from the confession of De Scythius there on the screen. But the infallibility of scripture itself is not the point of contention, and that's the same with the Roman Catholic Church as well, which teaches, as you can see from the catechism on screen, that the scriptures are without error in the truth that they teach about God. So we agree that the scripture is the infallible rule. What is not infallible is recording in my house where you will hear some background noises of kids at times. We'll see if it keeps going. My wife's home, so she would be okay. But we're in agreement on this. Scripture's infallible. The dispute is whether that is the only infallible rule. So the line of demarcation is, does the church possess a rule?

which is governing her that is infallible, that cannot err, other than the scripture. And Soloscriptura is simply a negative answer to that question saying, no, no, no, the later things that come about in church history, for all their positive value, can get it wrong at times. Counsels can fail. Popes can err. There's nothing that is preserved from the possibility of error here after the period of divine revelation is over. Anthony Lane puts it like this, Soliscriptura is the statement that the church can air. In the post-apistolic era, any authoritative deliverance of the church is actually subordinate to scripture. Must be reviewed in light of scripture because it's not infallible. So that's the idea. Now, unfortunately, the debate is often mis-framed. Let me identify

two common caricatures of Soliscriptura. First, Soliscriptura is often caricatured as the idea that the Bible is the only authority. The error here is confusing infallibility and authority. These are quite distinct. Infallibility means an incapacity for error. You can't be wrong. Authority means it's a more practical term. Infallibility is a more sort of metaphysical category. Authority means offering a binding decision. Okay. So if something is infallible, it will automatically have some authority, but not all authority is infallible. It doesn't go the other way. this is just a different category. I've given many examples of this.

My favorite one is the umpire at a baseball game. He has authority to call it a ball or a strike, but he's not infallible. Umpires do make mistakes at times. When you think about it, almost every authority in this world is fallible. And so that's why sometimes this distinction between infallibility and authority

doesn't really come through clearly to the other side, but I don't know how else to make the point. I think it's very clear that being able to make a decision that must be adhered to is just a completely different, idea altogether from being incapable of being wrong. Solo Scriptura does not deny ecclesiastical realities that have authority. It just says they're fallible.

They're under the scripture within a hierarchy of different authorities, and therefore they are subordinate under scripture and must be reviewed by scripture. Sometimes a critic of Protestantism will say or imply that only infallible authority is a real authority. But I think just on a moment's reflection that that's just obviously wrong. I mean, the umpire at a baseball game is a great example, but even just within the church, we can recognize that there are fallible entities that can make a real authoritative declaration. My ordination vows have real authority over me. I can lose my ministerial credentials if I oppose them. My church's statement of faith has real authority over me. I function under it. I will be

barred from the Lord's Supper if I oppose it. Many examples like this, communication in Protestant churches. There are real authoritative decisions that must be adhered to, but they're not infallible. Okay. Now, this is a historic Protestant view to distinguish infallibility and authority. So Article 20 in the 39 articles of the Anglican Church says the church has power to decree rights or ceremonies and authority in controversies of faith. In the reformed tradition, Frances Turriton distinguished between Scripture as the Supreme Judge and the Church as a subordinate judge, and said the question does not concern whether any judgment belongs to the Church and its officers in controversies of faith. Rather, the question concerns only the

supreme and infallible judgment by which everything must necessarily stand or fall. So whatever other criticisms of Siloscriptura may come, let's leave off any language about the Bibles are only authority, the church has no authority, that that's. is really a caricature. A second misunderstanding is the idea that all doctrines must be explicitly taught in the Bible. You will hear this over and over and over. I've been doing, it is dismaying at times, doing online apologetics and just how little traction sometimes we get. So I have to remind myself, actually, to make videos for the good faith onlookers who are more quiet, because sometimes it's discouraging when points just cannot get dislodged and you just keep hearing it over and over.

because you'll hear this, that Sola Scriptura is self-defeating because it says everything has to be in the Bible, but it's not in the Bible and this kind of thing. And the point here is, I think, pretty simple. Sola Scripura does not claim that everything that we believe needs to be taught explicitly in the Bible. That is just not on the table. What is being targeted here is the idea of the sufficiency of Scripture, which is a related but distinct Protestant doctrine that is teased out differently in different, Protestant traditions, sometimes more modestly in the Anglican tradition, Article 6 of the 39 articles basically says the Bible is sufficient for salvation. It's a very modest claim. Luther, as an individual, asserted that doctrines that are not substantiated by scripture can be held

as opinion but should not be required as dogma. That was a take he had. The tradition that in the Protestant circles that generally has the most ambitious articulation of the sufficiency of scripture would be the reform tradition, though even here, it's very carefully nuanced. So in the Westminster Confession of Faith, note what I put in purple here. The whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith in life is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced by Scripture. So the whole point of saying either expressly or explicitly, or explicitly,

or by good and necessary consequence deduced is to show it doesn't have to be expressly set down or explicitly. It can be, rather, just derived by a consequence of scripture. So that whole clause just gets lopped off over and over. And so we just want to be very clear here. I'll put this up on the screen. Here's what it does mean. Solo Scriptura means scripture is the only infallible rule. It does not mean it's the only authority or it's the excessive.

explicit source for all doctrines. I'm belaboring this because I see these misunderstandings so frequently. Now, this basic idea shouldn't be too hard to grasp because it has a lot of resonance with how most religions work, not all. The idea of one supreme text or set of texts and then subsequent ongoing authoritative bodies that are subordinate to the supreme text is how many religions will work. As a general structure that has resonance with Islam and how Muslim should regard the Quran, with how many Jews treat

the Hebrew Bible, with how some Eastern religions work, many Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs will treat their respective sacred texts as having this kind of unparalleled, unrivaled authority, and not anything that is

comparable to that in the ongoing functioning of the religion. That broad idea applied specifically to the notion of infallibility is the core of Soliscriptura. So the broad idea here shouldn't be too opaque or difficult to follow, I think. All right, but why should someone believe this? If that's the definition, only infallible rule, the only yardstick that won't get it wrong when you're looking at what governs our faith and practice, why should we think that?

Well, let me give an empirical argument here in which Soloscriptura is. follows as the cumulative entailment of two considerations. First, scripture's nature, or what it is, and second, scripture's role among God's people. That is what it does. Some of my comments here will draw from the debate I did with Trent Horn in March of 2003, though I'll flush it out a little more here. I had a time limit there.

I was talking fast. First, scripture's nature. Solar Scriptura is the conclusion to a series of questions that arise at the very beginning of Christian reflection, like, what is Scripture and what is Christianity and what is the gospel and these kinds of questions? You start asking these questions, and you're going to end up here. Simply put, Scripture claims to be the inspired word of God, and we want to take a second to probe this word inspired. I realize what I just said about the conclusion. I don't want that to come across wrong. I'm not saying, you know, as long as you start asking that

question, you're always going to get here. I'm saying the questions that get us into Sola Scriptura are very basic. So here, for example, we just, what is Scripture from a Christian perspective? And what we want to do here is probe the meaning of this word inspired. Okay, this is a technical term. We can use this term more colloquially as well. I could say that God really inspired C.S. Lewis to write the screw tape letters, or I feel really inspired about this homily I'm going to preach tomorrow.

That's a more general sense of the term. we mean inspired, we mean something more than that here. We can also use the term the Word of God more broadly and more generally. All Christian traditions use the phrase the Word of God in different ways and more broadly than just for written scripture. In my tradition, we speak of the sermon as the Word of God, the preached, fallible sermon as the Word of God. So that's a broader, just terminologically, that's broader. What we're trying to get at here when we say the inspired word of God is a claim about the ontological nature of Scripture. And specifically, the claim is that this is the speech of God.

This is divine revelation. The very words of Scripture are the words of God. Perhaps the best way to unpack this is just to use the biblical language itself for this. Maybe the most overutilized verse that I'm sure you're familiar with if you're into these discussions at all is 2 Timothy. 316, where Paul says that all scripture is breathed out by God. The Greek word Thayanustas gets a lot of discussion in these conversations, sometimes translated as inspired by God, as in the NASB, or breathed out by God in the ESV here. Don't think of this as though the idea is the scripture already exists, and then God comes along and

like breathes on top of the text, so as to give it extra power or something like that. rather think of the scripture itself, the very words themselves are what is breathed out by God. So John Stod, in his commentary in this passage, says you could use the Greek word expiration, as in, you know, God breathing out. If you're out on a cold night and you breathe and you can see your breath, the breath of God. That's the, in the semantic ballpark here of this term. So you can call a sermon that you hear on a Sunday morning the word of God in a more general sense, but we don't call it God breathed in this sense, and that is the ontological distinction we're trying to convey with the adjective inspired. Now, sometimes this is disputed in 2 Timothy 316. This word comes up, because later

it's used more broadly and so forth, and so this gets complicated. So let's just say that the point here is not dependent on that one passage. As we'll see, this is a point all traditions can agree upon today. And it's just something that is put in many different ways in different passages. For example, 2 Peter 121 speaks about men speaking from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The big idea here in this passage is that scripture comes through a human medium. The prophet is the one speaking or writing. But the origin is not human, but is rather divine. God. God is speaking through that human medium. In his classic treatment of biblical inspiration and biblical authority, B.B. Warfield

comments on the verb used here in this phrase carried along by the Holy Spirit. And what he helps us understand is that this is more than just a general guidance. What is in view here is that the words of the human author are from God. More colloquially, we could say scripture is God's words. It is God's speech. This is how the scripture speaks of itself. For example, Romans 3-2 says that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. Talogia to Tha-U-Thu, the words of God.

Or NASB says the actual words of God, N-I-V, the very words of God. Doug Mu in his commentary argues that this term is best taken as a reference to the Old Testament as a whole, as you can see on screen. Okay, so the Old Testament is the words of God. Jesus in Matthew 19 will quote Old Testament scripture. Now, not God speaking in Old Testament scripture, not a narrative in which God says something that is sort of recorded within the larger structure, but just the text itself as God speaking. That's actually one of the most relevant texts in this whole discussion. And so this is why infallibility will come into the picture is because we say the scripture

is infallible because it's God's speech. and God is omniscient and perfect. So God is infallible. So God's speech is therefore infallible. And it's on that basis that we say the scripture cannot err, it cannot get it wrong. Or as Jesus puts it in John 1035 with a slightly different nuance of meaning, it cannot be broken. So when it comes to this point, this need not be and often is not a point of disagreement with other Christian traditions, that scripture is ontologically unique in its nature as the word of God. I always want to encourage people, especially when they do rebuttal videos. I'm not making the argument yet.

This is one principle that is going to be in the larger context of an unfolding argument. So hang with me here for the relevance of this. Don't get ahead of me. This is not establishing Soliscriptura yet. Okay, we're just establishing one point. The scripture is unique, ontologically, as the speech of God. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that scripture, is the speech of God. It is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit. In Roman Catholic

theology, sacred scripture and sacred tradition together constitute the word of God, but in different ways. Sacred tradition is not inspired by the Holy Spirit in the same way that sacred scripture is and the role of the Magisterium, even when functioning with infallibility, isn't the same thing as divine speech. The charism of infallibility that's extended to the church in Roman Catholic theology is distinguished from divine revelation. It's an interpretation of divine revelation that is held to be infallible, but it's not the same thing as the speech of God. So when a pope speaks ex-cathedra, that's infallible, but it's not God-breathed, spirit-carried, divine speech, the oracles of God. It's not the same thing as Scripture,

and it's not adding new things on to the apostolic deposit of divine revelation. It's an interpretation of that. Similarly, Roman Catholic theology agrees that public divine revelation has ceased with the death of the last apostles. On the Eastern Orthodox side, though we have many differences, the unique nature of Scripture as the inspired word of God need not and often is not a point of difference. That point so far as it goes is something that we can agree upon. And therefore, we can say this much that no other rule of faith that we have today, is this inspired speech of God. And so Sola Scripura is going to go a step further and say,

just as the Bible is unique in its nature, so it is correspondingly unique in its authority. And the alternative positions are going to try to separate divine speech and biblical inspiration from infallibility. Now, at that point, the burden that is going to come up as we're going to get to is, okay, show us what is the ground for infallibility in this other case, where you have some other ontological entity, why is this also infallible as the scripture is infallible? So I'm just trying to gesture kind of where the argument's going to go. But one way you can put the instinct behind

Soliscriptura at a more metaphysical level is just to say, God is unique, therefore his speech is unique. Why accept that which isn't the speech of God to have comparable infallibility to that, which is the speech of God. If you're going to do that, you're going to need a good reason. And the argument we're going to make here is we don't have a good reason. All right. Second aspect of Scripture that is relevant is the role of Scripture among the people of God. The general importance of Scripture is we could go to so many passages. We could read through Psalm 119, for example. Psalm 1, for example.

You could look at narrative, like what happens when the book of the law is lost and then recovered again under Josiah and 2 Kings 22, the Word of God in the sense of inscripturalated divine revelation is foundational to the life and well-being of God's people, corporately and individually. But the more specific question of its authority in relation to other authoritative entities in the church or among the people of God is evident in how they function in relation to each other. And what you see is other legitimate authorities are subordinated under the scripture. And I think a good example of this, despite the pushback that will come against this passage, is Jesus's prioritization of scripture over tradition in Matthew 15 and Mark 7, where he says, why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your

tradition? Now, what will frequently be brought up in response is that, well, this passage is just about human traditions, the traditions of men, not divine traditions. But a question that arises is, how could anybody have known that these were just the traditions of men? Jesus himself affirms that the Pharisees had a legitimate God-given authority to teach God's people. They sit on the seat of Moses, so do whatever they say. The Pharisees themselves, in that authoritative teaching office, did not regard their traditions as merely human. This is why it's so scandalous that they were disobeyed. They claimed that they had an oral law for Moses handed down through something.

successive lineage, and they claimed that it was comparable in authority to the written law of Moses. This amounted to a similar kind of two-source theory of divine revelation to what we find, for example, in the Roman Catholic Church today. F.F. Bruce says, as time went on, the claim was made that this oral law, like the written law itself, was received by Moses on Sinai, and it was accorded with the same authority. Similarly, D.A. Carson notes that the Pharisees regarded their oral tradition is having authority nearly equal, very nearly equal to the canon. To defend this view of written and oral, two forms of the law of Moses, the Pharisees could have made the same appeal to Jesus that is often put against Sola Scripura today. And that is, where does the scripture

explicitly say that it has greater authority than our oral traditions? Okay. But the answer to that is, the Bible doesn't need to anticipate every possible later error that will come about subsequently. It's enough to know that the scripture is the inspired word of God, and these oral traditions are not the inspired word of God, and therefore it is reasonable to measure the subsequent oral traditions against the inspired text of Scripture. Just like you would trust a less, or you would weigh the words of a less trustworthy person against those of a more trustworthy person. And that is what Jesus does in this passage. The rebuke he gives to the Pharisees is not for offering the wrong traditions, as though the problem was just elevating human traditions over divine traditions.

Rather, he corrects the whole conception of tradition as such on the basis of the Word of God. This is the concern that they make void the Word of God by your traditions that you've handed down and many such things you do, Mark 713. Now, the term the Word of God here refers to Exodus 20 and Exodus 21-7, which he is just cited. The hand-washing traditions that are the occasion for this rebuke are not explicitly contrary to Scripture. The Pharisees would not have granted the contradicted the Scripture, but Jesus infers that the practical result is to make the Word of God void.

and note those words. This is not just one issue. This is a tendency. He says, many such things you do. So Jesus is not just rejecting one particular phariseical tradition. He is challenging the inflated view of tradition as such. He's challenging what has accrued over time this idea that we've got an oral law that has equal authority to the written law. And he's saying no. You know, that makes void the written law. And it removes it from its position of authority that it should be in. This is the concern. Basically, you've got divine revelation, and then human accretion comes along after the fact and gets papered over it and added onto it and intermixed with it. And the point is, we can't do that. We have to test the human by the divine. Now, this error, what is essentially a usurping of divine

authority is not a unique temptation to the Pharisees or any one group at any time. This will be a constant temptation for any group that has historical ties to a genuine work of God. There's always going to be a temptation to add things on. And so it is good and fitting and edifying and appropriate to test claims of divine authority that are uncertain in the light of those that are certain. And that is how we see the New Testament Church functioning as well. Again, despite the common pushbacks against it, this is why the Bereans are called Noble in Acts 1711, because they are examining the scriptures to see if these things were so. The verb used for examined here, John Stott notes, is used of judicial investigations elsewhere in the book of Acts. So the

praise here is for examining the scriptures to test the message being preached. In Galatians 1-8, Paul even says that angelic teaching should be tested according to the deposit of revelation that has already been given. So you take what the instinct here is conservative and reasonable. We want to take what we know God has said and live in light of that. And if new claims come along and we're not sure if they are from God, we test them in light of what we do have. Test that which isn't the inspired word of God by that which is the inspired word of God because God's speech is of greater authority than all other speech. Okay, that's not an argument for Soliscriptura yet.

Those are two principles. How does Soliscriptura then follow from those principles? Well, they generate a question. If the Bible is the inspired word of God, and if the Bible functions with greater authority than other legitimate authorities in the church, what other rule exists for the church that would be comparable to that,

that could also have infallibility as the inspired word of God does. One possibility is oral apostolic traditions. But there's a difference between oral teaching straight from the mouth of the apostle and the fallible transmission process by which that is given to subsequent generations, the telephone game, by which it is passed down.

In his 19th century defense of Sola Scriptura against the Anglo-Catholics, William Good has a treatment of this. I have a whole video on this. I'll put up the thumbnail. You can chase this down I'll just summarize the point here. You can see that to document these claims. But just to summarize, what good is showing is that almost immediately, after the apostles are off the scene,

basic questions arise, factual questions like the date of Easter, things that are not super complicated and opaque and metaphysical, just a factual historical question. And the different sides of the debate will appeal to apostolic oral tradition to establish their views. So in the date of Easter dispute, which is right there in the second century, you have Eusebius, a later church historian, who records a letter from Polycratties, the Bishop of Ephesus, claiming that their position on the date of Easter was handed down to them from the apostles. And then Eusebius records the response from Victor, who's the Bishop of Rome, and on the exact same. basis, desires to excommunicate churches who hold to that position, again, appealing to apostolic

tradition, but he's restrained by the other bishops. You also have as early as the second century Ireneus appealing to apostolic tradition to ground various claims, including his belief that Jesus died as a middle-aged man, a view that hardly anyone affirms today. He does say that, and he does say it's apostolic tradition from multiple apostles. And then in the third century, you have similar things like this, the dispute over re-baptism of those baptized by heretics, both sides are going to appeal to apostolic tradition in claiming we're just following the custom that was entrusted to the church by the apostles. And so what we can observe is right away out of the gate, transmission errors can happen on relatively simple matters within two or three generations

of the apostles. It's not hard to see that. That happens a lot when there's oral transmission of tradition. This is the telephone game. That's the whole point of that idea. Now, that doesn't mean that patristic testimony about oral apostolic teaching is all bad or not valuable, but it certainly means it is not infallible because the process of transmission is extremely fallible. And that possibility of error in transmission is very different when we're talking about. about literary transmission. It's comparatively tiny, and it doesn't touch any major dogmas of the faith. So that's one possibility we can set aside. The real alternatives, and where the debate really funnels, is the idea of post-apostolic mechanisms of infallibility in the church. So, for example,

ex-cathedra statements from popes, certain deliverances of the ecumenical councils, certain teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium. Basically, can the church function with infallibility after the period of public divine revelation is over? And I would say basically no. I would say we don't have any good reason to accept this. And I would give four challenges to it. First, this is without any precedent in the Old Testament.

The Jewish people didn't have ongoing offices of infallibility to determine and adjudicate on divine revelation and give you an infallible verdict. A lot of the epistemological conundrums that are placed upon us would apply to the Jewish people as well as Protestants. It's like, how do you know infallibly about this or that? That's just never been how it's been. The Sanhedron, for example, was fallible. There's a whole tractate in the Talmud that gives detailed instructions on what you do when the Jewish court gives an erroneous ruling and what kind of sacrifices you make and so on and so forth that's going on and on and on. It's just assuming that that can happen.

There can be an error. And there doesn't seem to be any sort of governing body that would be capable of giving an infallible determination throughout the Old Testament. You have divine revelation itself, but you don't have that kind of ongoing office like that. That would be a new thing if it came into being. Secondly, it doesn't seem to be envisioned in the New Testament. The New Testament gives us an enormous amount of information about the church, the offices of the church. You think of Ephesians 4, for example, the pastoral epistles, 1 Corinthians 12 to 14. There's so much information in the New Testament about the qualifications for certain offices and their function and so on and so forth. But there is no hint of any kind of post-apostolic office in the church that is infallible or any other kind of infallible rule that will arise.

what people will sometimes appeal to is what is bound on earth, on earth, bound in heaven, Matthew 18, this kind of language. But that's about the apostles. I'm talking about what is envisioned for the post-apostolic church. What are the offices of the church? What are the functions of the church? And you just don't see any idea. You can read throughout all the epistles.

You can read from Matthew to Revelation. There's no idea of the church being given some kind of ongoing infallible capacity for determining truth and interpreting divine revelation. If the church did get that, that would be the single most important thing for the New Testament to tell us because of how determinative this question is. I mean, if there is an infallible office after the apostles, we would need to know that information. That would be the most, that would be more important than anything else that we could know for the offices of the church and the functions of the church, but it's just not there in the text of the New Testament. Third, it's also not present in the early

generations of church history. Just like the Pharisees' conception of an oral law of Moses slowly evolves. It's what I call an accretion, just a slow development over time. So also is the idea of ecclesiastical infallibility. Any kind, all these conceptions. of being unable to err in certain conditions, those are slow. I mean, some of them are really slow. I have a video where I talk about papal infallibility, for example. It's more medieval, is my argument. If you'd like more on this, I won't make my full case here

because I've already whole videos on just this point itself. For example, you could see my video responding to Joshua Charles on Clement, Ignatius, and I'm showing. is that the only way to try to push the idea of infallibility in the church back into these early Christians is by conflating infallibility with other quite distinct ideas like authority or being divinely established and so forth. Because they'll say, well, there's offices in the church that are divinely established, but we all agree with that. That's not the same thing as being incapable of error. Fourth problem is once you do get the idea of ecclesial infallibility

coming into the picture, it seems to create more confusion than clarity, because supposedly infallible teachings don't have a good track record. And I've pointed to examples of this. I mean, of course, my work on icon veneration is something I would point to for that, and just the difference in the church between Nicaa 1 and Nicaa 2. But another area where I've done a whole video is no salvation outside the church, especially in, I would say in both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions actually. Not so much the others like Oriental Orthodox, but in the Roman Catholic tradition is the focus for this particular video. You can see the thumbnail there. By the way, Austin Suggs of the channel, gospel simplicity has a really good treatment of this as well, probably better than

mine. He's going into more detail, really, as always, carefully thinking things through. But without trying to make the case here that he makes there and I make in that video, I would sum it up by saying, I'm sorry guys, but it just really looks like this doctrine meant something different 800 years ago versus today. The elasticity, the change, the stretching it out like a rubber band to try to make it work is so vast that it loses any sort of functional value. Because basically everybody misinterpreted it for like 500 years. If you want to try to establish continuity between a medieval conception of salvation outside the church, and a contemporary one. So at the end of the day, you say, okay, there's simply no good reason to accept the idea that the post-apostolic church possesses ongoing capacities of infallibility.

It doesn't have precedent. It's not envisioned in our founding documents. It wasn't known by the earliest Christians, and it's problematic when it does arise. So putting all of this together, you could sum it up by saying, number one, scripture is an infallible rule for the church in light of what it is and in light of what it does. Almost all Christians historically have agreed upon that. Number two, we don't have any other rule for the church that is infallible. The major candidates would be oral apostolic traditions or ongoing organs of infallibility within the church, but both of these are problematic. The oral apostolic Apostolic tradition has a fallible transmission process, and post-apistolic infallibility just doesn't

have a historical foundation. It's a later gradual accretion. So it follows that if Scripture is an infallible rule for the church, and there is no other infallible rule, then Scripture is the only infallible rule, and that's Solar Scriptura. Just like you'd say, if you believe planet Earth has life, but you don't think any other planet in our solar system has life, then you say, planet Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has life. If someone's going to raise the objection, what about the canon? Because I know that'll come up in the comments. I have a whole video on that if that is your source of concern.

But I hope this video is a helpful video for people thinking this through summing up the work I've done on this topic and providing a broad overview of an argument in favor of the doctrine of solar scriptural. Thanks for watching, everybody.