Truth Unites - What is Sola Scriptura? Response to the Catechumen

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Here I respond to the critique from @thecatechumen of my case for sola Scriptura in a recent debate. See his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2V4KGUi0k Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

What's up, everybody? I've got a new lens for my camera. Let me know if you can tell a difference. If you like the difference, if you don't like the difference, feedback appreciated. If it's a little blurry, that's my fault. I'm still trying to adjust settings. But in terms of the angling and how much comes in, how much you can see, that's what it should be different. It's pouring rain outside today. I'm always in a good mood when it rains. It's my day off. So I'm doing YouTube stuff. And I want to make a response video to one of the criticisms of Soliscriptura from the debate that I have had on that topic, particularly in my case for solo scriptura, put up by a channel called the Catacumen, run by a guy named Braden, seems like a super nice dude.

I met him at the debate, so that was cool. There's lots of response videos. It's always the tricky thing of which ones do you respond to. So what I'm trying to do is be helpful, sometimes to respond to people I haven't responded to before, but also try to respond in areas where maybe we can make progress so we don't just get into a slog back and forth. So this would be very limited. I won't even get into everything in his video, but just one specific.

thing I want to address. And engaging his criticisms gives me the occasion to do that for this broader conversation, hoping to be productive. And that's the definition of solo scriptura. What does it mean? Obviously, definitions are so important. You know, if you were to think about if someone had the wrong view of what people infallibility means, they have the wrong definition. Like, for example, let's suppose someone thinks that they have a different view of what constitutes an ex-cathedral statement. Well, obviously, that's going to be a problem. Similarly with Sola Scriptura, all of these different options that you think about for scripture and tradition and how they relate, they're all pretty nuanced, actually.

So you have to appreciate the nuances and get an accurate understanding. And I really like Brayden. He seems like a nice guy. In this particular video, I think he was trying to be respectful, but I think he didn't give Sola Scripura a fair shake, and it didn't reflect a sympathetic understanding of the complexity of it. And in fairness to him, this is very widespread that's happened. That's why I want to do a video on this.

So I'll do more videos on other things, other responses to the debate as I have time, but I'll try to do little targeted responses where I think we might be able to make progress. You know, obviously you just realize some things we'll just disagree on, but this is one of those areas where maybe we can make some progress and just understanding what this idea is. Because that's the first step. We have to know what it is before we know how to assess it. He starts off the video defining Soliscriptura accurately in terms of how we'd agreed to define it in the debate.

The Scriptures are the sole infallible rules. for the Church, to which all traditions, creeds, catechisms, councils, confessions, and authorities are ultimately in submission. Solo scripture does not exclude all other rules. Rather, it excludes all other rules from carrying the characteristic of infallible. But then, right after that, he adds this. The data which informs one's theology under Protestantism ought to be the scriptures and nothing else. It's like, no, why, I don't know why people add in extra things and expand the definition like

that. And this comes up all throughout the video, and people do this a lot too. So one of the issues here is the conflation of Soliscriptura and the sufficiency of Scripture. You know, those two doctrines, the perspicuity of Scripture, the canon of Scripture, these are all distinct, historically, denominational, and conceptually. They don't necessarily stand or fall together logically, and some traditions will define them differently. So you have to be accurate and focused on each one. You can't criticize one particular idea of the sufficiency of the of Scripture and then think that that thereby criticizes Soliscriptura. They're distinct ideas.

But the bigger problem here is the definition of the sufficiency of Scripture. This is why this is the first thing I did in my opening speech is to try to get the parameters precisely about what precisely, what precisely Sola Scriptura means. And that's why I brought in the good and necessary consequence clause from the Westminster Confession of Faith, which I'll put up. the whole counsel 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 from Scripture.

So you have the whole Council of God concerning those four things is given to us in the scripture in one of two ways, either being expressly or explicitly written or through a deduction from what is written by a good and necessary consequence. Now, other, I quoted that one because that's one of the stronger definitions of the sufficiency of Scripture in the Protestant traditions. Other traditions are even broader. Article 6 of the 39 Anglican articles will put up, this makes it about salvation,

so it's about not binding people to things as necessary that are outside of Scripture. In the Lutheran tradition, the Book of Concord, it refers to Scripture as the only true standard, but the very next sentence gives the apostles, Nicene and Athanasian creeds as legitimate standards. Then it talks about other standards in the Lutheran tradition. So by true, it really means necessarily true or infallible, something like that. It's not saying it's the only standard that may be truthful.

But this comes up all throughout the video. Later, he says this. But it is the case in the classical articulation of Soliscripture that doctrines must be established in scripture, that they must be founded on scripture and no other source. Now the language here founded upon is a bit vague. There's a lot of imprecision in language. You're grounding things in Scripture, founding things on Scripture. That's not the same as it being explicitly in Scripture.

Later on, he puts it one more time like this. Because you would expect such an important doctrine to be explicitly laid out in the very documents that are supposed to serve as a sole grounding for doctrine in general. Now, again, you just have to lop off that word explicitly. again, you know, you just, the thing is that it's so frustrating is I've said this so many times. I mean, that's the thing that one of the things that's frustrating coming out of the debate is some of the reactions you hear, it's obvious that there's going to be some things that need to get clarified, but it's a bummer when the things that need to be clarified are the things

you've already repeatedly been trying to bring clarity to, you know? I would just ask my non-pronisan friends to consider what it feels like when something that is very nuanced, like papal infallibility, is criticized. in an imprecise way that doesn't really hit the target, you know, we've got to be careful to make sure we've really got it right. And the fact is that the good and necessary consequence clause, I mean, I just wish that this would get out there. It's like I kind of feel like saying, I don't want people to think I'm too upset about this, but I kind of feel like saying, what do I need to do? You know, what do I need to do to get this out there? That people will stop saying things like,

well, Solis Sculptura means all doctrines are in the Bible, but it's not in the Bible, therefore is self-defeating. That was one of the first things I said in the debate. I try to say this every time I talk about it. So you just hope that we'll make progress on this. It doesn't mean everything's explicit in the Bible. The sufficiency of Scripture allows for things to be deduced by, as a consequence in the Bible. The thing that you think that we could make progress on this because there are comparable similar ideas in the other traditions, you know, when Roman Catholics are talking about formal sufficiency, material sufficiency, a partum-partum view, that idea of material sufficiency allows for things to be implicit in the scripture.

And so it's real unfortunate when those positions are allowed lots of nuance, but then Protestant positions aren't allowed any nuance, and they're given in this more flat-footed way that's easier to critique. If you find yourself articulating Sola Scriptura in a way that you can set it up and knock it down in 10 seconds, you're probably not really getting at it because Protestants aren't just dumb. There's almost a billion Protestants and we've been around for 500 years. So people have thought about these things and there are responses. And a lot of times you might still ultimately reject it, but it'd be really great if people

would more carefully engage what this doctrine means. So just to hit it one more time, it doesn't mean that everything has to be explicit in the Bible. In fact, that itself is explicitly rejected. And there's the two-fold means by which those four items, Council of God, concerning those four things, can be conveyed in the scripture either explicitly or by good and necessary consequence. Now, you might still reject that, but that'd be the target we'd want to try to hit. Here's another thing I want to show from the video. So in my opinion, in order for Sola Scripture to be true, someone in Scripture, whether Jesus or the Apostles or some other New Testament writer,

would have had to record. this approach to formulating doctrine, that the written scriptures alone are to be the sole foundation for grounding your doctrine. So again, the sole foundation for grounding your doctrine is not quite the same thing as the sole infallible rule. But the other thing I wanted to comment following up on this portion is just that I don't think that that follows. Now, I did personally argue for Soliscriptura from scripture. And I said, basically to reiterate, I said it's the cumulative entailment about what the scripture's nature is and what the scripture's role is in consideration with alternative models. Okay. So talking about scripture's nature, I drew from 2nd Timothy 316,

2nd Peter 121, Romans 3, 2, Matthew 19, 5, John 1035. I had some verses from Psalm 119. I had to leave off for time. You have to distill these things down to get them into 15 minutes or 7 minutes or whatever. With respect to the role of Scripture, I argued from Mark 7, Acts 1711, Galatians 1-8. So I did argue from Scripture, but it's not necessary for it to be explicitly laid out in the scripture. To conclude that something is the only infallible rule, you wouldn't need that infallible rule to tell you that. So here's a meant. Now, for the sufficiency of Scripture, that would depend upon whether you think you can get it by good and necessary consequence. But let's suppose that you had, here's a metaphor for this.

Suppose you have 10 friends, one of them is named John, and you advance the thesis. John is the only trustworthy friend. For that to be something you can have confidence in, you would not need John himself to tell you that. All you would need was to observe that he is trustworthy while catching the other nine not being trustworthy. that alone would yield the conclusion. It's Sola John. He's the only trustworthy. See, I'm trying to help create sympathy for the just conceptual case here for how we're getting to this conclusion.

Now, I think we have more that we can use to get to that conclusion, but I'm just showing that it's not necessary that it be explicitly laid out. You don't need that. So, you know, if you conclude from Psalm 119, 170, 60 and John 1035, as well as a theological inference from the nature of Scripture, that the Bible is infallible. And if you don't think that the other rules of faith that are purportedly infallible are actually infallible, that alone will get you to Soliscriptura. Now, again, I think we have more than just that, but I'm saying that would be sufficient to get to that. This is the basic

argument I'm making. The other thing that is dismaying, this is off of Braden's video and onto a more general comment now is that people seem to, they seem to miss the word cumulative. Again, it's one of those things that is annoying when the very thing you're belaboring to, you know, I said cumulative entailment, cumulative entailment, cumulative entailment. I chose both of those words very precisely, thoughtfully. I said them twice in my opening and it was one of the first things I said in my first rebuttal. Okay. That it's a cumulative entailment, therefore don't critique one.

piece of the argument as though it were the whole argument. And yet, people will still say, oh, so you're assuming that unless something is the inspired word of God, it can't be infallible. No, no, no, no, no. The way the argument works is like this. Scripture is ontologically unique. It's the speech of God. Nothing else we possess as a rule is like that. Also, scripture functions with unrivaled authority. Nothing we possess as a rule does that. Both in what it is and what it does, the scripture is unique and it is infallible as a consequence of its nature. That doesn't automatically yet prove that Soliscriptura is true. Then you say, okay, so if you want to posit something else that is equal to that, you need a good reason for that. If you're going to

put something else into that same bucket, infallible rule, you need a good reason for it. And I gave four reasons why the idea of post-apostolic infallibility doesn't have any good reasons. Old Testament, New Testament, early church, later church history. Without precedent in the Old Testament, without ground in the New Testament, unknown in the early church, contravened by the facts of later church history. So that's how the argument works. To recap, the Bible's unique in what it is, the Bible's unique in what it does. Therefore, if you put something else in the same category of infallible rule, you need a good reason for that, but there are good reasons for that. So all of that is just to show the nature of the argument for

Sola Scriptura. It's not necessary that Sola Scriptura be explicitly laid out in the scripture. Okay, here's another clip. You'd have to assume that God's word is preserved only in the written word, but you can't say this because scripture itself records prophets and apostles accurately and authoritatively communicating God's word to the church and to the people of God throughout salvation history. So if God speaks infallibly and this word from God can be preserved in other means other than the written scriptures, then it follows that other things outside of scripture can be infallible. So if the oral proclamations of the apostles whenever they were giving God's word and God's will and God's revelation and

those teachings were preserved in the church, then that is another example of an infallible rule. Now there are two reasons why this criticism misses the target and this helps us again get conceptual clarity about what Sola Scriptura is. First, this criticism that Braden gave there, it misses the distinction between the inspired word of God and the word of God generally. That adjective inspired does convey an ontological distinction. This is something I talked about a lot in the debate, just to circle back. This is what we're getting at. This is the adjective inspired we use when we're trying to get at what 2. Peter 121 speaks of as born of the Holy Spirit.

what 2 Timothy 316 speaks of by God breathed. The essential idea of this idea of biblical inspiration is that the words, the very particular words, not just the general ideas, but the very particular words are of divine origin. Simplest way to put it is just as the scripture itself does. They're the words of God, Romans 3, 2. Or Matthew 19.5, the scripture is God speaking. That's the most colloquial, simple way to put it. By the way, in his classic treatment of biblical inspiration, B.B. Warfield is commenting on the

verb there used in 2. Peter 121. You could translate that carried or moved or born. This men spoke from God carried by the Holy Spirit or moved by the Holy Spirit. You could translate that. I mentioned Richard Bacham's translation, born of the Holy Spirit. Here's what Warfield says. He says the term here used is a very specific one. It is not to be confounded with guiding or directing or controlling or even leading in the full sense of that word. It goes beyond all such terms in assigning the effect produced specifically to the active agent. What is born is taken up by the bearer and conveyed by the bearer's power, not its own, to the bearer's goal, not its own.

What he's getting at there is the contrast that's present in that verse between divine and human, and this idea that, you know, a prophecy of scripture doesn't come from the human agent. That's the medium through which it goes, but ultimately the origin is, is divine. It comes from God. Men spoke from God carried by the Holy Spirit. So this is what we're talking about when we say the inspired word of God. Now this is not a point of difference between our traditions, Protestant and Catholic. This is a point of agreement. When the Pope makes an ex-cathedra statement, this is not the inspired word of God. When an ecumenical council offers a theological verdict, that is not the speech of God or God talking or spirit

carried. Same with any other mechanism of infallibility. If you're talking about the Or ordinary universal magisterium of the church and the deliverances of that. That is not the speech of God. We agree that there's an ontological difference between the inspired word of God and then various other things that we can also refer to as the Word of God, which is true in all of our traditions. We can use that term more generally. So in the reformed tradition and Calvin and Luther and they all talked about how the preaching of the gospel can be called the Word of God. But that's not the same thing as the inspired word of God. Okay, the second problem with Praden's critique there, that I'm trying to speak to these things, not just to attack at him,

but just because I think clarity on these things will help us, is that with respect to other expressions of the Word of God, we don't possess them as a rule. So if we're talking about anything that would be comparable to the inspired Word of God, we don't have it as a rule. And you can't be ruled by something if you don't know what it is. This is why in the debate I made this distinction between infallible teaching and fallible transmission of infallible teaching. There's lots of things you could say are divine speech, God speaking. When God spoke to Moses through the burning bush, he's hearing words. That's God speaking.

You know, in the Garden of Eden, God will speak to Adam and Eve, to the prophets, not everything that they said. In fact, even some of the things they wrote didn't, like Jeremiah's scroll was destroyed, but that was presumably the inspired word of God. So we're not saying that everything, that the only place you ever find the inspired word of God is in the scripture. We're saying it's the only thing we have that's the inspired word of God. Everything else that purports to be the inspired word of God that would come to us comes to us through the telephone game. Okay?

And if you just study church history, you see how easy it is for errors to creep in. When you have written texts with so many manuscripts by which to do text criticism, the margin of error in the process of transmission is comparatively tiny and it does not touch any of the major dogmas of the faith. Here's a metaphor for this. I was going to use this in the debate, but so much of what I prepared I didn't have time for because it was so constricted, you know. Imagine you're in a class, it's a class on Aristotle philosophy class. professor says, the highest authority in this class is going to be the canon of Aristotle's own writings. We're going to put a methodological priority on Aristotle's views and teachings rather than secondary literature. So we want to know what did Aristotle think.

And someone raised their hand and says, oh, but why are you just limiting it to what Aristotle wrote down? His oral teaching can also tell you what his own views were. Now the professor is going to say, what are you talking about, right? We don't have that. He lived thousands of years ago. But I think it's a fairly logical expectation. If Scripture is the only source to base our theology, then that approach must be warranted by scripture itself.

But instead, what you find, as I demonstrated in my video of Soul Scriptura, is that if the scriptures anticipate how the next generation of Christians would formulate their doctrine, it is that they would hold on to the traditions which were passed onto them in whatever form they were delivered. Again, there's this character here of the only source. Whenever you hear the word source, that's a different word than rule, so we're moving. But the other thing I wanted to say on this, just to bring hopefully some clarity is Soliscriptura is a conceptual framework for the church. The specific question it's designed to address is how we function as the church now that we are in the era in which public divine revelation has closed. It's looking out of the church and saying, okay, how does the church do theology?

What's our ultimate divine rule that we look to? And we all agree that public divine revelation has ceased, so it's problematic to critique Soliscriptura by pointing to what was happening while public revelation was still going on. You see, things do change with the apostles all dying because the apostles were unique. Now, by the way, that doesn't mean you'd have to reject all. traditions that were purported to be apostolic. It just means they're not infallible. So you can't assume that they are true. You need to look at them and say, well, is it actually an apostolic tradition? But it doesn't mean you have to reject it. It just means you don't accept it as

infallible. So anyway, maybe it would help people on this to not think of Soliscriptura. Don't think of it like this, that, well, there's the Word of God in both its oral form and its written form and we're just arbitrarily rejecting the oral form because we prefer the written form for some reason. That's not the intent or the idea. The heart cry behind Soliscriptura, the cry of the conscience behind it is not a preference for written versus oral, but it's a preference, it's a desire to basically be rooted to what's apostolic. And it's just the accidental facts of history and circumstances of history that make the written the best way to do that to the same reason that you read Aristotle, you want to know his views, you got to read his books

because he's no longer alive. And I'm sorry, but we do worry about the telephone game when it come. I mean, look at the most recent Roman Catholic dogma, the bodily assumption of Mary. People, if people say, well, you always bring that one up, well, if you make it infallible, I'm allowed to bring it up because now it's on the table. We've got to talk about it now. And the fact is that I don't even know how strongly to state my concerns about this. Because anytime I try to say it, it doesn't come out strong enough. And I need people to understand just the vice grip you put on our conscience. When you make us affirm something like that, that just has abysmal historical testimony.

I mean, just it's like hundreds of years of silence plus dozens of people going against the idea. I did a video on it and I've studied it since that video and I could go on about that. But the point is, that's why we worry about the telephone game. Anybody can just come along and say, well, our traditions are the apostolic traditions. People can make that claim. But the fact is transmission errors happen very easily in oral transmission. And that's why we have Soliscriptura. So we don't have things like the bodily assumption of Mary coming along as a universal,

obligatory, irreformable dogma of the faith. So those are the few points I wanted to just quickly insert into the larger chain of conversation, hoping they bring conceptual clarity upon what solo scriptura is. There's other things that Breeden brought up that we could talk about another time, the canon. He brought up the canon. I'm happy with what I said about that in my first rebuttal. I condensed it all down into like a two-minute sound bite of just what I wanted to say about the canon.

I gave a philosophical principle, and then I gave historical arguments. I was saying you don't need to be infallible to recognize that which is infallible. And then I tried to show that that's how it happened with the Old Testament and the Jewish people and the early church and the scripture. But even in a two-minute soundbite, of course, you can't give all this documentation for things. But I'm trying to at least share how I deal with that challenge. So that's something so then we could have to talk about that further. But here I'm just trying to focus on this basic issue. What is the idea on the table?

Because if we don't have clarity about it, the conversation is not even going to get off the ground. It'd be like me launching critiques on papal infallibility because I think ex-catheter statements are different than how the Roman Catholic Church says ex-catheter statements are. And you can imagine how that's going to go arrive very quickly. So I'll close by simply saying, as I said in the debate, when you strip away the caricatures, Soliscriptura is an incredibly compact, modest, reasonable, chaste idea. It's simply saying, God is unique, therefore his speech is unique. If you want to put something equal to the speech of God with respect to infallibility,

you need a good reason. And as I argued, for those four points I brought up, we don't have good reasons. Actually, that's something I feel really convicted about that I wish, I hope people would look into with an open mind. The whole idea of ongoing post-apostolic mechanisms of infallibility in the church, that is light. That's medieval. It really is. when people try to argue for it from the patristic era, they have to do it inferentially, saying, well, the church spoke with authority or definitively, therefore it must be infallible. There's a few episodes people can

maybe try to point to that are stronger than that, but for the most part, it's, you just don't find the idea of infallibility, an incapacity for error in some mechanism. You don't find that early on in church history, and I just don't think you see it anywhere. There are all of redemptive history, until you get to the medieval era. So that's what a lot of the Roman Catholics, in the 19th century who were opposing Vatican I, which is a pretty sizable minority, things were contested around papal infallibility.

That's what they were saying. They were appealing to history and saying, that's what the old Catholics said when they broke off at Vatican 1. They were like, this, it's never been, that's what the Eastern Orthodox say. It's never been that way that you take infallibility and look it in one person, the Pope? That's just a new.

That's a later accretion. So anyway, thanks for watching this. Hopefully that brings some clarity to this topic. And it's pouring rain even harder than it was when I started. So I am going to go on a walk in the rain. I know it's odd that I love doing that actually. Let me know what you think at the comments. This is just one modest thing video.

There will be others. I'll be doing other responses. I'm going to do something on the whole idea of can Protestants agree on the essentials of the faith? I can do something on that? What I'm going to try to do is just the most important. important issues that rise up, rather than doing like a line by line response to every response video, I'm just going to try to hit the main topics out there. And so this is an initial video about the idea of solo scriptura, the definition of it. I'll have others to follow on

some of the other points. I'll do my best to keep up with the discussion as I can, and I appreciate everybody making videos about it. All right, God bless everybody. Bye-bye.