Sola Scriptura: Trying Something New

In this episode, Jimmy explores an idea that is seldom proposed in Protestant circles—the claim that their core principle of sola scriptura (“by Scripture alone”) is not actually a doctrine. Instead, it’s an interpretive principle.

The motivation for this claim is that, if sola scriptura is a doctrine then—since it holds that all doctrines have to be proved by Scripture alone—sola scriptura itself must be proved by Scripture alone, and it can’t be. It’s thus self-refuting.

This has led a few Protestants to propose that sola scriptura is not a doctrine but an ordinary rule of interpretation that should be justified by reason alone rather than by passages of Scripture.

One of the most sustained treatments of this idea is from Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity, and in this episode Jimmy interacts with Austin’s proposals and sees how well the idea of sola scriptura as an interpretive principle rather than a doctrine holds up.

 

Transcript:

Coming Up

AUSTIN SUGGS: And I know that the majority of people who watch my videos will disagree and perhaps quite strongly with the notion of so scriptura, and that’s fine. I’m not here to convince you to become Protestant or to adopt solo scriptura. However, if you watch my videos, I like to think you value intellectual rigor and honesty, and that’s what today’s video is all about. I want to look at some common arguments against solas scriptura and explore where they might be lacking.

Let’s dive in!

* * *

Howdy, folks!

If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing

If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video

And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

 

Who Is Austin Suggs?

Austin Suggs is a really nice guy. He’s a young gentleman who runs the Gospel Simplicity channel on YouTube.

Although an Evangelical by background, he’s been on a bit of an ecumenical journey—which he has publicly shared—and he creates videos looking at theological issues affecting Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox.

I’ve been on his channel, myself!

Austin is not on a quest to convert anybody, as you heard in our opening clip.

I gather that he regards Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox as fellow Christians who have more in common than what separates us.

He’s also a very charitable and thoughtful guy, which I very much appreciate. In fact, I think that he thinks more deeply about many of these issues than most apologists producing content online, which leads us to the subject of today’s video.

 

Sola Scriptura

Recently, Austin published a video on the topic of sola scriptura—a Latin phrase that means “by Scripture alone.”

The video was titled “My Thoughts on Sola Scriptura: Responding to Common Objections,” and in it, Austin does something really interesting.

In fact, he takes an approach toward sola scriptura that very few people take, and he offers the most sustained and thoughtful exploration of this approach that I’ve seen on YouTube, which is why I wanted to interact with his video.

I really appreciate what Austin is trying to do here—because he’s trying to find a way to approach sola scriptura that is more defensible than the way it is normally presented. I admire that, and it deserves interaction.

Let’s start with Austin’s definition of the concept.

For today’s purposes, I want to describe sola scriptura as a theological principle. That’s key that says scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history and therefore should act as the rule against which we measure all other theological claims. If that’s a bit too Barthian for you, maybe it is. Here’s Gavin Orland’s description of it in his book, What It Means to Be Protestant that sola scriptura is the claim that scripture is the only authority standing over the church that is incapable of error. There’s plenty of others. You could look to the Westminster Confession and things like that for ways in which this principle has been expressed. But here are just a couple Anyway, now you know what we’re working with in this video.

Now, Austin has already mentioned what’s unique about his approach, but here he calls attention to it.

So one important word to note here is that of principle. Properly speaking, Sola scriptura is not an exegetically derived doctrine. It means we’re not going to scripture to get it and pull it out. This is not like a theological slight of hand. Rather it’s a logical necessity to say that the method we use to interpret has to come prior to that which we are interpreting.

So that’s the key thing that makes what Austin is doing different than what most do. He’s explicitly rejecting the idea that sola scriptura is a doctrine and instead claiming that it’s an interpretive principle.

This is not what most Protestants do. Most regard sola scriptura as a doctrine rather than a simple interpretive principle, and if you ask them why they believe it, they will try to come up with passages in Scripture to prove it.

The problem is that none of the proposed passages do, and so a few individuals—like Austin—have tried abandoning the idea that sola scriptura is a doctrine and instead propose that it is an interpretive principle. That’s what sets Austin’s position apart from most folks.

I normally interact with people who hold that sola scriptura is a doctrine, but there are a few who have tried exploring the position Austin is taking, and so it’s worth accompanying them on this journey and looking at what they have to say—which is what I’ll be doing in this video.

Having proposed an understanding of sola scriptura, what Austin does next is go through five common objections to sola scriptura and evaluate how well they hold up in light of this alternate conceptualization.

To interact with this, I’ll briefly review Austin’s thoughts on how well the objections hold up, and then I’ll offer my own thoughts on the alternate understanding of sola scriptura itself.

 

Objection 1: Sola Scriptura Isn’t in Scripture

So the first objection that Austin considers in light of his proposal that sola scriptura is a principle rather than a doctrine is that sola scriptura isn’t taught in Scripture. He says:

Okay, so the first and most obvious, most popular argument against so scriptura is that solo scriptura is not taught in scripture. Some people will define solo scriptura as scripture should be the source for all doctrines and people will assume solo scriptura is also a doctrine and say that this is contradictory since the Bible nowhere teaches solo scriptura. However, if we take it as a theological principle, not an ex energetically derived doctrine, I think we can already see that we can avoid some of this quagmire.

I’d actually put it more strongly than Austin does. If sola scriptura requires that all doctrines be taught in Scripture and sola scriptura is a doctrine, then it would have to be taught in Scripture to meet its own test.

But if it’s not a doctrine then it doesn’t have to be taught in Scripture.

The first argument thus would be completely undercut if sola scriptura is not a doctrine.

Of course, you’d need some other basis to assert sola scriptura—and we’ll come back to that—but the idea that sola scriptura is self-refuting because it’s a doctrine not taught in Scripture would be completely undercut. That argument just would not work.

Now, Austin was less definite and only said that we could avoid a lot of the quagmire, but he goes on to talk about the issue of which books do and do not belong to the canon of Scripture, and that’s getting into his second argument, so let’s turn to that.

 

Objection 2: Sola Scriptura Couldn’t Work Before the Canon

The second objection that Austin considers is that sola scriptura would not have worked before the canon of Scripture was identified. He says:

The next argument, solos scriptura couldn’t work for the first 400 years of the church. Many Protestants, many Christians in general actually are not very familiar with the history of the Bible, so it’s understandable that some Protestants are swayed by the idea that solo scripture must be false because the early church didn’t have a complete canon and therefore couldn’t know what the scripture was for us to judge doctrines with.

Austin says that he does not find this persuasive, and I would agree, but on somewhat different grounds than he articulates.

What I would say is that sola scriptura could not be implemented the way it is today by Protestants before the canon was identified, but that doesn’t mean that the principle couldn’t be used before it was.

Let me give you an example. The canon had not been fully identified in the early A.D. 300s, and the early Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea summarizes the state of opinion among Christians around the year 300. He says that Christians put books related to Scripture into three categories—the accepted books, the disputed books, and the rejected books.

Accepted Books:

• The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
• Acts
• The letters of Paul
• 1 John
• 1 Peter

Disputed Books:

• Letter to the Hebrews
• James
• 2 Peter
• 2-3 John
• Jude
• Revelation of John
• Shepherd of Hermas
• Gospel of the Hebrews

Rejected Books:

• Revelation of Peter
• Letter of Barnabas
• The Didache
• Gospels of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias
• Acts of Paul, Andrew, and John

See Eusebius, Church History, 3:25:1-6 with 3:3:4-6.

The accepted books were those that all orthodox Christians accepted as Scripture, and they included things like the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of St. Paul apart from Hebrews.

The rejected books were those that all orthodox Christians rejected as Scripture, and they included things like the Revelation of Peter, the letter of Barnabas, and most of the non-canonical Gospels.

In the middle were the disputed books, and here orthodox Christians had different opinions. Some thought that these books were Scripture and some thought that they were not. Books in this category included Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, Revelation, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Gospel of the Hebrews that was favored by Jewish Christians.

So some Christians would think—for example—that Hebrews was Scripture but Revelation was not, while others would think that the Shepherd of Hermas was Scripture but 2 Peter was not. There were many variations, with different Christians holding different views on different books in this category.

Now, let’s suppose that you’re an orthodox Christian living in the year 300. Could you apply the principle of sola scriptura? Sure! You could say, “Sola scriptura holds that every item of binding Christian belief needs to be taught or implied in Scripture, so if you want me to believe something, you need to show it to me from the books that I regard as Scripture.”

Thus, you might prove a doctrine by appealing to one or more of the accepted books—like the four Gospels, Acts, or the letters of Paul excepting Hebrews.

If I’m also a Christian who accepts Hebrews but rejects Revelation and isn’t sure whether 2 Peter is Scripture or not, then you could also prove it to me by appealing to Hebrews. You could not prove it by appealing to Revelation, since I reject that one. And you could make an argument for it based on 2 Peter, but it won’t be a conclusive argument for me since I’m not sure if 2 Peter is Scripture or not.

In this situation, you’d be using sola scriptura to try to convince me of a doctrine, you just wouldn’t be using it with the modern canon. Instead, you’d be using the canon that I personally accept.

This is like when Catholics and Orthodox try to convince Protestants of doctrines by only appealing to the smaller canons that they accept. It’s the same principle.

To return to our situation, let’s let some time go by and suppose I’m the same Christian but living in the year 320. By this point, I’ve become convinced that 2 Peter is Scripture, so you can now appeal to that book also when you’re arguing for a doctrine.

The principle of sola scriptura is the same; it’s just that now I have a larger canon, and so you can appeal to an extra book.

What you can’t do is employ sola scriptura the way modern Protestants do—with a 66-book canon—before that 66-book canon has been identified and accepted. But you can apply the principle with whatever canon a person accepts at a given moment.

And this is true whether or not sola scriptura is a doctrine or a principle. It’s just that if it’s a doctrine, it must be taught or implied in the books that a person accepts.

 

Objection 3: The Fathers Don’t Teach Sola Scriptura

We now come to the third objection that Austin considers, which is the fact that the early Church Fathers do not teach sola scriptura.

Put most strongly, it is formulated along the lines that if sola scriptura is the most reasonable hermeneutical principle for the church today, why is it that the church didn’t come to this conclusion until later in her life?

He also adds this:

After all, if we formulate solo scriptura as a principle and not a doctrine, we must argue for it based on reasonableness or fittingness as a way of approaching scripture not solely off of a proof text.

And that’s something we’ll come back to when we look at whether sola scriptura should be understood as a principle or a doctrine, but for now, let’s focus on the Fathers.

If sola scriptura is a principle that needs to be justified on the grounds of reasonableness—if it really is the most reasonable position—why didn’t the Fathers see it? Why did they go for centuries—around 1500 years—without seeing it?

That would seem very odd and implausible, and Austin confesses that he thinks this is one of the better arguments against the understanding of sola scriptura he is proposing.

He does have some ways to reconcile it with the fact that the Fathers didn’t teach sola scriptura—so it’s not that the two things are totally incompatible—but he does note that this argument has some force.

And I agree with that. I tend not to use this argument from the Fathers, because I think sola scriptura needs to be understood as a doctrine, and it fails on that basis alone. However, I agree that—if it is meant to be a reasonable exegetical principle rather than a doctrine—then it’s very odd but not impossible that the Fathers wouldn’t have spotted it.

 

Objection 4: We Can’t Agree on What Sola Scriptura Is

We now come to the fourth objection.

Number four, okay, we talked about this early on and that is that we can’t agree upon a definition of sola scriptura. I mentioned at the beginning that some people will point to different definitions of sola scriptura and say, see, with sola scriptura, you can’t even come to agreement on what sola scriptura is. It’s certainly true that people have defined the principle in different ways. However, I don’t see this as all that surprising. . . .

While people define it differently, it doesn’t mean that the concept is inherently wrong or incoherent.

And I definitely agree with Austin here. The mere fact that there are different definitions for sola scriptura doesn’t prove that the concept is false.

All it proves is that different, mutually exclusive definitions can’t all be right, but that doesn’t mean that none of them are right.

Austin points out that Catholics sometimes use different definitions of Tradition, but that doesn’t mean that all understandings of Tradition are false, and the same thing is true of sola scriptura. Multiple definitions, and even multiple, mutually exclusive definitions does not prove universal falsity.

Frankly, I’m not sure who Austin is thinking of when he says some people use this argument. Personally, I never use such an argument. Given the breadth of quality in apologetic discussions, though, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are people using the argument.

Where I think this kind of reasoning can play a role is in two areas.

First, there are situations in which Protestants seek to minimize the amount of doctrinal diversity in their own movement. They may portray Protestants as unified around the positions of sola scriptura and sola fide—or “by Scripture alone” and “by faith alone”—but this unity is purely verbal, and it masks actual doctrinal diversity.

For example, what a Lutheran means by sola fide is different than what a Baptist means by sola fide. Thus, a Lutheran sees no problem in saying that we are justified by faith alone and that this doesn’t rule out baptism as a means of salvation. While a Baptist will say that justification by faith alone absolutely does rule out baptism as a means of salvation.

There are similar disagreements with numerous aspects of justification—like whether you can be justified through infant baptism or not, whether you can lose the state of justification or not, what causes you to lose the state of justification, whether you can regain the state of justification, whether people get different rewards in heaven, whether you need to obey God’s law for salvation after justification, and numerous other issues.

So even though Protestants adhere to the slogan sola fide, they interpret it in radically different ways.

The same thing is true of the slogan sola scriptura. What “by Scripture alone” means to a traditional, high church Anglican is very different than what it means to a low church Baptist, and what it means to a low church Baptist is very different than what it means to a Word-Faith Pentecostal.

The truth is that—while Protestants use the formulas sola scriptura and sola fide—they interpret these formulas in very different ways, and when they use their verbal unity to mask the real doctrinal diversity they have, it’s fair to point that out.

The second area where the different definitions of sola scriptura is fair to point out is when an individual Protestant tries to disguise his definition.

Very often in discussions, Protestant apologists will offer one definition for sola scriptura when they use another in practice. They will thus offer a more modest, more minimal formulation of sola scriptura in apologetic discussions for defensive reasons—because a smaller target is harder to attack—but then they will turn around and demand that Catholics be able to prove their doctrines using a more robust definition of sola scriptura.

For example, a Protestant apologist trying to defend sola scriptura might say that it only means that Scripture is uniquely inspired and that nothing can contradict Scripture, and that’s a very modest claim. In fact, it’s so modest that a Catholic would agree with it. Scripture is uniquely inspired, and nothing can contradict Scripture.

But then the same Protestant will go on the offensive and say, “You must prove Catholic doctrine X by showing me proof texts in the Bible that positively teach it!” Okay, that’s a different definition of sola scriptura.

What the apologist has done in that case is use the more modest definition when he’s on the defensive and the more robust definition when he’s on the offensive. He’s switching between different understandings of sola scriptura and picking whichever suits him at the moment.

That inconsistency means that he’s engaging in intellectual hypocrisy, and he may not even realize that he’s being a hypocrite. He may be doing this unconsciously. But when he is doing it, it’s fair to point that out and insist that he pick a definition and stick with it. He can’t have it both ways.

However, these are limited situations. If a Protestant isn’t trying to hide the doctrinal diversity in the Protestant movement by appealing to sola scriptura, and if he isn’t switching between different definitions of it, then the fact there are different definitions isn’t relevant.

One might take note of what definition a person is using, but the existence of other definitions doesn’t mean that the definition a person is using is false. What we need to do is identify the definition that’s under discussion and then evaluate that definition.

 

Objection 5: Sola Scriptura Makes Everyone the Pope

Now we come to the fifth and final objection Austin considers.

Number five, sola scriptura makes everyone the pope and causes divisions.

So this is really two objections: That sola scriptura makes everyone the pope and that it causes divisions. Austin deals with the second of these first.

When non Protestants object to sola scriptura based on the divisions it creates, I think in some ways Protestants must be honest and lament the divided state of Protestantism. It is a scandal and we should not merely waive it away as though it weren’t. At the same time, Protestants do have a right to investigate the twofold claim that Sola scriptura is at fault for this and that this means sola scriptura is false.

On the first point, I would largely agree that decreasing the relative authority of the church vis-a-vis scripture has resulted in people feeling a greater liberty to break away from an ecclesial body when they deem it is at odds with things that the Scripture teaches. In this way, solid scripture could be said to lead to splintering in this way. One could say that a certain amount of divisiveness is a side effect of sola scriptura. To continue the medical metaphor, the question is whether the side effects are justified by the cure.

I basically agree with what Austin says here. Sola scriptura—which by its nature incorporates a greater degree of private judgement than other systems, since Scripture alone is considered authoritative for a Christian’s beliefs—will result in a greater degree of disagreement and doctrinal diversity, as it has in Protestantism.

It’s fair to point that out, as Austin does.

But I also agree with him that this does not settle the matter. Just because a principle leads to a higher or lower degree of doctrinal diversity doesn’t tell us whether the principle is true or false.

As a result, I don’t use the argument from disagreement when I’m critiquing sola scriptura. It’s worth noting that the disagreement happens, and that the disagreement is undesirable, but it doesn’t prove that sola scriptura is false.

To see why, consider the alternative position of determining doctrine by Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium rather than Scripture alone. In this case, we have an additional source of information besides Scripture—namely, apostolic Tradition. We also have an interactive interpreter—the Magisterium—to guide us in the correct interpretation of Scripture and Tradition.

Having these additional resources—apostolic Tradition and the Magisterium—means we have more data to work with, and so for people who accept and use the Catholic system, there will be less disagreement than for those who use the Protestant system. But there will still be some disagreement, because the Magisterium has not settled every issue and does not immediately settle issues when they first come up. So there will still be some disagreement and doctrinal diversity.

God could eliminate this if he just directly downloaded the correct understanding of all points of Christian teaching into our brains, but it apparently is not his will to do that for us in this life.

As a result, God tolerates a system that incorporates some measure of uncertainty and thus some measure of disagreement and diversity.

But if God tolerates that, then it’s just a question of how much disagreement and diversity God is willing to tolerate. Perhaps he wants less disagreement—as on the system used by faithful Catholics—or perhaps he chooses to tolerate more disagreement—as on the system used by faithful Protestants.

It’s fair to point out that the system used by Protestants is more prone to disagreement than the system used by Catholics, but this does not prove that the system is false.

Now Austin addresses the related objection.

Part of this objection to sola scriptura based on divisions is the idea that it elevates private judgment too much or put colloquially makes everyone the pope. . . . This is the point that Protestants and Catholics or Orthodox seem at an impasse constantly talking past each other for fear of doing that. Here,

I must say that this argument doesn’t land for me. The problem of private judgment is a problem for everyone. Whether we submit to the authority of the church or scripture, there is inevitably both private judgment and interpretation involved. We must use our God-given reason to judge whether our submission is warranted. We don’t merely submit to everyone making authority claims, so therefore you must be privately judging these claims. There’s no way around that. Some people will grant this point, but say, I submit to the church, but you don’t really submit to the Bible just your interpretation of it.

Once again, though, I failed to see how or not all interpreting truth claims, whether we’re interpreting the book of Romans or Pope Francis Vatican II, the USCCB, and our local priest’s application of his bishop’s, instructions interpretation is just a fact of life. You might argue that you think one option is easier to interpret, and fair enough, but it’s not the case that any of us escape private judgment or interpretation.

I think that what Austin says here—taken in total—is substantially correct, and personally, I never argue against sola scriptura on the ground that it makes everyone the pope or involves private judgment.

All of us do use our own judgment. God gave us intellects to guide us through life, and he expects us to use them. Since none of us are Borg drones, we can’t avoid using private judgment. Austin is right about that.

It’s true—from the Catholic perspective that I personally hold—that the Magisterium of the Church is here to help us interpret the sources of faith—Scripture and Tradition—but even when the Magisterium speaks, I still have to interpret what it says, and as someone who spends lots of time reading and interpreting magisterial documents, that’s something I’m very well aware of.

What many Protestants neglect is that the fact the Magisterium is still with us means that it’s interactive, so when a new question comes up, the Magisterium can address it. And if people interpret what the Magisterium says the wrong way, the Magisterium can clarify what it has said and point out the misinterpretation.

That’s a real advantage that the Catholic system has which the Protestant system does not, and many Protestants completely fail to note this advantage, but Austin does not. Remember, he said:

You might argue that you think one option is easier to interpret, and fair enough.

So Austin acknowledges that it’s fair enough to say that some options make interpretation easier than others, and that’s true of the Catholic system. Because it incorporates a living Magisterium that can address new questions and issue clarifications, it does make interpretation easier than in other systems, like in sola scriptura.

But—as with the previous objection—this doesn’t prove the Catholic system. We already know that God is willing to tolerate some degree of difficulty in interpretation. We covered that in the previous objection about disagreement. It’s also illustrated by the fact that the Old Testament prophets used symbols that are hard to interpret and the fact that Jesus taught in parables.

So if God is willing to tolerate some degree of difficulty in interpretation, we can’t say, “Your system must be false because it involves more difficulty in interpretation than mine.”

As a Catholic, I’m glad that my system involves less difficulty. I think that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t—of itself—prove that sola scriptura is false.

 

The Story So Far . . .

So let’s summarize the objections to sola scriptura that Austin has considered.

The first objection was that sola scriptura is not found in Scripture. Austin said this was true but it doesn’t matter if it’s a principle of interpretation rather than a doctrine. I agree with that. If it’s not a doctrine, it doesn’t need to be taught in Scripture.

The second claim was that sola scriptura was not usable before the canon. Austin appeared to say that it was, and—although he argued for this differently than I would—I agree. You could use the principle of sola scriptura before the canon was fully identified.

The third claim was that sola scriptura is not taught by the Church Fathers. Austin said that he thought that this argument has some force but is not conclusive. I agree.

The fourth claim was that sola scriptura doesn’t have an agreed upon definition. Austin said that this doesn’t prove that the concept is false. I agree. Just because there are rival definitions doesn’t mean that none of them are good.

The next claim was that sola scriptura produces disagreement. Austin said it does have this tendency but that does not prove that it’s false. Once again, I agree.

And the last claim was that sola scriptura elevates private judgment too high, making everyone the pope. Austin said that we all have to deal with private interpretation, and he’s right about that. What this objection really amounts to is that the issue of interpretation is easier in some systems than others, but this doesn’t prove that sola scriptura is false, and I agree.

I thus find myself in broad agreement with what Austin said. I don’t always express the reasons why in the same way, but I agree with the fundamental conclusions.

And yet I disagree with sola scriptura.

Why is that?

Well, there’s a difference in the objections we just covered. All of them except the first  are lesser-order arguments that don’t amount to proof. Since I think you can disprove sola scriptura, I don’t bother using them precisely because they are weak.

It’s not that they lack all force, and one could try using them as part of a cumulative case—none of the individual elements of which are decisive—but if you can provide a positive disproof then I don’t consider it advisable to spend time on lesser, inconclusive arguments when a decisive one is available.

That focuses our attention on the first objection—the fact that sola scriptura isn’t mentioned in Scripture. So let’s take a closer look at that.

 

What Is Sola Scriptura?

To start, let’s go back and refresh our memory of how Austin defined sola scriptura.

For today’s purposes, I want to describe solo scripture as a theological principle—that’s key—that says scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history and therefore should act as the rule against which we measure all other theological claims.

So there’s a good bit to analyze there, but let’s start with the word “measure.” Austin says that Scripture is the rule against which we measure all other theological claims. What does this mean? What does it mean to measure a theological claim?

There are at least two possibilities, one of which is stronger than the other.

The strong possibility for what it means to “measure” something is to prove it. On this understanding, if you want to propose something as an item of Christian doctrine, you’d have to be able to prove it by Scripture alone. That is, Scripture contains some verse or set of verses that either teach or imply the item in question.

However, this does not seem to be what Austin has in mind. He appears to have something much weaker in mind, which is just the idea that Scripture must not contradict proposed items of Christian doctrine.

This is suggested by the fact Austin also uses Gavin Ortlund’s definition of sola scriptura.

Here’s Gavin Ortlund’s description of it in his book, What It Means to Be Protestant: that sola scripture is the claim that scripture is the only authority standing over the church that is incapable of error.

So this is a much more modest definition. It merely says that Scripture is incapable of error, which would mean that Scripture can’t contradict any proposed items of Christian doctrine. If there is a contradiction, then since Scripture is incapable of error, the proposed item of doctrine must be wrong.

The same, weaker understanding of sola scriptura is also suggested by Austin when he says:

Sola scriptura is a principle designed for arbitrating disagreements. It comes to light when scripture and other authorities, indeed valid ones, are at odds. In these cases, sola scriptura teaches us to side with scripture. It doesn’t mean that these authorities are invalid, it just is the tool that we use When a teaching of scripture is at odds with an authority, even a valid one.

So it sounds like Austin is conceptualizing sola scriptura in a very weak form. It appears to mean just that Scripture is guaranteed to be correct, and so anything that contradicts Scripture must be incorrect.

What can we say about this?

 

Not the Historic Understanding

The first thing to say is that this is not the historic understanding of sola scriptura in Protestant circles.

You can see this in the very name sola scriptura. It means “by Scripture alone” the same way that sola fide means “by faith alone.” In Latin, all of these terms—sola, scriptura, and fide—are in what is known as the ablative case, and the ablative case is something Latin uses to convey what English conveys by a preposition, like the preposition by. So sola fide doesn’t mean faith alone. It means by faith alone. So how are we justified? By faith alone.

In the same way sola scriptura means by Scripture alone, so what is the thing that you are to do sola scriptura? What is the thing you are to do by Scripture alone? People might use different terms here, but the answer would be that you are supposed to form Christian doctrine or teaching—or do theology—by Scripture alone. Christian doctrine is to be formed by Scripture alone.

But that’s more than what the weaker understanding of sola scriptura indicates. If you’ve made sure that your doctrine doesn’t contradict Scripture, that doesn’t mean that you’re doing theology by Scripture alone. As Austin said:

Sola scriptura is a principle designed for arbitrating disagreements. It comes to light when scripture and other authorities, indeed valid ones, are at odds. In these cases, sola scriptura teaches us to side with scripture. It doesn’t mean that these authorities are invalid, it just is the tool that we use When a teaching of scripture is at odds with an authority, even a valid one.

So if these other authorities—like Tradition and the Magisterium—are valid and thus okay to use in forming Christian doctrine, you aren’t doing doctrine by Scripture alone. You may have given Scripture pride of place among your sources, but you aren’t doing theology using Scripture alone.

The very term sola scriptura thus indicates that the historic understanding of this concept is the strong one, not the weak one.

The same thing is indicated by one of the other sources Austin references—the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was a confessional document produced in the Church of England in 1646 and that has become influential among Calvinists. It says:

The whole counsel of God . . . is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men (Westminster Confession 1:6).

So that’s a much more historic presentation of sola scriptura. Everything God wants us to believe—all of Christian doctrine or “the whole counsel of God,” as they put it—is either  expressly set down in Scripture or it can be deduced from Scripture by good and necessary consequence. In other words, you can prove it by Scripture alone.

And you aren’t to add anything else to Scripture—whether new revelations or traditions of men. Those are not to be used as authorities when forming Christian doctrine, at least for the men who wrote the Westminster Confession.

We thus see—both from the phrase sola scriptura and from the Westminster Confession—that the weaker understanding that Austin is proposing is not the historic understanding of the concept.

 

Catholics Can Agree!

There’s also something else to say about the weaker understanding that Austin seems to be proposing, and that is that Catholics can agree that nothing can contradict Scripture.

I mean, we believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, too! So—for Catholics as well as Protestants—nothing can contradict Scripture.

Furthermore, Austin says that Scripture holds a unique place among our theological authorities, and that is also true for Catholics. Catholics recognize Scripture as unique. It’s divinely inspired in a way that Tradition and the Magisterium are not. God doesn’t determine the words in which apostolic Tradition is expressed, and while he guides the Magisterium in articulating Christian doctrine correctly, he doesn’t determine the words it uses as an author does. So only Scripture is divinely inspired, and it is thus unique.

So Catholics can agree both that Scripture can’t be contradicted and that it is unique.

But then there’s the fact that Austin recognizes the validity of later sources as long as they don’t contradict Scripture.

Okay, then a Catholic could say, “Well, we have documentation in early Christian sources from say the A.D. 200s that indicate Mary was assumed into heaven at the end of her earthly life. And there’s nothing in Scripture that says this didn’t happen. It doesn’t contradict Scripture any more than the assumption of Elijah—which is expressly taught in Scripture. So under this weaker understanding of sola scriptura that just says other authorities can’t contradict Scripture, I would be entitled to believe it.”

And the Assumption of Mary isn’t the only thing like that. In fact, there aren’t any Catholic teachings that are flatly contradicted by Scripture, and so the entire corpus of Catholic teachings would fly under the weaker conceptualization of sola scriptura.

Catholics wouldn’t use that term to express themselves, but it doesn’t appear that the weaker understanding of the doctrine would be a dividing point between Catholics and Protestants.

 

What To Do?

So what would a Protestant do in response to this situation? He might try arguing that this or that Catholic doctrine actually does contradict Scripture, but this would be an uphill climb, because Catholics have been around for 2,000 years and they have been thinking about Scripture and how their doctrines fit with it.

It would also be an uphill climb because language is flexible, and it’s harder than you think to show that a Catholic doctrine is flat-out contradicted by Scripture.

And—at most—he would identify something here or there that would be a problem, but he wouldn’t have a wholesale rejection of the Catholic viewpoint on the basis of Scripture.

On the other hand, he might bite the bullet and say, “Well, I guess Catholics can agree with what I’m calling sola scriptura, and I can’t rule out their system on this basis.”

But I suspect that what most Protestants would want to do is strengthen the definition of sola scriptura so that it does rule out Catholicism.

For example—like the Westminster Confession—they might rule out any other theological authorities when it comes to doctrine. They thus might say that sola scriptura requires no apostolic Traditions capable of informing doctrine or that we have no divinely guided Magisterium helping us interpret Scripture and Tradition.

And—again like the Westminster Confession—they might require that every Christian doctrine be proved by Scripture alone.

In doing such things, they would be working their way back to how sola scriptura has historically been understood in Protestant circles and how it is, in fact, used in Protestant circles.

But this would only create a new problem.

 

Doctrine or Principle

You’ll recall that Austin based his discussion of sola scriptura on the idea that it’s an interpretive principle rather than a doctrine.

So one important word to note here is that of principle. Properly speaking, Sola scriptura is not an exegetically derived doctrine. It means we’re not going to scripture to get it and pull it out.

This is not like a theological slight of hand. Rather it’s a logical necessity to say that the method we use to interpret has to come prior to that which we are interpreting.

Okay, so that’s how Austin is interpreting sola scriptura—as an interpretive principle rather than a doctrine or claim of faith.

If it were a doctrine or claim of the Faith, you’d need to be able to prove it from the sources of faith, such as finding Scripture verses that state or imply it.

However, if it’s not a claim of faith then you’ll need to justify it on some other grounds—without appealing to matters of faith. Instead, you’d need to justify it on grounds of reason—on how reasonable it is.

And this is something Austin acknowledges.

If we formulate sola scriptura as a principle and not a doctrine, we must argue for it based on reasonableness or fittingness as a way of approaching scripture—not solely off of a proof text because again, principles come prior to exe conclusions even if they mutually reinforce one another.

So how well can we justify sola scriptura just on the basis of reason?

 

Justifying Interpretive Principles

Austin is correct that if sola scriptura is an interpretive principle then you have to justify it by reason. If it’s not a doctrine—a faith claim—then you can’t appeal to the sources of faith to justify it. You have to appeal to something other than the sources of faith—to things that are accessible to reason alone.

This is how we justify other interpretive principles that we use when understanding other texts and speech acts.

After all, we do have interpretive principles that we use to make sense of them. In the first place, there are the rules of the language they are composed in. If I’m dealing with an English text, I need to know the vocabulary and grammar of English. If I’m reading Greek or Hebrew, then I need to know the same things for Hebrew.

I also need to know higher-level principles like the rules governing the genre that a person is writing or speaking in. If a text begins with the words “Once upon a time,” you’ll interpret it differently than if it begins with a newspaper reporter’s dateline.

There are also rules of literary criticism—like interpret things in terms of expanding contexts. So you look at the immediate context first, then more distant contexts in the same document. Then other documents by the same author. Then documents by other authors from the same literary circles, and so forth.

And there are more foundational, philosophical principles like the law of non-contradiction, the assumption that the external world exists, the assumption that other minds exist and that communication with them is possible, and so forth.

All of these are interpretive principles that are based purely on reason. Some of them are defaults that are built into us—like the philosophical ones—and others we learn by experience—like the knowledge of a language or a genre.

The interpretive assumptions we make also can be defeated in particular cases, like if we’re reading a text or listening to a speech and it becomes incoherent.

They also can be modified, as when we realize that someone is using a word differently than we do and we need to interpret them in a way we would not have expected.

But in all these cases, we can appeal purely to reason to justify these interpretive principles. We don’t need to appeal to any matters of faith.

 

Sola Scriptura as an Interpretive Principle

So how could we justify sola scriptura if we take it as an interpretive principle—using reason alone—rather than as a faith claim that would let us appeal to the sources of faith?

Let’s see what Austin himself proposed.

For today’s purposes, I want to describe sola scripture as a theological principle—that’s key—that says scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history and therefore should act as the rule against which we measure all other theological claims.

So Austin’s definition actually includes its own basis. He says that Scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history. Then he says therefore. And then he says that “Scripture . . . should act as the rule against which we measure all other theological claims.”

The second part is the articulation of sola scriptura itself: the idea that Scripture is what we measure theological claims against. The therefore tells you that it’s a conclusion that’s based on the first part of the statement. And so the first part of the statement is the basis on which Austin argues for sola scriptura—the idea that Scripture is the most reliable witness we have to God’s revelation in history.

Right away, we encounter a problem, because the statement that Scripture is the most reliable witness we have to God’s revelation is itself a religious claim—a faith claim.

Austin is not offering a justification that’s accessible to reason alone. A Christian scholar or a Jewish scholar or a Mormon scholar or a Hindu scholar or an atheist scholar could all look at the linguistic data we have about the Greek word artos and conclude that it means bread or food. Reason alone tells you that.

But you’re doing something different if you assert that the Christian Scriptures are the most reliable witness we have to God’s revelation. A Christian scholar might agree to that—depending on what kind of Christian he is—but a Jewish scholar would not. He would say that only the books of the Jewish Scriptures within the Christian Old Testament play that role and the books of the New Testament do not. A Mormon scholar would say you need to go further, and works like the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price are just as reliable as the regular Christian Scriptures. A Hindu scholar would make a case for the Hindu scriptures. And an atheist scholar would say God hasn’t made any revelation because there is no God. Therefore, the Christian Scriptures are not our most reliable witness to an imaginary God’s supposed revelation.

So you can see how Austin would be doing something very different here than what we do with other interpretive principles. He’s not justifying sola scriptura on the basis of reason or reasonableness alone. He’s basing it on faith claims.

 

A Proposed Fix?

But let’s see if we can steelman Austin’s case by proposing a fix. Suppose that we said, okay, we understand that people who already have different faith commitments won’t see things the way Christians do, but suppose that a person isn’t committed to any faith system—including atheism.

Let’s then present them with the evidence from Christian apologetics—things like arguments for the existence of God and the Resurrection of Jesus and the historical reliability of Luke as an author. Those are all things that are accessible to reason even without a faith commitment. The arguments for God’s existence show us that there is a God. The Resurrection of Jesus shows us that God is active in human history, which reveals at least something about him. And the reliability of Luke as a historian—who wrote documents that witness Jesus’ Resurrection, like Luke’s Gospel and Acts—suggest that the New Testament provides at least something of a witness to God’s revelation in history. And we can do all this simply by appealing to reason—without having made a prior faith commitment.

Will this solve our problem?

Here we come to a fork in the road, and we have to make a decision. While you can make an apologetic case based on reason alone, you then have to decide what reason does with that case. Does it make a leap of faith or not?

 

The First of Two Paths

If we make a leap of faith and embrace Christianity, we might then say that the Christian Scriptures are uniquely and divinely inspired, and so they are our most reliable witness to God’s revelation.

But we also might not make that leap of faith. We might say, okay, I understand that God exists, that Jesus rose from the dead, that Luke is a reliable historian, and so forth. I can thus agree that the Christian Scriptures bear witness to God’s revelation in history in some way. But that doesn’t mean that I’m convinced of Christianity or that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired. Saying that something is inspired is a much stronger claim than just saying that it bears witness to what God has done, and I’m not prepared to make the leap of faith and say that the Christian Scriptures are actually inspired.

We’ll explore both of these paths, but—in keeping with the minimal approach Austin has been pursuing—let’s begin by looking at the second path, which better keeps open the possibility of sola scriptura as an interpretive principle rather than a doctrinal claim.

 

Is Scripture Our Most Reliable Source?

So what happens if we don’t make the leap of faith to embrace Christianity and conclude that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired? What if we stick with what reason alone can tell us?

Will this let us justify sola scriptura as Austin has defined it? Has it been established—by reason alone—that the Christian Scriptures are our most reliable witness to God’s revelation in history?

No, that hasn’t been established. There might be other sources—outside of the Christian Scriptures—that are also reliable in bearing witness to God’s revelation in history. Whether or not such sources exist is a separate issue that Austin has not dealt with.

Therefore, merely because you show that Scripture is reliable about God’s revelation, you haven’t shown that only Scripture is reliable or that it is more reliable than other sources.

So—right out of the gate—the key claim for Austin’s defense of sola scriptura has not been proven. He’s made a Protestant assumption but has not defended it against competing views.

 

Additional Problems

Additional problems also emerge. Even if you grant that there is a God who has revealed himself in history, if you don’t make the leap of faith to saying that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired, there will be additional problems.

The reason is that saying that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired puts them all on a level playing field. It equalizes the authority between them. They all have equal authority due to their divine inspiration.

But if we don’t assume—as a matter of faith—that they are divinely inspired and stick with what reason alone can tell you, we’re going to hit problems fast.

 

The Non-Canonical Problem

For example, without inspiration there’s no bright line separating the Christian Scriptures from other works of early Christian literature. This means that you will need to consider works of early literature that are not part of the New Testament and be open to considering them as authoritative as some of the works that are in the Christian Scriptures.

For a start, there is the Gospel of Thomas, whose date and relationship to the canonical Gospels is debated among scholars. Thomas is clearly early, and it does not contain the kind of wild speculations found in later Gnostic works, so it can’t be dismissed as easily. Some scholars date it to the first century and argue that it’s even older than our canonical Gospels.

I don’t believe that, but the fact that there is serious scholarly opinion advocating this view means that abandoning a faith commitment to the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures implies that one is going to have to work through a great deal of scholarship and potentially be open to coming to uncomfortable conclusions about what should be treated as more accurate or less accurate.

The same thing applies even more to other books. For example, I’ve done a great deal of work on dating The Ascension of Isaiah, and the evidence strongly suggests that it was written within one year of A.D. 67.

The book also contains traditions about Jesus that are not found in the Gospels—like Mary giving birth to Jesus in a miraculous manner—and you’d need to be open to these non-canonical Jesus traditions in the same way we are the canonical Jesus traditions.

Then there is the early Church manual known as the Didache is thought by many to have a date in the first century, and perhaps very early in the first century. This view is very well grounded, because the Didache recommends tests to churches for how to tell true apostles and prophets from false ones. And one of these tests is how many days apostles stay when visiting your local church.

The Didache thus reflects a situation in which apostles and prophets were both still regular features of church life—something that applies only to the first century, especially in the case of apostles.

And the fact the Didache says that an apostle should not stay more than two days envisions a time when the apostles were still young and vigorous and traveling rapidly—not when they were old men who were settling down in particular places for lengthy periods.

This points to a date quite early in the first century—like the A.D. 40s or 50s at the latest—which makes the Didache as early or earlier than the books of the New Testament.

And if you haven’t made a faith assumption that the books of the New Testament are inspired in a way the Didache is not, then you’re going to have to be open to treating the Didache as as-much a witness to God’s revelation as the books of the New Testament.

So the fact that we are not making a faith commitment to the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures means that we’re going to have to be open to what non-canonical works have to say, and this undermines the idea of sola scriptura as Austin has defined it.

 

The Canon Ambiguity Problem

We’re also going to have to deal with another problem, which is that if we’re sticking with reason alone, we have much better reasons for supposing some of the New Testament writings as reliable witnesses than others.

Failing to make a faith commitment to the inspiration of these books would return us to a situation that looks a lot like the one Eusebius described around the year 300, with some books being accepted, others being disputed, and others being rejected.

Accepted Books:

• The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
• Acts
• The letters of Paul
• 1 John
• 1 Peter

Disputed Books:

• Letter to the Hebrews
• James
• 2 Peter
• 2-3 John
• Jude
• Revelation of John
• Shepherd of Hermas
• Gospel of the Hebrews

Rejected Books:

• Revelation of Peter
• Letter of Barnabas
• The Didache
• Gospels of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias
• Acts of Paul, Andrew, and John

See Eusebius, Church History, 3:25:1-6 with 3:3:4-6.

In fact, the same books would largely go into the same three categories. There were reasons why the early Church wasn’t as sure about works like Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, Revelation, and so on as other books.

The evidence for them originating in the apostolic community is simply not as strong as for other books—like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts.

In fact, if we’re sticking with reason alone, many scholars today would argue that St. Paul did not write many of the letters attributed to him. In fact, if you survey contemporary scholarly opinion based on reason only, you would end up with a similar, three-category structure.

Accepted as Pauline:

• Romans
• 1 Corinthians
• 2 Corinthians
• Galatians
• Philippians
• 1 Thessalonians
• Philemon

Disputed as Pauline:

• Colossians
• 2 Thessalonians
• 2 Timothy

Rejected as Pauline:

• Ephesians
• 1 Timothy
• Titus

See Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament.

Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are all accepted by scholars using reason alone as genuinely Pauline.

But the same scholars will reject Ephesians, 1 Timothy, and Titus as Pauline.

And they are divided about whether Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and 2 Timothy are by Paul.

Personally—on grounds of reason alone—I think that they’re all Pauline, but it’s not like those who disagree don’t have arguments for their positions.

The point is that—if we’re going by reason alone, without a leap of faith to divine inspiration—then we’re going to need to acknowledge different degrees of confidence about books within the Christian canon and give them correspondingly different weights when determining doctrine.

Once again, sola scriptura is not faring well.

 

The Interior Canon Problem

Then—even for books that we conclude did originate within the apostolic community—there’s the issue of their respective reliability if we’re going by reason alone.

Without applying this to the canon, Austin sketches some of the relevant principles:

All of us when we read a text have certain principles in mind prior to driving conclusions about the material. For instance, people generally interpret texts with the principle of non-contradiction, namely that X can’t equal X and not X. Strictly speaking though, they’re not getting this idea from the text. We’ve all just agreed that it’s a logical principle that should be applied when seeking knowledge. Sola scriptura in it’s least ambitious forms seeks something like this.

It’s hard to see it that way when it’s been mired in controversy for centuries, but let’s try applying it to another realm of knowledge. For instance, let’s take Plato. Imagine you want to know things about Plato. How would you do that? There are lots of options for this. Of course, you could read the works of Plato, you could read works from people who knew him directly and were taught by him. Furthermore, you could read people’s centuries later who continued to reflect on his teachings. You could read modern books about Plato. In this situation, what sources though would have the highest priority and be considered the most trustworthy? My guess is you’d say Plato’s own works and perhaps second would be those who knew him directly, that they’d be somewhat authoritative interpreters or something, but only in so far as they interpret correctly what Plato actually said.

So this is not because you derive this from Plato saying, “Trust only my books. This is your principle.” But rather it’s a principle of evaluating testimony and claims about the past.

And Austin is right that—if we’re going by reason alone without assuming divine inspiration—then we’re going to need to rank different sources by how reliable we think they are as guides.

But that’s going to apply to the books inside the Christian Scriptures as well as those outside them. We’ve already seen that there are arguments—from a reason alone perspective—to challenge whether some of these books are actually of apostolic origin.

But even with books that we’re sure were written or approved in the apostolic community, we’d have to establish such ranks.

For example, there are good reasons to think that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the four canonical Gospels and that John was the last of them to be written.

So if you want the earliest preserved testimony about a particular Jesus tradition, you’d want to weight Mark’s account more highly, and you’d want to weight John’s lower. John’s Gospel is also very different in style than the others—with Jesus giving long speeches instead of short, memorable sayings—and many scholars have taken that as reason to weight the precise words John uses to express something less highly.

Now, if you believe in divine inspiration, that guarantees that—even if John uses different words—he at least gives us teaching that Jesus would agree with, but on this path, we’re not assuming divine inspiration, and so you can’t make the assumption that Jesus would agree with whatever John says.

You’d also have the complicating issue of which works were and weren’t written by eyewitnesses and how you weight those.

If—as many scholars claim—Paul wrote before the four Evangelists—you’d also have to consider whether you assign more weight to what Paul says than to what the Evangelists say if we’re going by reason alone.

And we will need to make choices about which documents we go with if we’re using reason alone. If we make a faith commitment to inspiration—as I said—that puts the documents on a more level playing field, and so you can infer that they do harmonize.

But if you’re not making that faith commitment, then you can’t assume that they harmonize, and you’ll need to consider accepting what some documents say and rejecting what others do.

This is—after all—how Austin envisions sola scriptura working.

Sola scriptura is a principle designed for arbitrating disagreements. It comes to light when scripture and other authorities, indeed valid ones, are at odds. In these cases, sola scriptura teaches us to side with Scripture. It doesn’t mean that these authorities are invalid, it just is the tool that we use when a teaching of scripture is at odds with an authority, even a valid one.

But if you’re not privileging all of the Scriptures by making a faith commitment to their inspiration, you’ll also have to be open to adjudicating conflicts between Scriptural documents using reason alone.

And you will run into such situations. To name one off the top of my head, there is the issue of meat that has been sacrificed to idols. For example, the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 stated:

It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols (Acts 15:28-29).

And in Revelation, we read:

I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols.

I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who . . . is teaching and seducing my servants . . . to eat food sacrificed to idols (Revelation 2:14, 20).

So that makes it sound like the New Testament is against eating meat sacrificed to idols.

But St. Paul has a very different attitude. In 1 Corinthians 8, he writes:

Some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do (1 Corinthians 8:7-8).

And in Romans 14, he writes:

I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself. . . . Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats (Romans 14:14, 20).

So that makes it sound like eating idol meat is not wrong in itself. It’s only wrong for you if you think it is.

Now, if you’ve made a faith commitment to divine inspiration, that lets you infer that these passages must ultimately harmonize with each other, but if you’re going by reason alone, you can’t infer that. You have to be open to the possibility of real conflicts between the authors of different New Testament books, and so you have to be open to selecting what some authors say and rejecting what other authors say.

And this is precisely what many scholars claim—that Scripture does not speak with a single voice and that its authors have different and conflicting opinions on things.

 

The Underdetermination Problem

The idea that we should use sola scriptura as a principle in sorting out apparent disputes between different views also presupposes that Scripture gives us enough data to arrive at a confident resolution.

But that does not appear to be the case. In fact, it looks like—in many cases—Scripture underdetermines issues.

Underdetermination is what happens when the data we have available is consistent with multiple different interpretations, and so it does not determine which we should choose.

And it’s not hard to think of examples. For example, should we baptize the infant children of believers or should we only baptize those who make a personal profession of faith? To put that in theological terms, should we be paedobaptists who baptize small children, or should we be credobaptists who only baptize believers?

You can find some passages that point in one direction and other passages that point in the other. But the truth is that Scripture nowhere contains a statement addressing this question. No passages say, “It’s okay to baptize infants,” and no passages say, “It’s not okay to baptize infants.” That’s why people on both sides of the discussion appeal to what they take as the implications of different passages in support of their positions.

The same thing happens with the issue of how to baptize. You can appeal to some passages as favoring baptizing people by immersing them in water, but you can appeal to other passages as favoring baptism by infusion or pouring water on them. Scripture nowhere contains a passage saying, “This is how you baptize a person.”

In both cases, it appears that Scripture simply underdetermines the issue, and there’s a very good reason for that. The Scriptures were meant to be read by Christians, and so the readers had already been baptized.

Sometimes people think that the Scriptures were written as evangelistic tools for non-Christians, but that is not true. Books were fantastically expensive in the ancient world. A single copy of Matthew would cost the equivalent of more than $2,200, and no one is going to give away a book that costs that much as an evangelistic tool.

The Scriptures were clearly written for Christians, and the Christian readers already knew how baptism was done and for whom it was done. That’s why we don’t have passages instructing us on these matters, and thus Scripture underdetermines them.

In fact, the Scriptures expect the reader to look to the practice of the Church to answer these questions. It thus expects us to rely on apostolic Tradition—how and who the apostles baptized—to give us the answers.

And this isn’t just true on the subject of baptism. It’s also true on numerous other issues, as illustrated by the diversity of opinions among Christians on topics like justification, sanctification, predestination and free will, the sacraments, charismatic gifts, biblical prophecy, and others. In fact, one may easily argue that the reason for a large part of the doctrinal diversity in Protestantism is precisely because Scripture so frequently underdetermines the answers to various questions.

All of this makes it hard to use sola scriptura as Austin has proposed it to settle doctrinal issues, because it’s frequently not clear that Scripture contains the data needed to settle on a single position for various questions.

 

The Uncertainty Problem

All of the problems that we’ve seen going down this path of not making a leap of faith to divine inspiration and using reason alone boil down to one underlying problem. This path fundamentally creates additional uncertainty.

There’s uncertainty enough if you hold that the Scriptures are divinely inspired, but there’s even more uncertainty if you stick with reason alone and treat them as merely somehow representing God’s revelation in history.

In the first place, the central support for Austin’s proposal for sola scriptura—that it’s our uniquely and most reliable source for God’s revelation in history—has not been proven. It is a Protestant assumption that there are not equally reliable witnesses to God’s revelation. Austin is assuming something that he needs to argue for sola scriptura, but he has not proved it. So from a reason alone perspective, there is uncertainty about whether this key claim is true.

Then there is the fact that—from a reason alone perspective that doesn’t make a leap of faith to the divine inspiration of the Scriptures—you’re not sure that there aren’t other books outside the Christian Scriptures that need to be considered as sources, and that may even rival what’s in the Christian Scriptures in terms of the traditions they contain—especially first century works like The Ascension of Isaiah and The Didache. This creates uncertainty that interferes with the idea of using scripture alone to judge theological claims.

Then there’s the problem that—by relying on reason alone—you can’t establish with certainty that all of the books in the New Testament should be regarded as inspired Scripture. If you may need to say goodbye to some of the books of the New Testament—like the ones that were doubted by many early Christians or that are doubted by many secular scholars today—then that also creates uncertainty about using sola scriptura to judge theological claims.

Then there’s the problem that—even within the canon—you can’t assume that all the books harmonize with each other if you’re not holding that they’re inspired. If we have to use reason alone to sort out potential conflicts between them, then that creates additional uncertainty for using sola scriptura to adjudicate potential conflicts between different traditions within the New Testament.

And that’s even assuming that Scripture contains the data needed to arrive at firm conclusions. But—as we’ve seen—it appears that Scripture frequently underdetermines the proposed answers to different questions. In other words, it doesn’t contain enough data to decisively address subjects like how to baptize a person or whether they need mature, personal faith in Jesus to be baptized—among numerous other questions. Simply approaching Scripture by reason alone does not give you the certainty that it will contain the data needed to determine the answers to pressing questions a Christian needs to know the answer to.

But these are only illustrations of a larger problem. Most fundamentally, if you’re approaching Scripture from the perspective of reason alone then you’ve taken the guardrails of faith off and you have to settle everything by reason alone. But reason is notoriously uncertain, particularly when one is dealing with ancient historical matters with very limited data.

It’s one thing to reason our way to the Resurrection of Christ—for which we have good evidence—and make a leap of faith that the Bible is divinely inspired. But if you don’t make that leap of faith and stay in a pre-faith mode, then you’re going to have to deal with a mountain of argumentation—and thus uncertainty—about every point you want to address.

You’re opening the door to Bart Ehrman and all of the skeptical scholars to come in and question and challenge everything that every book and every passage of every book says.

And the fact that you’re going to have to use reason to settle all those points and whether these books and these passages of books are witnesses to revelation means that there’s a sense in which sola scriptura or by Scripture alone is almost being replaced with sola ratione or by reason alone.

Needless to say, this is not how sola scriptura has historically been envisioned to work, and it is certainly not how it is used in practice. The average Christian does not and is not expected to formulate his theological beliefs based on a reason-only approach without adopting the faith position that the books of Scripture are divinely inspired.

So let’s look at the other path we could take.

 

Making a Leap of Faith

Let’s suppose that—after hearing the evidence of apologetics—you make a leap of faith and decide to embrace the Christian religion. You say, okay, the Christian faith is true. You accept the Christian Scriptures as divinely inspired—that’s something that is definitely a faith claim that reason alone does not tell you. And now you want to start interpreting the Christian Scriptures to learn more about your faith.

Have you established that Scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history?

No. You haven’t.

What you have done is—with input from apologetics—established that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired. But that doesn’t establish that they are uniquely reliable and more reliable than anything else.

In fact, the majority of Christians today—around 70% between Catholics and Orthodox, and basically 100% of Christians before the time of the Reformation in the first 1500 years of Church history—have held that, while the Scriptures are unique in being divinely inspired, there are other sources that are just as reliable.

For example, there is apostolic Tradition. The apostles didn’t make mistakes, and so if we have apostolic Traditions, they’re guaranteed to be accurate—to be true. God doesn’t control the way apostolic Tradition is expressed. Different authors may vary the wording in a way that doesn’t happen with the Scriptures that have a fixed form. That’s why they’re not divinely inspired the way the Scriptures are. But if authors are transmitting apostolic Tradition, that Tradition is just as accurate as a witness to God’s revelation as the Scriptures are.

And just by showing that the Scriptures are divinely inspired, you haven’t done anything to show that we don’t have apostolic Tradition. So you simply have not shown what needs to be shown on Austin’s formulation of sola scriptura.

You also have not shown that there is no divinely guided Magisterium or teaching authority that is able to speak infallibly on the correct understanding of Scripture and Tradition. So—if there is such a Magisterium—it would be just as reliable as Scripture and Tradition when it speaks infallibly. It’s not divinely inspired, but it would be just as reliable.

Consequently, even if you admit the evidence of apologetics and make a leap of faith to embrace Christianity, you simply have not shown that Scripture is our most reliable witness to the revelation of God in history. That’s an assumption you’re making, not something that can be shown by reason alone.

 

Scripture’s Unique Role

As a result, the mere fact that Scripture is unique in that it alone is divinely inspired does not give you sola scriptura on Austin’s understanding.

What it means for Scripture to be inspired is that it has a fixed form that God himself was the ultimate author of, using human authors as his agents.

But just because some modes of truth have fixed forms and others have flexible forms does not make those with fixed forms less accurate.

Just because God inspired Genesis 1:1 to say:

• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

That doesn’t mean it’s any less accurate to say, “God created everything in the beginning” or “Everything was created by God” or “Yahweh created the world and all that is in it.” All of those are just different ways of saying the same thing. So just because one form is inspired doesn’t make the others less accurate. They’re all 100% truthful.

Now, Austin would be right to say that the fact Scripture alone is inspired gives it a unique role or function in the Church. That’s very true. But its role or function is based on the fact that it is inspired—not the fact that it is accurate.

Scripture’s unique function is to tell us not only what content is true but how God chose to express it in written form, and that means you can do certain things with Scripture that you can’t do—or can’t do as easily—with other sources.

Since God determined not only the content of Genesis 1:1 but the way that content is expressed, that means you can look to Scripture in a way that you can’t look to extra-scriptural expressions of Tradition when determining the spiritual sense of a statement.

In addition to the literal sense of a statement—which the human author was aware of—God is capable of building in additional meanings in the spiritual sense. For example, in Hosea 11, we read:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son (Hosea 11:1).

Now, the child here is Israel—as the text says—and so in the literal sense that the prophet Hosea was aware of, it was Israel who was the son called out of Egypt in the Exodus experience.

But God built additional meanings into the spiritual sense of this text, so that Matthew can apply it to Jesus and say:

And [Joseph] rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matthew 2:14-15).

So in the literal sense of Hosea 11, the son is Israel, but in the spiritual sense it’s Jesus.

Now, I can express the same content as Hosea 11 simply by saying, “God brought the Israelites out of Egypt during the Exodus.” That means the same thing as the part of Hosea that Matthew quotes.

But because God didn’t inspire my expression the way he inspired Hosea’s, you can’t draw a Christological prophecy out of the uninspired statement, “God brought the Israelites out of Egypt during the Exodus.” Certainly you can’t do so as easily.

So Austin would be right that Scripture has a unique function in the Church because of its inspiration, but that function is connected to its inspiration, not its accuracy. Anything that’s accurate is binding on our belief—regardless of whether the accurate statement is even on the topic of religion or not. And that’s certainly true of any apostolic Traditions, because those are guaranteed to be accurate.

 

Apostolic Traditions Exist Today

But the situation gets worse, because there are—in fact—Traditions that are not written in the Bible that Protestants themselves accept as authoritative. For example, here are 3 such traditions:

1. There are no more apostles.
2. There is no more public revelation.
3. There are no new books of Scripture.

There is no way that you can prove any of these items by Scripture alone. For example, there is no statement in the New Testament that God will not send any more apostles.

Some individuals might think otherwise, because in Acts 1:21-22—when the Twelve replace Judas—St. Peter says they need to pick a man who was an eyewitness of the entire ministry of Jesus, from his baptism to his Ascension. Obviously, nobody today fulfills that criterion, so some might argue that there can’t be any more apostles today.

But this argument doesn’t work, because if it proved anything, it would prove too much. St. Paul was not an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus, but he was an apostle—along with other individuals who were not members of the Twelve, like St. Barnabas. Luke identifies both Paul and Barnabas as apostles in Acts 14:14. So what this reveals is that being an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus was required for being one of the Twelve but not for being an apostle. The Twelve were a group within the broader group of apostles, and you had to be an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry to be one of the Twelve, but you didn’t to be an apostle.

Others might argue that in 1 Corinthians 9:1, St. Paul links the fact he is an apostle to the fact he has seen the Lord, so you might need to have at least seen Jesus in order to be an apostle, and they might then argue that nobody fulfills this criterion today.

However, this argument won’t work, either, because St. Paul saw Jesus in a brief encounter on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, when Jesus commissioned him. In Acts 26:19, Paul actually refers to this encounter as a heavenly vision. So—if Jesus chose—he could continue to appear to people in heavenly visions and appoint them as apostles, just like St. Paul.

The Bible thus does not contain anything indicating that the apostles would die off as a group and not be replaced. So if Christians are expected to believe that, it must be based on apostolic Tradition rather than on Scripture.

Similarly, there is nothing in Scripture that indicates that there will be no new public revelation—that is, revelation that is binding on all Christians the way Scripture or Scripture and Tradition are.

No verses say that God is not going to continue to give public revelation, and you didn’t even have to be an apostle for him to do that through you. Neither St. Mark nor St. Luke were apostles, but they both wrote Gospels that are part of public revelation.

God’s mystery is infinite, so no matter how much he reveals, there is always more of it that he could disclose, so there is no limit in principle to how much public revelation God could give us.

And there are no passages in the Bible that say or imply that he isn’t going to give us any more. So if you believe that this is the case, you must believe it on the basis of apostolic Tradition rather than deriving it by Scripture alone.

Then there is the fact that we are not going to have any more books of Scripture. Christians understand that books of Scripture are items of public revelation and so are binding for our faith, and if you agree that there is to be no new public revelation then you will infer that there are to be no new Scriptures.

But we’ve already seen that the idea that there is no new public revelation can only be based on apostolic Tradition rather than Scripture, and the same thing is true here. There are no passages of Scripture that say, “This is the final book of Scripture to be written,” and there are none that say or imply that no new Scripture will be written after a certain date.

Therefore, if a Protestant holds that the apostles and their associates gave us the last Scriptures, he must hold this based on apostolic Scripture since it cannot be derived by Scripture alone.

Therefore, we see that there are propositions that Protestants accept that can only be based on apostolic Tradition—like there are to be no more apostles, there is to be no more public revelation, and there are to be no new books of Scripture. These are all widely held in the Protestant movement, and none of them are taught in Scripture.

So if Protestants want to have a basis for these beliefs, they would need to acknowledge the ongoing reality and binding nature of apostolic Tradition.

 

Scripture’s Attitude Is Different

Another problem emerges when we read the content of the Scriptures themselves. And that’s something we should do. I mean, if you’re going to propose an interpretive principle, it ought to at least be consistent with the content of the text for which you propose to use it.

For example, if I propose that we interpret the Greek word artos to mean bread or food, then the passages where that word is used in the Greek Bible—or at least most of them—ought to make sense when we interpret it in that way.

So if we are supposed to hold that the Scriptures are our most reliable guide to God’s revelation in history, do we find the Scriptures themselves advocating that attitude?

No, we don’t.

We certainly don’t find that attitude in the Old Testament. It was given in an age of active revelation in which God was frequently giving new revelation, and there are no passages indicating that written presentations of that revelation were more authoritative than oral presentations of it. If a prophet told you something, it was just as reliable as if he wrote it down for you.

The same thing is true in the New Testament. This was also an age of active revelation, and while there are New Testament passages that acknowledge the authority of written presentations of Old Testament revelation, there are no passages in the New Testament indicating that written presentations of revelations are more authoritative than oral presentations. In the New Testament, the new revelations that came through Jesus were just as authoritative as anything that had been written down.

What’s important—in both the Old and the New Testaments—is that something is God’s word, and there is no indication that God’s word gains more authority by being written down. We thus do not find any passages in either collection of Scripture supporting sola scriptura as Austin has defined it.

 

Scripture Endorses a Different System

In fact, we find the contrary, because there are passages—particularly in the New Testament—that indicate we should adhere to God’s word regardless of whether it is communicated to us in oral or written form. Thus in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, St. Paul says:

So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

We further find evidence of a divinely guided teaching authority or Magisterium to settle disputed questions when there were different opinions on how revelation should be interpreted. Thus in Galatians 2:1-2, Paul writes:

Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation (Galatians 1:1-2).

Paul then offers his account of the council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15, and the fact Paul went up because of a revelation indicates that God willed that the Jerusalem Council take place, and so he gave a revelation directing that it be held.

This naturally implied that God would be guiding the council, which is confirmed by how those at the council regarded it. Thus the council fathers wrote to the churches that:

It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements (Acts 15:28).

Notice how they put the Holy Spirit in the first place. “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” They thus understood the Holy Spirit to be guiding their council and its results, meaning a divinely guided Magisterium.

We thus see that the Christians in the New Testament were using a system that incorporated Scripture, apostolic Tradition, and a divinely guided Magisterium as authorities.

And Austin at least partly acknowledges this.

I grant that others will look at scripture and say that because the Bible describes the church as the pillar and buttress of faith or instructs us to hold fast to traditions, these things undermine the principle. Honestly, smart people are going to come to different conclusions here. . . .

I understand that how people can see scripture pointing to other authorities and put the brakes on. What I think is worth noting here is that they’re coming to these conclusions via scripture though.

And that’s true. Those who make these points do use Scripture. But this does not support the idea of sola scriptura. First, because we’ve already seen that the attitude displayed in the Scriptures does not support sola scriptura as Austin has defined it, and second because it actually supports the use of the Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium model that is in use in traditional Christian churches today.

 

How To Discern Apostolic Traditions

Now, some in the Protestant community argue that this model would be reasonable to use if we still had the apostles with us. In fact, Austin makes this argument.

Sola scriptura in my estimation doesn’t say scripture is the only way one could form doctrine. If you can sit down with the apostles and people who knew them directly, you’d be justified in making theological conclusions based on their testimony.

There’s thus a historical argument being made: If we still had the apostles, you could get their traditions from their own lips, and they would be as authoritative as Scripture is today. But we don’t have the apostles with us today, and so we don’t have a way of knowing which traditions were theirs and are authoritative, compared to other traditions that are merely human and are not authoritative. That’s why we should stick with Scripture, since we know—as an item of faith—that it is a reliable witness to God’s revelation.

We can’t know that about apostolic Traditions that are not in Scripture, so Tradition is less authoritative than Scripture.

There are several problems with this argument. One is that—as we have seen—Protestants themselves acknowledge apostolic traditions like:

1. There are no more apostles.
2. There is no more public revelation.
3. There are no new books of Scripture.

Another problem a person making this argument would run up against something Austin himself notes:

To those who say that sola scriptura couldn’t work until these times, until you have a canon, I’d ask, does Matthew being recognized by the Church as canonical make it authoritative? This seems to confuse epistemology—how we know—with ontology—the essence of something. I’d argue that Matthew was authoritative from the moment it was written and that Christians were treating it as such by reading it in church far before local councils meant to affirm that this was in fact correct.

And the same thing is true of Tradition that is true of Scripture. There’s a difference between the authority God has given something and whether we know God has given it this authority. Austin refers to this as a difference between epistemology and ontology—two terms that come from philosophy. Epistemology deals with how we know something, and ontology deals with what something is. I might potentially quibble a little with the application of this terminology, since quibbling is what academically trained philosophers like me do best, but he’s correct about the distinction.

And the same thing is true of Tradition. If the Gospel of Matthew was authoritative from the moment it was written and then that authority became operative for Christians once they were certain it was of apostolic origin, then if St. Matthew gave an oral Tradition, it would be authoritative from the moment he spoke it, and that authority would become operative for Christians if they are certain it is of apostolic origin. Even if some Christians—like Protestants—are not certain of that, the tradition still has its God-given authority today, the same way the Gospel of Matthew would still have its God-given authority, even if some Christians didn’t recognize it as apostolic.

But that brings us to the question of how we know which things are apostolic and which are not. For example, we can either treat the apostolicity of Matthew’s Gospel as a matter of history—which we’ve already covered—or we can treat it as a matter of faith—which we are doing here.

Well, if we’ve been convinced to make a leap of faith and accept the Christian Scriptures as divinely inspired, do they envision any way we could settle conflicting opinions based on different traditions?

Indeed, they do! That’s what the point of the Acts 15 council was. Some early Christians—based on existing traditions, like the Old Testament covenant of circumcision—thought that one needed to become a Jew in order to become a Christian and be saved. While other Christians—based on other traditions, like Isaiah’s prophecies of gentiles being acceptable to God—thought that you don’t need to be a Jew in order to become a Christian and be saved.

God then directed the early Christian community to hold a council that he guided to arrive at the correct identification and application of authoritative Traditions, and in doing so God set a precedent for how to handle disputed questions.

It’s thus not a surprise that councils have been a prominent part of how Christians settled such disputes, and they in fact played a prominent role in the identification of the canon of Scripture—which books were genuinely apostolic in that they were handed on or written by the apostolic community as authoritative for Christian faith.

 

Divine Guidance in Later Centuries

But those councils met hundreds of years after the apostolic age, and so we see the teaching authority or Magisterium of the Church acting hundreds of years after the apostolic age to settle questions—and getting them right!

Austin argues that just because you see councils making decisions, you don’t have to accept everything they say, and I would agree with that. You only have to accept them when they’re speaking infallibly.

But if you’ve accepted as a matter of faith that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired, and if these books were identified as apostolic and thus divinely inspired centuries later through the Magisterium, and if you think the Magisterium got it right, then it seems to me that you need to accept it as a matter of faith that—in at least some occasions—God does guide the Magisterium into making correct interpretations about what is apostolic and what is not even centuries after the apostolic age.

And if God is doing that for the traditions about which books are apostolic and which aren’t, then you need to be open to God doing the same thing through the Magisterium for other traditions as well.

We thus see the books of the New Testament again agreeing with the Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium paradigm used in traditional churches.

 

No Paradigm Change

If sola scriptura were true, then there would have been a major paradigm shift in how Christians are to formulate their doctrine. In the apostolic age, they formulated it using Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium as authorities, whereas today we should give ultimate authority to Scripture alone.

But the documents of the New Testament simply do not envision such a paradigm shift.

Not only did the Christians in the first century not use a sola scriptura paradigm themselves, they also envisioned the system they were using to continue—even once the apostles started dying out.

For example, in Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he knows that he’s about to die. He writes:

I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness (2 Timothy 4:6-8).

But Paul still envisions the passing down of apostolic Tradition in the coming post-apostolic age. In the same letter—as he’s waiting to die—Paul also writes:

What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2).

Here Paul is speaking of oral apostolic Tradition—“what you have heard from me”—and he names the first four generations of it being handed down. The Tradition originated with Paul—“me”—that’s the first generation. It then was passed to Timothy—“you”—the second generation. And now that Paul is about to die, he tells Timothy to entrust it to “faithful men”—the third generation. And then they will be able to teach “others”—the fourth generation.

Those last two generations are in the post-apostolic age since Paul and the other apostles are now dying, and yet the New Testament expects apostolic Tradition to continue to be passed down as authoritative in the post-apostolic age.

Is there any limit to how far that process will extend? No, and that’s something we have Jesus’ own assurance of. At the end of Matthew, he says:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:18-20).

Notice that Jesus tells his disciples to teach . . . all that I have commanded you, and he gives them two assurances. First, that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him—so the authority of heaven backs up this teaching. And second, that he is with us always, to the end of the age. So Jesus—with the authority of heaven backing him up—will be guiding the Church in its teaching until the end of the world.

That very much does not sound like there’s going to be a paradigm shift. If Jesus is guiding his Church’s teaching with divine authority to the end of the world, we would expect the same principles to be used for handing on and interpreting that teaching that were used in Jesus’ own day. And so this text once again counts as evidence against sola scriptura.

 

Reflecting on the Leap of Faith

So let’s take a few moments to look at what we’ve covered in this video.

First, we looked at Austin’s proposed understanding of sola scriptura.

Then we looked at Austin’s evaluation of five arguments against sola scriptura, and I broadly agreed with his conclusions.

After that, we looked at how one might justify sola scriptura as a principle of interpretation rather than a doctrine—using reason alone.

This brought us to a fork in the road, so we first looked at what would happen if we didn’t make a leap of faith to assume that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired.

We saw that this did not go well for sola scriptura since using reason alone—without divine inspiration—would create enormous amounts of uncertainty, making it very difficult to test theological claims using sola scriptura. Consequently, sola scriptura has historically been employed using the assumption that the Scriptures are divinely inspired.

We then looked at Austin’s formulation of sola scriptura with the faith commitment that the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired. Yet here also, we have hit multiple problems.

In the first place, we saw that even if—based on the data of apologetics—you accept that Scripture is divinely inspired, inspiration does not imply that Scripture is our most reliable witness about God’s revelation. Inspiration and reliability are distinct concepts, and just because something is inspired doesn’t imply that it is the most reliable. There can be other, equally reliable things that are not inspired, meaning that their substance—but not their exact form—has been determined by God.

Next, we saw that Scripture does have a unique role because of its inspiration, but this unique role has to do with its inspiration rather than its reliability. For example, we can more easily draw lessons from the spiritual meaning of inspired texts, but this does not mean we can infer that inspired texts are more reliable than other sources.

We also saw that apostolic Traditions do exist today, and Protestants accept doctrines that are not taught in Scripture and so can only be based on apostolic Tradition. It thus appears that Protestants accept apostolic Traditions like there are no more apostles, there is no more public revelation, and there are no new Scriptures.

We saw that neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament considers written presentations of God’s word to be more reliable than oral presentations. What matters is whether something is God’s word, not whether it is transmitted in written or oral form.

And we saw that the early Christians did not use sola scriptura to form their doctrine. Instead, they used a system for forming their doctrine that incorporated Scripture, apostolic Tradition, and a divinely guided Magisterium.

We saw that the early Christians used the Magisterium to establish which Traditions were accurate when there were apparent conflicts between them, holding open the prospect that we can do the same thing to identify what is genuinely divine or apostolic from what is not.

We saw that God has used the Magisterium to do this even centuries after the apostolic age, as when it identified the genuinely apostolic books of the New Testament from among numerous other writings.

And finally, we saw that the New Testament does not envision a paradigm shift to sola scriptura happening in the post-apostolic age. Instead, it envisions apostolic Tradition continuing to be passed down through generations of Christians, and it envisions the Church’s teaching to continue to be divinely guided by Jesus—down to the end of the world. It thus envisions the system of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium continuing to be used.

I’d also add here that—in light of this—it’s no surprise that the early Church did not teach sola scriptura. Austin himself put the argument this way:

Put most strongly, it is formulated along the lines that if sola scriptura is the most reasonable hermeneutical principle for the Church today, why is it that the Church didn’t come to this conclusion until later in her life?

And he acknowledged the force of this argument. It would be very surprising if sola scriptura was God’s plan, and yet it was not in use for around 1500 years, until the time of the Reformation or shortly before. That is—itself—evidence against sola scriptura.

And—in view of the New Testament’s use of the Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium paradigm and its expectation that this would continue to be used in the post-apostolic age—I have to say that sola scriptura is what some would call an accretion.

It thus turns out that sola scriptura also does not fare well if we take it as an interpretive principle that is backed up with the doctrinal belief that the books of the Christian Scriptures are divinely inspired. There are still numerous and very serious problems with it.

 

Returning to Doctrine

Now, I want to make it clear that I haven’t given a deductive proof that sola scriptura is false. What I have done is offer a great deal of very serious evidence inductively pointing to its falsity, but in order to offer a deductive proof I’d need to do something different.

That can be done if sola scriptura is a doctrine, because if it’s a doctrine, then it will need to meet its own test. In other words, sola scriptura will need to be taught in Scripture, either as a doctrine applying to the first century or as a doctrine applying to a later age.

But there are no verses that—singly or taken together—either state or imply that. Thus, as a doctrine, sola scriptura fails its own test. It is self-refuting, and you can show that deductively. That’s what motivates the claim that it is an interpretive principle rather than a doctrine, because it is so obviously false if you take it as a doctrine.

That’s why I said I agreed with Austin’s assessment of the first argument against it. If sola scriptura is only an interpretive principle, then it doesn’t matter that it is not taught in Scripture.

But I don’t think it fares much better for the reasons we have covered in this video. Even taken that way, it still has major problems, and we’ve seen an inductive disproof of it rather than a deductive disproof.

I think that sola scriptura is most naturally understood as a doctrine rather than an interpretive principle. It’s not something that reason alone suggests or even reason coupled with the doctrinal belief in scriptural inspiration, for the reasons we’ve seen.

In fact, it relies so heavily on the doctrine of inspiration that I don’t think one can honestly escape the conclusion that sola scriptura is a doctrine rather than an interpretive principle. Inspiration is clearly a doctrine, and if you base a claim upon a doctrine, then that claim will also be a doctrine.

I’m likely to explore this argument further in the future.

For what it’s worth, and this is a much smaller point that some may object to, but Wikipedia—as a document built on community consensus—states that sola scriptura is a Christian theological doctrine held by most Protestant Christian denominations. Since this is a Protestant doctrine, the editors of the Wikipedia page are most likely to be Protestant and to reflect the consensus within Protestantism. And what it says certainly reflects how most in the Protestant community treat sola scriptura.

Even if you set Wikipedia aside, though, the fact is that most Protestants do regard sola scriptura as a doctrine, and I think they are right to do so, because it cannot be supported as an interpretive principle by reason alone.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter which way you take it. If you regard sola scriptura as a doctrine, then we can demonstrate that it’s false deductively, and if you regard it as an interpretive principle, then we can demonstrate that it’s false inductively. Whether the proof is inductive or deductive, doesn’t matter. It’s still false.

At least, that’s my view.

I’d like to close by thanking Austin for putting out such an interesting video. Few people in the Protestant community seek to offer sustained treatments of sola scriptura as a principle rather than a doctrine, and it’s been stimulating to have something more substantial to interact with on that viewpoint.

So, Austin, great interacting with you, as always! Thanks very much, and I hope my own thoughts are in some way useful to you.

* * *

If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing

If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video

And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!