Blueprint for anarchy: bad argument against sola scriptura? White v. Matatics (1997), part 7.

Note: This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a series on Dr.* James White’s 1997 debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics on sola scrip­tura. You can find part 1 here and fol­low the links for­ward. (The debate itself is on YouTube, and I direct you there since I would no more embed the labor of anoth­er man’s vast brain than I would take a bone from a harm­less Ger­man Shep­herd dog­gy.)

lue­print for anar­chy” is an argu­ment against sola scrip­tura that Patrick Madrid made in the 1990s. So why would Dr.* White bring it up in a debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics? One can have fun guess­ing. Per­haps it was because Mr. Matat­ics repeat­ed the argu­ment at some point and caused con­ver­sions to mul­ti­ply. Or maybe Dr.* White remem­bered his debate with Mr. Madrid in 1993 — it had weighed heav­i­ly upon his mind for four long years — and he want­ed to cast doubt upon blue­print lest Mr. Matat­ics bring it up and Dr.* White’s share of the audi­ence resolve to join RCIA. What do I know? Blue­print is actu­al­ly an unde­ni­able claim:

The final ques­tion that should be asked the Protes­tant is, “Can you show where in his­to­ry sola scrip­tura has worked?” In oth­er words, where, through­out Protes­tantism’s rel­a­tive­ly brief life-span, can we find exam­ples (just one will do) of sola scrip­tura actu­al­ly work­ing — func­tion­ing in such a way that it brings about doc­tri­nal cer­ti­tude and uni­ty of doc­trine among Chris­tians? The answer is “nowhere.”

Now, Mr. Madrid does add some addi­tion­al claims to this that real­ly are dubi­ous. For exam­ple, he cites a fig­ure of 22,000 denom­i­na­tions, which is not just exces­sive but unnec­es­sary to the argu­ment. I’ve crit­i­cized some Catholics’ habit of exag­ger­at­ing the num­ber of Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions; since “Blue­print” was pub­lished, the stan­dard num­ber has swelled to 33,000 or more. Cit­ing dubi­ous num­bers like this is a dis­trac­tion from the pri­ma­ry argu­ment, which is true: Every­where you look in Protes­tantism, you see divi­sion. Attempts to quan­ti­fy the divi­sion are point­less; divi­sion itself is the prob­lem. Sola scrip­tura has not achieved uni­ty. But if it’s such a sure guide to faith and prac­tice, how did this come about? Why has there not been uni­ty for even a day? Mar­tin Luther famous­ly com­plained — right at the very birth of the Ref­or­ma­tion — that there were already as many sects as there were heads. (Even James Swan, who has made a cot­tage indus­try out of deny­ing that Luther said much of any­thing that’s attrib­uted to him, admits there’s a pri­ma­ry source for it and that a Catholic was able to track it down. Now, that’s indus­try! Here’s the source; I hope you may be able to read Ger­man.)

So if Dr.* White wants to claim that blue­print is a bad argu­ment, he’ll need to prove why it’s a false argu­ment. Take up Mr. Madrid’s chal­lenge, Dr.* White. Show us sola scrip­tura “actu­al­ly work­ing.” It will not be enough for him to com­plain that he does­n’t like those words. Nor can he just scoff at an exag­ger­at­ed num­ber of denom­i­na­tions — as though, hav­ing proved the num­ber ain’t that high, he can put on his night­cap, pull the cov­ers over him­self, and sleep the sleep of the jus­ti­fied.

BIASED AGAINST BLUEPRINT

Around 31:15 into the debate Dr.* White describes Mr. Madrid’s essay as the “sin­gle worst argu­ment against sola scrip­tura.”

(In fact, I sus­pect it’s prob­a­bly a pret­ty good one if he’s going to try to bias the audi­ence against it and, if all goes well, trick Mr. Matat­ics into not bring­ing it up. Remem­ber when John Bugay tried to bul­ly Catholics into not ask­ing the ques­tion Where is sola scrip­tura in the Bible, claim­ing that it was “dis­hon­est”? I do. That’s when you know an argu­men­t’s work­ing.)

“Look at what has hap­pened!” Dr.* White char­ac­ter­izes blue­print. “There are 23,000 Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions!”

See what I told you? Already he mis­states Mr. Madrid’s argu­ment, as though it were about the quan­ti­ty of divi­sion rather than divi­sion by itself. (In fair­ness, that’s a huge rea­son why I think Catholic apol­o­gists should steer clear of try­ing to put a num­ber on Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions. It only encour­ages anti-Catholics like Dr.* White to play games of dis­trac­tion.)

But here is the main rea­son why he thinks blue­print fails as an argu­ment against sola scrip­tura: “The mis­use of a suf­fi­cient source is not an argu­ment against the suf­fi­cien­cy of that source.” As an illus­tra­tion, Dr.* White uses a com­put­er man­u­al. The man­u­al will tell you how to get the com­put­er to work, but too many peo­ple don’t read the full man­u­al. “They skip over sec­tions, they ignore sec­tions, they only read the sec­tions that have the pic­tures in them. What­ev­er it might be, they mis­use the source.”

So Dr.* White attempts to write off all the divi­sion with­in Protes­tantism as a con­se­quence of peo­ple just not read­ing the whole Bible. If only they would read the whole thing, we are meant to believe, there would be no divi­sion at all!

I’m not buy­ing that. Does Dr.* White real­ly mean to say that all these Protes­tant church­es — the Calvin­ist ones alone exclud­ed — are guilty of not read­ing all 73 books? (Actu­al­ly, even Dr.* White has dis­re­gard­ed sev­en of them; maybe there’s some­thing to this.) They’re ignor­ing this part, they’re skip­ping over the bor­ing Mosa­ic codes in the Pen­ta­teuch, St. Paul’s syn­tax is far too wild to read, they skip ahead to James because he affirms their vile accu­mu­la­tion of works? That’s why there’s the­o­log­i­cal dis­agree­ment about impor­tant texts of scrip­ture? Real­ly?

I’m sor­ry, but that strikes me as either a car­toon­ish or actu­al­ly dis­hon­est expla­na­tion of why — for exam­ple — Calvin­ists and Armini­ans dif­fer so pro­found­ly about free will, total deprav­i­ty, pre­des­ti­na­tion, and the atone­ment. The idea that Armin­ian the­olo­gians have skipped over large chunks of the Bible, leav­ing them unread, or else have silent­ly dis­re­gard­ed them, is utter non­sense. That may be true of every­day Chris­tians in the pews, but not of schol­ars and the­olo­gians. The idea is not even worth tak­ing seri­ous­ly, and I hope Mr. Matat­ics — when he gets his turn — calls him out on it. Dr.* White has the bur­den of prov­ing that “the sin­ful­ness and rebel­lion of man,” rather than the inad­e­qua­cy of sola scrip­tura, explains Protes­tant divi­sion. It would require a large amount of evi­dence to prove this, and Dr.* White makes no attempt to cite any. He sim­ply asserts the claim. And did you notice that it saves him the trou­ble of point­ing to any evi­dence that sola scrip­tura has actu­al­ly worked? All he has are excus­es for why it has­n’t.

In fact, Dr.* White con­cedes that there are “dif­fi­cult pas­sages in the Bible.” We must be “dili­gent stu­dents of the Word,” he says. But Armini­ans aren’t? Catholics aren’t? How does Dr.* White know that he’s not guilty of the malfea­sance, the sin­ful­ness and rebel­lion, the lack of suf­fi­cient dili­gence, that he accus­es oth­ers of? If there real­ly are “dif­fi­cult pas­sages in the Bible” — and there’s no deny­ing it, since St. Peter him­self tells us such texts exist — then isn’t it pos­si­ble that an Armin­ian is mak­ing the best effort he can and just comes to a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion than the Calvin­ist?

In order to get around Mr. Madrid’s claim, Dr* White has to engage in rash judg­ment. In order to retain the claim that the Bible alone is suf­fi­cient for faith and prac­tice, he has to assume that all this divi­sion is a result of malfeasance–rebellion, sin­ful­ness, lack of dili­gence and atten­tive­ness to the full tes­ti­mo­ny of Scrip­ture. He cites no evi­dence for this, and that’s just not good enough to sus­tain the claim that blue­print is the “sin­gle worst argu­ment” against sola scrip­tura.

It’s got to be a pret­ty good argu­ment if Dr.* White has to resort to unsub­stan­ti­at­ed rash judg­ment in order to deny it.

BUT WHAT ABOUT CATHOLIC DISUNITY?

Now Dr.* White tries to turn the tables:

If you sim­ply look at the Roman Catholic Church today, you will find a tremen­dous amount of dis­agree­ment and diver­gence amongst those who name the name of Rome. Does that mean the Mag­is­teri­um is insuf­fi­cient because it does not result in absolute una­nim­i­ty? Mr. Matat­ics dis­agrees with even oth­er Roman Catholic apol­o­gists. Does that mean that the Mag­is­teri­um and the pro­nounce­ments, the infal­li­ble pro­nounce­ments, of the Church are insuf­fi­cient because they don’t pro­duce unan­i­mous opin­ion? Well, obvi­ous­ly not.

What Dr.* White wants us to believe is that the dis­uni­ty in Protes­tantism is no dif­fer­ent than the dis­uni­ty in Catholi­cism. The Mag­is­teri­um is not any bet­ter a safe­guard than sola scrip­tura is. The prob­lem is, he does not give any exam­ples of the kind of “dis­agree­ment and diver­gence” he has in mind. It would help a lot if he did. If I were debat­ing him, I would ask him to name a few.

For exam­ple, does the “dis­agree­ment and diver­gence” involve things about which Catholics are free to dis­agree? There are many of them. Catholics are free to believe in the mate­r­i­al suf­fi­cien­cy of Scrip­ture, but it is not a doc­trine of the faith and Catholics may also reject it. Like­wise, Catholics are free to reject any Mar­i­an appari­tion at all, even ones that are approved by the Church.

On the oth­er hand, Catholics are not free to reject the doc­trine of Tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion. But sup­pose Dr.* White were able to say, “You know, John Smith says he does­n’t believe in Tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion.” Does that mean Mr. Smith thinks the Mag­is­teri­um has not taught Tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion at all? Or does it mean that he’s con­scious­ly in dis­sent?

By con­trast, it’s not as though Armini­ans some­how know that Calvin­ists are right about John 3:16 but choose to dis­sent. Nei­ther have Armini­ans skipped over the Gospel of John. Rather, they under­stand the text dif­fer­ent­ly than Calvin­ists do. To be sure, many Chris­tians know per­fect­ly well that the Bible teach­es that homo­sex­u­al acts are a sin and sim­ply rebel. But that’s not the kind of divi­sion that Mr. Madrid had in mind when he spoke of the blue­print for anar­chy. He is think­ing of cas­es where Chris­tians dis­agree about the inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture, not where Chris­tians reject what they know the Scrip­ture to be teach­ing.

So unless Dr.* White has spe­cif­ic exam­ples of “dis­uni­ty and diver­gence” — unless he can show cas­es of Catholics dis­agree­ing about what the Mag­is­te­r­i­al teach­ing on wom­en’s ordi­na­tion actu­al­ly is — it’s impos­si­ble to address whether or not his claim has any mer­it. It would be nice to find that Mr. Matat­ics brings this up in cross exam­i­na­tion. [Read Part 8.]