Four questions for defenders of sola scriptura.

com­mon­place argu­ment among Catholic apol­o­gists, when­ev­er the top­ic of sola scrip­tura aris­es, is this: that, with­out an author­i­ty exter­nal to the Bible, one can not know which books belong in the first place. No Protes­tant would argue that the table of con­tents is infal­li­ble; and yet some­how one must know that Gala­tians belongs in the Bible, but not the Epis­tle to the Laodiceans; the Gospel of Luke but not the Gospel of Philip.

Protes­tant apol­o­gist Stephen Wolfe, in “A Short Defense of Sola Scrip­tura,” tries to side­step this prob­lem. He argues that sola scrip­tura, as a doc­tri­nal prin­ci­ple, is sub­se­quent to the process of cod­i­fi­ca­tion. The Church had author­i­ty for a time; it could tell us what books belonged in the Bible; but that author­i­ty ceased once the canon was closed. Con­ve­nient.

The doc­trine of sola scrip­tura is not about a list of books, but the prin­ci­ple that all doc­trine must come from scrip­ture. In oth­er words, all doc­trine must come from a cer­tain type of rev­e­la­tion, name­ly, inscrip­turat­ed divine com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The cod­i­fi­ca­tion of the canon as a list of books is sub­se­quent to the receiv­ing of texts as scrip­ture, not pri­or to it; and say­ing that the rule of faith is con­tained in the six­ty-six book canon of scrip­ture pre­sup­pos­es this cod­i­fi­ca­tion as sub­se­quent.

All this bears a strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty to a point which Dr. James White has made before, most notably in his 1997 debate with Ger­ry Matat­ics. In that debate he said that sola scrip­tura is a “nor­ma­tive con­di­tion” of the church that does not exist “dur­ing times of enscrip­tura­tion.” It only shows up when the canon is closed. The anony­mous “Tur­ret­inFan” made the same point in a more recent debate with William Albrecht, when he said that sola scrip­tura is “what we do with the Bible once we have the Bible.”

It’s a clever argu­ment, to be sure. It tries to get around the fact that the Church must first tell us what the canon is, by say­ing that sola scrip­tura did not exist then any­way. The canon need­ed to be writ­ten first. Then it need­ed to be cod­i­fied. But then, once all that was done, sola scrip­tura took over and we did not need these exter­nal author­i­ties any longer.

The prob­lem with that argu­ment is that it leaves at least four things unex­plained.

• If that were true, what about the many Chris­tians who could not read?

Even Reformed schol­ar Michael J. Kruger con­cedes that the lit­er­a­cy rate among Chris­tians in the ear­ly cen­turies of the church was some­where between ten and fif­teen per­cent. How can sola scrip­tura func­tion if such large num­bers can’t even read the Bible in the first place and must rely on oth­er author­i­ties to tell them what it says and how it is to be under­stood?

• If that were true, why would God not have told us about sola scrip­tura some­where in the bib­li­cal text?

You don’t find any pas­sage in the Bible that says we are to be gov­erned by the Bible alone. Instead, we find texts, like 1 Tim. 3:15, that tell us about the author­i­ty of the Church.

• If that were true, why do we not hear about it in the Church Fathers?

Instead, we find peo­ple like Ignatius of Anti­och telling us, “You make sure you lis­ten to the bish­op.” Why did we have to wait for James White to tell us that sola scrip­tura took over when apos­tolic author­i­ty left off? For when I pressed him on it, Dr. White was not able to tell me of one sin­gle per­son, before him­self, who made that point. Now Reformed apol­o­gists all ape some­thing Dr. White said in 1997 only when Mr. Matat­ics forced him to con­cede that the apos­tles did not prac­tice sola

• If that were true, why was the Church wrong about the num­ber of books in the canon for 1200 years?

For all that time, Chris­tians thought that Baruch was canon­i­cal scrip­ture. For all that time, they thought that Tobit was the inspired word of God. If the Church had the author­i­ty to rec­og­nize what books were in the canon, how did they get it wrong, and why was Mar­tin Luther the first to fig­ure that out? Where in the Bible did Mar­tin Luther learn that Wis­dom shouldn’t be in the Bible? If, once the canon is set­tled, Chris­tians must fol­low scrip­ture alone, how is it that some remove scrip­ture from scrip­ture?

Unless there are sat­is­fac­to­ry answers to ques­tions such as these, Protes­tant attempts to defend sola scrip­tura will only cre­ate more prob­lems than they solve.

 
Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Epic Pew, August 8, 2016.