Questions for a Reformed apologist.

onder, dear read­er, the fol­low­ing words: “The nov­el­ty of bib­li­cal rev­e­la­tion con­sists in the fact that God becomes known to us through the dia­logue which he desires to have with us.” Does the author believe in sola scrip­tura? What do you think? For, after all, he describes the Bible as “nov­el.” That is to say, it is unique; it is dif­fer­ent than any­thing else. More than that, he describes the Bible as the means by which “God becomes known to us.” He refers to it as God’s “dia­logue” with us. He points to no oth­er source of knowl­edge or dia­logue with God.

what do the fathers really say?

Now, before I tell you who wrote those words, let us look at a sec­ond pas­sage, this one from St. Hip­poly­tus of Rome (170–235 A.D.). Dr. Joseph Mizzi quotes Hip­poly­tus here as part of an effort to show that the Church Fathers believed in sola scrip­tura. (Don’t let the “Dr.” con­fuse you in this con­text; he’s a pedi­a­tri­cian.) In Against Noe­tus Hip­poly­tus writes: “There is, brethren, one God, the knowl­edge of whom we gain from the Holy Scrip­tures, and from no oth­er source.” That sounds very like the first pas­sage, does it not? So alike is it, in fact, that the first could be noth­ing more than a para­phrase of the last.

The first was writ­ten by—well, you can find it here.

Reformed apol­o­gists often use quo­ta­tions like these to prop up their false doc­trine of sola scrip­tura. (Look here what this Father said! Tolle, lege, papists!) It can be con­vinc­ing. The texts speak so high­ly of the Scrip­ture as a rule of faith and source of truth. One may stum­ble over what to say in reply; for no one can have mem­o­rized all 38 vol­umes of the Fathers, such that—say, in a spar—he could always know the con­text, or whether his Protes­tant inter­locu­tor is cheat­ing in the accu­ra­cy. (I have an exam­ple of that below, in a quo­ta­tion from St. Athana­sius.) The best you might do, if it is an unknown text, is say, “I don’t in fact know; I’ll have to look that up lat­er.” But then you come off as une­d­u­cat­ed and bum­bling. The Protes­tant scores anoth­er tick on his gotcha tal­ly.

Dr.* James White is no stranger to using this tac­tic in debate. (Just lis­ten to the first few min­utes of his open­ing state­ment in the 1997 debate on this top­ic with Ger­ry Matat­ics.) The pas­sage from Ver­bum Domi­ni is a case in point of what I mean. Bene­dict XVI, to be sure, is not some­one the good Dr.* White would try to pass off as a sup­port­er of sola scrip­tura. That way mad­ness lies. But imag­ine that his words real­ly had been writ­ten by a Church Father—say, Hip­poly­tus. (The words, you recall, are near the same.) Unless you had a work­ing knowl­edge of the con­text, and even the entire text itself, it would be a hard task for you to show how they do not sup­port sola scrip­tura.

The real point to be made, though—as I have done here, in an ear­li­er post—is that such texts nev­er once speak of Scrip­ture as the sole rule of faith. Now, to be sure, they do speak high­ly of it. They do appeal to Scrip­ture to prove some point of doc­trine. That is so. But when speak­ing of it thus, they nev­er speak of it in terms to which the word “sola” could fair­ly be applied. Look at the quo­ta­tion from Hip­poly­tus again. “There is, brethren, one God, the knowl­edge of whom we gain from the Holy Scrip­tures, and from no oth­er source.” At once, the Protes­tant apol­o­gist will point out the phrase “from no oth­er source” and cry: “That is exclu­siv­i­ty!” But—here’s the key point—what exclu­siv­i­ty does Hip­poly­tus claim for Scrip­ture? Does he say that Scrip­ture is the sole rule of faith and prac­tice? Not at all. He says that Scrip­ture is the sole source of the knowl­edge of God. That’s dif­fer­ent: Pope Bene­dict XVI approach­es the very same claim in Ver­bum Domi­ni. As far as I know, the pope is not an advo­cate of sola scrip­tura. Not even the good Dr.* White would want to claim oth­er­wise; I trust him to be that far sane.

Dr. Mizzi, on his site, lists sev­er­al pas­sages like that from the Church Fathers; many are from St. Augus­tine, as though that could dumb­found a Catholic who was not whol­ly unground­ed and had heard the name. He says they sup­port sola scrip­tura, but very few of them, even on the sur­face, make any claim of exclu­siv­i­ty. As an exam­ple, take this one from St. Basil the Great. In Moralia 72:1 he writes: “The hear­ers taught in the Scrip­tures ought to test what is said by teach­ers and accept that which agrees with the Scrip­tures but reject that which is for­eign.”

(That would be scan­n’d; the syn­tax is mud­dled. A bet­ter ren­der­ing would be: “Th[ose stu­dents who have been instruct­ed] in the Scrip­tures ought to test what is said by [their] teach­ers and accept that which agrees with the Scrip­tures but reject that which is for­eign.”)

Syn­tax aside, how­ev­er, all that Basil says here is that a legit­i­mate teacher should not con­tra­dict the Scrip­tures (“reject that which is for­eign”). But this does not touch upon the doc­trine of sola scrip­tura in the first place. No Catholic defends tra­di­tion con­trary to the Bible. (“For­eign” here means “con­trary” because Basil uses the word in con­trast with “agrees.”) No Catholic says you must lis­ten to your priest or cat­e­chist if he says things the Bible refutes. And St. Basil him­self says noth­ing about tra­di­tions that are nei­ther in the Bible nor for­bid­den by it. He says noth­ing that any Catholic would reject.

bias of a print culture.

This page on Dr. Mizzi’s site, with cita­tion after cita­tion like that, amounts to no more than a scam defense of sola scrip­tura. Those with a healthy skep­ti­cism will find, by care­ful read­ing, that the Church Father is mak­ing a far dif­fer­ent point. It’s pos­si­ble the good pedi­a­tri­cian is con­fused and not men­da­cious; I don’t know. But in fact, the most con­vinc­ing pas­sage he offers comes from St. Athana­sius’s Against the Hea­then. Here is Dr. Mizzi’s very selec­tive quo­ta­tion: “The holy and inspired Scrip­tures are ful­ly suf­fi­cient for the procla­ma­tion of the truth.” Thun­der­bolt and light­ning, that sure sounds like sola scrip­tura! One prob­lem: Dr. Mizzi leaves out this very impor­tant word, which pre­cedes the quo­ta­tion: “Although.”

Here is the full text:

For although the sacred and inspired Scrip­tures are suf­fi­cient to declare the truth—while there are oth­er works of our blessed teach­ers com­piled for this pur­pose, if he meet with which a man will gain some knowl­edge of the inter­pre­ta­tion of the Scrip­tures, and be able to learn what he wish­es to know—still, as we have not at present in our hands the com­po­si­tions of our teach­ers, we must com­mu­ni­cate in writ­ing to you what we learned from them—the faith, name­ly, of Christ the Sav­iour; lest any should hold cheap the doc­trine taught among us, or think faith in Christ unrea­son­able.

This too would be unpacked. Athana­sius here makes men­tion of two things that are the wery life and blood and sinew and bone of every Catholic apol­o­gist’s body of argu­ments against sola scrip­tura. The first is that not every Chris­t­ian will have access to the Bible. “We have not at present in our hands the com­po­si­tions of our teach­ers,” he says. How are they to be guid­ed by Scrip­ture alone if they don’t have it in the first place? And that was par­tic­u­lar­ly true in his time; not until the inven­tion of the print­ing press, 1400 years lat­er, could the Bible begin to be avail­able to the aver­age per­son. It would take cen­turies more before a man could afford a copy all his own. And what of places and times with poor lit­er­a­cy rates?

Indeed, one could say—and as an aside; this is a top­ic large enough to mer­it a blog entry of its own—that sola scrip­tura is the bias of a print cul­ture. Pri­or to a print­ing press, pri­or to being able to buy a copy all your own, and sit under a tree, and mark it up, and pope your­self, a Chris­t­ian relied for his knowl­edge of the faith not on read­ing the Scrip­tures but on hear­ing the words of his teach­ers. He heard the Bible when it was read at Mass and glossed by homi­ly; he learned the faith by instruc­tion and cat­e­chism.

The sec­ond thing that Athana­sius points out is the rea­son Chris­tians need teach­ers in the first place: so they may obtain “some knowl­edge of the inter­pre­ta­tion of the Scrip­tures.” He can­not just be left alone with them. (Nor at the time could any­one have read the Bible alone, when texts were few and made by hand. It was a pub­lic, com­mu­ni­ty act.) Scrip­ture must be inter­pret­ed, and the dis­ci­ple guid­ed and taught in the prop­er exe­ge­sis of the var­i­ous texts. Athana­sius makes no men­tion, in any of this, of a book that can per­form mag­ic and exegete itself.

So what we have in Against the Hea­then is a dis­tinc­tion between what we call, today, the mate­r­i­al and the for­mal suf­fi­cien­cy of Scrip­ture. The Bible does con­tain, in some form, even if just ovum, all true doc­trine. It is “suf­fi­cient [in its mate­r­i­al, or con­tent] to declare the truth.” No Catholic need fear that. Amen, Lord Jesus. But a “Bible alone” doc­trine must go fur­ther; a “Bible alone” doc­trine must posit that any­one can inter­pret the Bible aright, with­out the guid­ance of the Church—as though it were suf­fi­cient unto itself, in form and mat­ter. Try to find the Trin­i­ty in the Bible, spelled out so plain that it could not be denied. The West­min­ster Con­fes­sion of Faith tells us that the Bible somehow—if you bounce about from text to like text—interprets itself. (As though the cross-ref­er­ences in the mar­gin come from God.) Who needs a teach­ing Church? the Trin­i­ty is self-evi­dent in Scrip­ture! But if the Bible alone could achieve what the WCF says (and I am here to say that no text can), why do Protes­tants not all agree with each oth­er on all things? Why do Uni­tar­i­ans exist? Why do Calvin­ists and Armini­ans both cry, “Scrip­ture alone”? No. Although the Scrip­tures are suf­f­i­cent in con­tent, Athana­sius says, right inter­pre­ta­tion must be guid­ed by the Church. That is why the Church is one, and Protes­tants are 33,000 and still explod­ing.

Thus is Dr. Mizzi’s par­tial quo­ta­tion of Athana­sius mis­lead­ing. It seems chopped off at the head by craft alone, whether the craft belonged to Dr. Mizzi or he bor­rowed it from else­where and failed to trace the source to the orig­i­nal text. I can’t say. But far from defend­ing sola scrip­tura, Athana­sius denies it.

sola scriptura quia ipse dixit.

But if, dear read­er, you are struck with the incon­gruity of sola scrip­tura Protes­tants try­ing to defend a “Bible alone” doc­trine from sources out­side the Bible, you are not alone. Why quote the Fathers if the Bible is enough? Why not just quote the Bible? That is the wrin­kle into which they have ironied them­selves. Sola scrip­tura is not in the Bible, so how does one defend it? Only from out­side the Bible! And indeed, the Protes­tant does under­stand the impor­tance of find­ing evi­dence that the ear­li­est Chris­tians held and prac­ticed this doc­trine. With­out it, sola scrip­tura appears to be what in fact it is: noth­ing more than the idio­syn­crat­ic nov­el­ty of a group of wild rebels, which took hold three-quar­ters of the way into Chris­tian­i­ty’s 2000-year his­to­ry. It is not enough to say that Mar­tin Luther stat­ed the doc­trine, or John Calvin. The Protes­tant has to find some ear­li­er tra­di­tion, deep in his­to­ry, and claim that Luther and Calvin restored it. But an even cur­so­ry look at some of these quo­ta­tions shows that they have not been doing a very good job at that.

Dr. David Anders, who writes for Called to Com­mu­nion, explains the dif­fi­cul­ty that the Protes­tant apol­o­gist has his­tor­i­cal­ly had with the doc­trine of sola scrip­tura (the audio starts around 34:00).