Two highly illogical arguments for sola scriptura.

oth of these come from Stephen Wolfe, writ­ing at Ref­or­ma­tion 500—a site fre­quent­ed by our old friend, the polem­i­cal rogue Mr. John Bugay The title of Mr. Wolfe’s small lit­tle post is “A Short Defense of Sola Scrip­tura”; and it is so short—even cursory—that he fails to avoid sev­er­al large and breezy gaps in log­ic.

In the first of them, Mr. Wolfe tries to reply to a com­mon­place obser­va­tion: that you can’t have sola scrip­tura unless the Bible itself gives us an infal­li­ble list of what’s canon­i­cal, and the Bible does not come with an inspired table of con­tents. Mr. Wolfe says he has a rebut­tal to this:

The canon, as the “list of books,” is no more inspired than the num­ber of para­bles in the gospels. (I think that Tur­ret­inFan made this point a while back). The num­ber of para­bles is a con­se­quence of the para­bles being inspired, but the num­ber is not inspired. In the same way, the “list of books” is not inspired; it is a con­se­quence of the receiv­ing or “hear­ing” of scrip­ture by the church. Yes, the Church had a fun­da­men­tal role in rec­og­niz­ing scrip­ture, for they are the ones who “hear” and rec­og­nize the voice of Christ (Jn. 10:27); and the Church, as the receiv­ing body, cod­i­fied what they heard in the form of a canon. So the canon is a con­se­quence of the church hear­ing and receiv­ing scrip­ture. As I say below, the canon is a con­se­quence of the prin­ci­ple of sola scrip­tura.

Sev­er­al prob­lems emerge here.

1. Mr. Wolfe con­cedes that “the Church had a fun­da­men­tal role in rec­og­niz­ing Scrip­ture” and that she “cod­i­fied [it] in the form of a canon.” But what the Church “cod­i­fied” was a 73-book canon, and Mr. Wolfe’s Bible only has 66 of them. If it is the Church that “rec­og­nizes the voice of Christ,” why does Mr. Wolfe not hear that voice in Judith, or Tobit, or Mac­cabees, as the Church does? In his blithe post, he sim­ply bypass­es this prob­lem, as though it does not exist.

2. If the Church can tell us what the canon is or is not, then it fol­lows that she has at least some author­i­ty out­side Scrip­ture. It also fol­lows that it must be an infal­li­ble author­i­ty, for God would not give the Church the author­i­ty to tell us what Scrip­ture is and then allow it to make a mis­take. But accord­ing to Mr. Wolfe it made sev­en of them. What he grants with his right hand he takes away with his left. If the Church has the author­i­ty to tell us what scrip­ture is, why does it not have the author­i­ty to tell us what the Scrip­ture means? Why does it not have the author­i­ty to tell us what doc­trines are or are not to be found there? Mr. Wolfe does not say.

3. Mr. Wolfe mis­states the Catholic argu­ment in his rebut­tal. The Catholic argu­ment is not that the pre­cise num­ber of bib­li­cal books is inspired. Nor is the Catholic argu­ment that their titles are inspired, or that some par­tic­u­lar list is. Rather, the Catholic argu­ment is that, with­out an author­i­ty exter­nal to Scrip­ture, we can­not know what belongs on that list. Why Gala­tians, and not the Epis­tle to the Laodiceans? Why the Gospel of Luke, and not the Gospel of Philip? Scrip­ture itself does not tell us these things; only an author­i­ty exter­nal to Scrip­ture can do so. Mr. Wolfe tries to trick us by con­ced­ing the Catholic argu­ment while at the same time deny­ing it. The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away.

In Mr. Wolfe’s sec­ond argu­ment, he tries to side­step this prob­lem by argu­ing that sola scrip­tura, as a doc­tri­nal prin­ci­ple, is sub­se­quent to the process of cod­i­fi­ca­tion. The Church had author­i­ty for a time (to tell us what books belong in the Bible) but it ceased to exist once the canon was closed:

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. Tur­ret­inFan (known on this blog as Mr. X) 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, as I’ve said before (e.g., here and here and here). 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.

1. 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?

2. 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.

3. 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 Dr.* 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 scrip­tura.

4. 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, we’re sup­posed to fol­low scrip­ture alone, how is it that scrip­ture gets removed from scrip­ture?

In truth, none of these argu­ments are at all orig­i­nal with Mr. Wolfe; he apes them from Dr.* White and Mr. X. Nor does he acknowl­edge that they have been answered, time and again, nor does he attempt to inter­act with the ques­tions and dif­fi­cul­ties that oth­ers have raised. The result, on his part, is a very shal­low and per­func­to­ry post with numer­ous gaps in log­ic.