White Man’s Burden redux.

ight from the start of his pod­cast The Divid­ing Line last Thurs­day, Dr.* James White seemed mys­ti­fied about this arti­cle of mine in a way that, frankly, mys­ti­fied me. He began where one should—at the end—and read his audi­ence the last sen­tence of my post: “Answers to these ques­tions will cer­tainly help me great­ly in my ongo­ing look at the issues of sola scrip­tura, the canon of Scrip­ture, and eccle­si­ol­o­gy.” Poor Dr.* White seemed to think that the words “my ongo­ing look” meant that I was “still exam­in­ing these issues.” Some­how I had not made up my mind. Some­how I was still agnos­tic about sola scrip­tura. And he found it incon­gru­ous with my ear­li­er plea that sola scrip­tura is a “false doc­trine.” The immense pate of that learned man could not fath­om what I had meant.

easy truths for dr.* white.

Allow me to help. I meant that I am writ­ing about sola scrip­tura. (How easy truth is!) I had writ­ten a few blog arti­cles, three or four, pri­or to the one that came with­in the purview of Dr.* White’s sig­nif­i­cant atten­tion; I have more to write. I made no secret of that. You won’t find a page here, for mem­bers only, enti­tled “Things I Hide From Dr.* White.” The expres­sion “look at” to mean “write about” or “talk about” is used all the time. It is no obscure lan­guage. Dr.* White him­self used those very words at the very start of this very Divid­ing Line: “Today we are going to be look­ing at an arti­cle.” I did not say: You mean Dr.* White has­n’t made up his mind about it yet? He’s still think­ing it through? He might con­vert to Rome before the end of the pod­cast?

Dr.* White also had me scratch­ing my head over the Hen­drick­son set of the Church Fathers—the sem­i­nal 38-vol­ume one. I had includ­ed a pic of in my pri­or post. He says his first reac­tion was to ask him­self: “Is this guy going to do what Jason Stell­man did, and pret­ty much lim­it the ear­ly Church Fathers to this par­tic­u­lar edi­tion?” I have not lis­tened to Jason Stell­man’s pod­cast with Bryan Cross, or Dr.* White’s epic Divid­ing Line response to it, in some months. But I doubt Mr. Stell­man real­ly is unaware that oth­er edi­tions of the Fathers exist. I’m sure he knows the 38-vol­ume set is not exhaus­tive. I know I am aware of all the oth­er edi­tions Dr.* White and his prime toady, the glib and anony­mous Tur­ret­inFan, brought up. (For that wor­thy gen­tle­man did join the show.) One such set is being pub­lished by the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca Press and it’s just not cred­i­ble to think a Catholic apol­o­gist would not have heard of its exis­tence.

But there are many reasons—in the con­text of my dis­cus­sion at that moment, and hav­ing to do with shorthand—why I would cite “the 38 vol­umes.” One is sim­ply that, for con­verts or Catholics who have nev­er read the Church Fathers—who may even be unable to afford a copy of any set—the 38 vol­umes are the obvi­ous place to begin, since they are eas­i­ly avail­able to be read and searched online. (Such as here and here.) To be sure, an aca­d­e­m­ic, a schol­ar, a cyclist, a pro­fes­sion­al apol­o­gist, a wor­thy blog­ger, a man of many degrees like Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc. ) must make him­self know the full range of avail­able edi­tions. But at this point I was not address­ing myself to schol­ar­ship in the Fathers. There are con­texts out­side the one where Dr.* White lives and moves and has his being.

The sec­ond rea­son to include a pic­ture is—in context—to impress upon the read­er how exten­sive these writ­ings are. One need not gath­er togeth­er every last set known to Dr.* White, stack them up like the Great Wall of Chi­na, and stage a pho­to shoot from a high crane with a strong lens.

Now, of course, I know that Dr.* White wants to make Catholic apol­o­gists look as super­fi­cial and unaware of the depth of patris­tic schol­ar­ship as pos­si­ble. He’s very Pavlov­ian that way. But the assump­tion that, if you men­tion a par­tic­u­lar trans­la­tion of a text, you there­fore must be unaware of oth­er trans­la­tions which also exist, is a non sequitur that, I do con­fess, leaves me rolling on the floor in a baf­fled stu­por.

benedict the hippolytan.

But to turn to the heart of Dr.* White’s cri­tique. He and Tur­ret­inFan (known to us as Mr. X) were confused—though by this point, I’m get­ting used to that—by my ref­er­ence to Ver­bum Domi­ni. In that doc­u­ment, Pope Bene­dict XVI writes: “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.”

Mr. X under­stands what my point was: “that one can take Bene­dict XVI out of con­text to sug­gest he holds to sola scrip­tura.” But he won­ders whether I might not have cho­sen a bet­ter B16 text to make the same point. The pope also says this: “[Scrip­ture is not] an inert deposit with­in the Church [but the] supreme rule of faith and pow­er of life.”

Inci­den­tal­ly, as an aside: Mr. X seems to pre­fer that his read­ers click through a series of links to trace this quo­ta­tion back to the an arti­cle in L’Osser­va­tore Romano—itself a sec­ondary source that quotes a papal let­ter to William Car­di­nal Lev­a­da, pres­i­dent of the Pon­tif­i­cal Bib­li­cal Com­mis­sion. I, who make no such hunt­ing demands upon the read­er, present to you the full text, which can be found on the Vat­i­can’s web page. You will observe that Mr. X rather slop­pi­ly repro­duced the pope’s words, which were these:

Thus the Word of God, set down in sacred texts, is not an inert deposit with­in the Church but becomes a supreme law of her faith and life force.

No soon­er does he say that than the pope at once clar­i­fies that the “sacred texts” are to be under­stood only through the Tra­di­tion of the Church and the teach­ing of its bish­ops.

The Tra­di­tion, which orig­i­nates from the Apos­tles, pro­gress­es with the help of the Holy Spir­it and grows with the reflec­tion and the study of believ­ers, with per­son­al expe­ri­ence of spir­i­tu­al life and preach­ing of the Bish­ops.

But at any rate, before I turn to whether or not Mr. X’s choice is in truth a clos­er approx­i­ma­tion to sola scrip­tura, let me point out why I chose the quo­ta­tion I did. (I said all this in the first place, but Mr. X seems to need some extra help.) It bears a strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty to some words by the Church Father Hip­poly­tus, which Dr. Joseph Mizzi quotes here in defense of the idea that the Church Fathers believed in sola scrip­tura. Here is Hip­poly­tus: “There is, brethren, one God, the knowl­edge of whom we gain from the Holy Scrip­tures, and from no oth­er source.”

And here again is Bene­dict XVI, from the quo­ta­tion I chose: “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.”

In Hip­poly­tus, “the knowl­edge of [God]” is attained from the Scrip­tures; in Bene­dict XVI, the Scrip­tures are the source through which “God becomes known to us.” They sound near-iden­ti­cal to me; Dr.* White saw nary a like­ness. Only he can explain that. But here was my point: If Hip­poly­tus’ words sup­port sola scrip­tura—and Dr. Mizzi claims they do—then so do the pope’s. One must take care, in oth­er words, when claim­ing to have found sup­port for a doc­trine among men who were whol­ly unfa­mil­iar with it.

Dr.* White and Mr. X then fell into a dis­cus­sion about the “no oth­er source” part of the Hip­poly­tus quo­ta­tion. My Bible, Dr.* White says, tells me oth­er­wise, and there­fore Hip­poly­tus does not sup­port sola scrip­tura—at least, not here. Dr.* White also would not read sola scrip­tura into the pope’s words, nor assume that he believes that the knowl­edge of God comes only from the Bible. On these points, Dr.* White and I agree. But Dr. Mizzi—whose selec­tion of Hip­poly­tus I was dis­cussing at this point—certainly does seem to think that the “no oth­er source” clause implies sola scrip­tura. I’m glad to learn that Dr.* White’s real prob­lem is with Dr. Mizzi, not with me.

Let us turn, then, to the words that Mr. X thinks may be clos­er to a sola scrip­tura state­ment from the pope: that Scrip­ture is “the supreme rule of faith.” Accord­ing to Mr. X, in order to deter­mine that Bene­dict is not advo­cat­ing sola scrip­tura, you have to look fur­ther into the con­text to see that he defines tra­di­tion as also “the supreme rule of faith.”

Except there is no need to go fur­ther. Even if Pope Bene­dict did not include the addi­tion­al state­ment about tra­di­tion, all Mr. X needs to con­sult in order to know that the pope is not advo­cat­ing sola scrip­tura is the dic­tio­nary. Bene­dict calls Scrip­ture the “supreme rule of faith.” That’s dif­fer­ent from call­ing it the “sole rule of faith.” “Supreme” and “sole” do not mean the same thing. That may be news to Mr. X, but it is an impor­tant point; for there­in lies the very error that Reformed apol­o­gists make, time and again, when they appeal to texts of Scrip­ture or the Church Fathers. They will take state­ments about the Bible that use prox­i­mate words, and treat them as though they are some­how syn­ony­mous with “sole.” Catholics who dia­logue or debate with Reformed Chris­tians need to point such things out when they hap­pen. Sola scrip­tura can not be jus­ti­fied by redefin­ing words.

mr. x struggles with the text.

In his arti­cle, Mr. X quotes Hip­poly­tus at greater length in an attempt to show that, in con­text, he views Scrip­ture as “the sole source for the­o­log­i­cal debate and dog­ma.” Here is the full quo­ta­tion that Dr. Mizzi mere­ly began:

There is, brethren, one God, the knowl­edge of whom we gain from the Holy Scrip­tures, and from no oth­er source. For just as a man, if he wish­es to be skilled in the wis­dom of this world, will find him­self unable to get at it in any oth­er way than by mas­ter­ing the dog­mas of philoso­phers, so all of us who wish to prac­tice piety will be unable to learn its prac­tice from any oth­er quar­ter than the ora­cles of God. What­ev­er things, then, the Holy Scrip­tures declare, at these let us look; and what­so­ev­er things they teach, these let us learn; and as the Father wills our belief to be, let us believe; and as He wills the Son to be glo­ri­fied, let us glo­ri­fy Him; and as He wills the Holy Spir­it to be bestowed, let us receive Him. Not accord­ing to our own will, nor accord­ing to our own mind, nor yet as using vio­lent­ly those things which are giv­en by God, but even as He has cho­sen to teach them by the Holy Scrip­tures, so let us dis­cern them. (Against Noe­tus 9)

Hip­poly­tus draws an anal­o­gy here between the man who attains his wis­dom from “the dog­mas of the philoso­phers” and the man who attains his piety from “the ora­cles of God.” But look at the claim: “Those who wish to prac­tice piety will be unable to learn its prac­tice from any oth­er quar­ter than the ora­cles of God.” Leav­ing aside for the moment the fact that Hip­poly­tus does not say that “the ora­cles of God” are to be found only in Scrip­ture, all he claims in this pas­sage is that one may derive the prac­tice of piety from Scrip­ture. But the claim of sola scrip­tura is that Scrip­ture alone con­tains all that a Chris­t­ian must believe and all that a Chris­t­ian must prac­tice in his wor­ship. It claims noth­ing about where piety is to be derived. Here, again, we find the Reformed apol­o­gist play­ing a shell game with sola scrip­tura—shift­ing its mean­ing to suit what­ev­er text from Scrip­ture or the Fathers hap­pens to be under dis­cus­sion at the moment.

Let us take anoth­er pas­sage from Against Noe­tus, which Mr. X also cites.

Now they seek to exhib­it the foun­da­tion for their dog­ma by cit­ing the word in the law, I am the God of your fathers: you shall have no oth­er gods beside me; and again in anoth­er pas­sage, I am the first, He says, and the last; and beside me there is none oth­er. Thus they say they prove that God is one. And then they answer in this man­ner: If there­fore I acknowl­edge Christ to be God, He is the Father Him­self, if He is indeed God; and Christ suf­fered, being Him­self God; and con­se­quent­ly the Father suf­fered, for He was the Father Him­self. But the case stands not thus; for the Scrip­tures do not set forth the mat­ter in this man­ner. (§2)

I’m tru­ly lost as to how this pas­sage has any­thing at all to do with sola scrip­tura. Hip­poly­tus is writ­ing about errors that some have made in their exe­ge­sis of Scrip­ture. They have not made these errors because they fol­low the tra­di­tions of men; indeed, his oppo­nents try to defend their denial of the Trin­i­ty by appeal­ing to Scrip­ture. Hip­poly­tus replies: “[T]he Scrip­tures do not set forth the mat­ter in this man­ner.” Their denial of the Trin­i­ty is false, but both they and Hip­poly­tus argue from the Scrip­ture. It is not as though his oppo­nents have tried to derive their doc­trine else­where and he has to direct them back to “the Bible alone.” They already are using “the Bible alone”—just false­ly exeget­ed.

Mr. X reads the above words and and cries: See, Hip­poly­tus is refut­ing error from Scrip­ture alone! But apart from the fact that Hip­poly­tus could hard­ly argue the ques­tion at hand oth­er than by scrip­tur­al exe­ge­sis, one could more eas­i­ly claim that the text high­lights one of the key prob­lems with sola scrip­tura. Unless one has an inter­pre­tive author­i­ty who is under­stood to be infal­li­ble, you can argue about the prop­er exe­ge­sis of Scrip­ture until the sun goes down; it’s pos­si­ble your inter­pre­ta­tion is wrong, and you have no way to know that. Hip­poly­tus’ oppo­nents believed they were argu­ing sound­ly from Scrip­ture; they were not. “Scrip­ture alone,” as a hermeneu­ti­cal sys­tem, is no haven from error.

The last two texts Mr. X cites do indeed show that Hip­poly­tus can refute his oppo­nents from Scrip­ture. “The Scrip­tures them­selves con­fute their sense­less­ness!” he says in the one (§3); “they muti­late the Scrip­tures!” he says in the oth­er (§4). But in nei­ther of these does Hip­poly­tus claim what Mr. X wants him to. Hip­poly­tus refutes his oppo­nents from Scrip­ture, but nowhere does he say that only Scrip­ture is capa­ble of refut­ing error. The Catholic Church has no prob­lem with error being refut­ed from the Bible; we impose no choice between “the Bible alone” and “nev­er the Bible.” To find a Church Father refut­ing error from the Bible proves noth­ing.

wherein mr. x tries to impress us with long quotations.

Mr. X next turns to some long pas­sages from St. Basil, but the only thing he derives from any of them is a sin­gle emp­ty plat­i­tude: “We ought to make an exam­i­na­tion of Rome’s doc­trines by Scrip­ture.” If Mr. X is going to quote such long extracts, it would be best if he spent some time ana­lyz­ing them. You can’t assume their mean­ing will some­how be stun­ning­ly obvi­ous. Per­haps Mr. X hopes that the sheer length of the extracts, of itself, will con­vey the idea of some mas­sive learn­ing on his part and there­by save him the hard work of analy­sis. It does­n’t. It proves that he can type. (Or copy and paste.)

Here is the pas­sage from Basil which I used in my ear­li­er blog arti­cle:

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. (Moralia 72:1)

In para­phras­ing Basil, I said that the only guide he gives is that doc­trines con­trary (or “for­eign”) to Scrip­ture be reject­ed. He says noth­ing about those not to be found in Scrip­ture but not con­trary either. In oth­er words, Basil is not address­ing sola scrip­tura, which holds that only doc­trines express­ly (or by just infer­ence) found in Scrip­ture are bind­ing upon Chris­tians. Mr. X seems to think that his length­i­er excerpts from Basil, by their mere pres­ence, will show that that my para­phrase is false.

He starts with an excerpt where­in Basil explains why he wrote the Moralia. Because Mr. X gives no analy­sis of any of these pas­sages, it is hard to know what he wants us to see. Basil says that he went search­ing about the New Tes­ta­ment for “pro­hi­bi­tions or com­mend­ed acts” (in Schopp, ed., vol. 9, 1962, p. 68). That would imply that he seeks to derive a moral sys­tem from the Bible. Of course, Basil does not say that he went look­ing about the New Tes­ta­ment for “pro­hib­it­ed or com­mend­ed dog­mas,” which would be more per­ti­nent to the ques­tion of sola scrip­tura. He says lat­er that he tried to har­mo­nize the moral­i­ty of the New Tes­ta­ment with that of the Old. Again, since the dis­cus­sion is about moralia rather than dog­ma, I’m not sure what bear­ing any of this has on Reformed claims about the Bible.

Mr. X’s remain­ing quo­ta­tions involve a selec­tion of moral pre­cepts in Basil, and Basil’s ref­er­ence to where in the Scrip­ture he found that par­tic­u­lar prin­ci­ple. Again, since the top­ic under dis­cus­sion here is moral­i­ty rather than dog­ma, I’m not clear what rel­e­vance all this has to sola scrip­tura, nor how my own para­phrase of Basil is false. Mr. X does not say. He just writes down many words as though their sheer num­ber were a great and silenc­ing rejoin­der.

On the Divid­ing Line, Dr.* White and Mr. X spoke well of Basil’s mod­el for moral con­duct. But then they claimed, odd­ly, that the Catholic Church has failed his test because, in its long, long his­to­ry, many popes and bish­ops have been sin­ners. Well, that cer­tain­ly is a shock, though the same could be said about many Protes­tant church lead­ers. Is every last one of you the pink of per­fec­tion? (I was wait­ing for Dr.* White to make his stan­dard allu­sion to the “pornoc­ra­cy,” but my hopes were rude­ly dashed.)

In any case, I am not sure how it is that, if sin is found in Church lead­ers, then their author­i­ty to teach is some­how taint­ed. Calvin­ism teach­es the doc­trine of total deprav­i­ty, even in teach­ers; so how it is that Dr.* White can cry foul when he finds total deprav­i­ty in a Catholic bish­op is a point upon which I can only claim con­fu­sion. Dr.* White and Mr. X say that Catholic lead­ers fail Basil’s test, but all they real­ly mean by that is that Catholic lead­ers through­out the ages have been sin­ners. And all that proves is that they are human and do sin. There is none right­eous but God: Am I sup­posed to be shocked by that? Next I’ll be told that popes breathe the same air as mere men. (None of this has any­thing to do with sola scrip­tura, by the way; Dr.* White and Mr. X are play­ing a game of avoid­ance here. We have gone down anoth­er trail and must come back.)

Per­haps Dr.* White and Mr. X might want to con­sid­er these words from Basil, which are per­ti­nent to the dis­cus­sion at hand:

In answer to the objec­tion that the dox­ol­o­gy in the form ‘with the Spir­it’ has no writ­ten author­i­ty, we main­tain that if there is not anoth­er instance of that which is unwrit­ten, then this must not be received [as author­i­ta­tive]. But if the great num­ber of our mys­ter­ies are admit­ted into our con­sti­tu­tion with­out [the] writ­ten author­i­ty [of Scrip­ture], then, in com­pa­ny with many oth­ers, let us receive this one. For I hold it apos­tolic to abide by the unwrit­ten tra­di­tions. ‘I praise you,’ it is said, ‘that you remem­ber me in all things and keep the tra­di­tions just as I hand­ed them on to you’ (1 Cor. 11:2), and ‘Hold fast to the tra­di­tions that you were taught whether by an oral state­ment or a let­ter of ours’ (2 Thess. 2:15). One of these tra­di­tions is the prac­tice which is now before us, which they who ordained from the begin­ning, root­ed firm­ly in the church­es, deliv­er­ing it to their suc­ces­sors, and its use through long cus­tom advances pace by pace with time.” (De Spir­i­tu Sanc­to 71)

Here we find that Basil defends tra­di­tion and “mys­ter­ies” which are extra-bib­li­cal, and from the very same texts (1 Cor. 11:2 and 2 Thess. 2:15) that Catholic apol­o­gists use. We find that he defends apos­tolic suc­ces­sion as well, when he refers to the “suc­ces­sors” of the apos­tles who “ordained from the begin­ning.” If Dr.* White and Mr. X want to claim sola scrip­tura for Basil mere­ly on the basis of pas­sages that talk about the moral teach­ing of Scrip­ture, they might want to explain how that squares with these words. If they say, in response, that “some­times the Fathers were incon­sis­tent” (for Mr. X said that on the Divid­ing Line), it yet behooves them to explain how they know which pas­sages in the Fathers are nor­ma­tive and which are not.

wherein mr. x can’t be bothered to look up the definition of “sole.”

If Dr.* White is piqued by what he thinks of as an attempt to turn St. Athana­sius into a Roman Catholic, then I can only con­fess that I am piqued by the attempt to turn him into a car­bon copy of Dr.* White sole­ly on the basis of the fact that he defend­ed the Trin­i­ty from Scrip­ture. As I say, the Catholic Church is in no way opposed to defend­ing dog­mas from Scrip­ture. It is not as though the Church says that, since we deny sola scrip­tura, we may nev­er appeal to the Bible.

Mr. X made a very strange claim, on the Divid­ing Line, con­cern­ing what he thought to be my own def­i­n­i­tion of sola scrip­tura—name­ly, that sola scrip­tura means that Scrip­ture alone is suf­fi­cient for all knowl­edge. Per­haps Dr.* White or Mr. X can point out where I said any such thing. I often hear Dr.* White charge that Roman Catholic apol­o­gists “don’t under­stand the issues,” or that they “don’t under­stand what sola scrip­tura is.” But in my own case, Dr.* White and Mr. X slap the charge down before a court of yeasay­ers with­out so much as an Exhib­it A or a by your leave.

For the record: Sola scrip­tura, accord­ing to Dr.* White and his co-labor­ers in the schis­mat­ic vine­yard, is the doc­trine that the Bible alone is the “sole infal­li­ble rule of faith and prac­tice.” Any doc­trines that can­not be found in Scrip­ture, either explic­it­ly or by log­i­cal infer­ence, are not bind­ing upon Chris­tians. (See, I told you so here. Do you not read the posts I link to? Sad.)

Mr. X makes anoth­er strange claim, which is this: that I believe that Athana­sius wrote Con­tra Gentes because the Scrip­tures were insuf­fi­cient. Again, I would appeal to him to point out where in my blog post I said any such thing. I would, in fact, appeal to him to point out where in my blog post I said any­thing at all about Athana­sius’s pur­pose in writ­ing Con­tra Gentes. Such words are sim­ply not there.

And I must con­fess, at this point if at no oth­er, that what dumb­struck me the most about both the Divid­ing Line broad­cast of Jan­u­ary 17, and Mr. X’s writ­ten reply, is the con­sis­tent lack of care both he and Dr.* White seem to have tak­en with read­ing what I actu­al­ly wrote and what I actu­al­ly meant. I don’t take either one of them to be poor readers—I think—so my amaze­ment can­not be more vast.

In his reply, Mr. X sug­gests that I read Athana­sius’s Let­ter to Mar­celli­nus for its tes­ti­mo­ny about the suf­fi­cien­cy of Scrip­ture. Of course, the link he pro­vides does not take me to Athana­sius (the full text of whose Let­ter can eas­i­ly be found here), but to an ear­li­er blog post by he him­self. Does he just want the hits? In said blog post, Mr. X—very, very oddly—quotes Athana­sius to the effect that the knowl­edge of God is “in the Church.” If that is how he begins an arti­cle attempt­ing to prove that Athana­sius held to sola scrip­tura, he is in for some dif­fi­cul­ty.

From the Let­ter, Mr. X quotes anoth­er pas­sage, in which Athana­sius cites 2 Tim. 3:16. Mr. X calls this Athana­sius’s “sub­stan­tive com­ment” on the issue. Here is what he says:

All Scrip­ture of ours, my son—is inspired by God and prof­itable for instruc­tion” (2 Tim.3:16), as it is writ­ten. [Only “prof­itable”?  not “suf­fi­cient”?] But the Book of Psalms pos­sess­es a cer­tain win­ning exac­ti­tude for those who are prayer­ful.

I have already writ­ten here regard­ing how 2 Tim. 3:16 is not a suf­fi­cient text with which to defend the doc­trine of sola scrip­tura. And although I direct­ed the read­er of my blog article—the very one to which Dr.* White and Mr. X were responding—to that ear­li­er arti­cle for its dis­cus­sion of what I mean by the term “exclu­siv­i­ty,” at no point do either of them address my dis­cus­sion of that text. Sim­ply put, 2 Tim. 3:16 says that “all” Scrip­ture is inspired by God; it does not say that “only” Scrip­ture is. The Reformed apol­o­gist who tries to read sola scrip­tura into this pas­sage is guilty of a faulty syl­lo­gism, along the lines of say­ing that if all apples are fruit, there­fore only apples are fruit. Dr.* White can cry “θεόπνευστος!” all he wants to, but it does­n’t change the def­i­n­i­tion of the word “all.” Ear­li­er, we saw Mr. X try to rede­fine “supreme” to mean “sole”; here he tries to rede­fine “all” to mean “only.” It is this basic error that shapes his entire analy­sis of the Let­ter.

the printing press as an agent of theological change.

I am going to write a lat­er arti­cle con­cern­ing my claim that sola scrip­tura is “the bias of a print cul­ture.” In the arti­cle Dr.* White was respond­ing to, that was a pass­ing remark. How­ev­er, I should point out—merely because Dr.* White did address the subject—that, though I am famil­iar with the expres­sion “man­u­script cul­ture,” I have nev­er heard it used to refer to the first cen­turies of the Church. Rather, the expres­sion “man­u­script cul­ture” refers to the cul­ture of the Mid­dle Ages, in which Bene­dic­tine monks start­ed the tra­di­tion of copy­ing clas­si­cal texts that were in dan­ger of being lost after the fall of Rome. It was this man­u­script cul­ture that was lat­er sup­plant­ed by print cul­ture after the inven­tion of the print­ing press in 1440. The ear­ly cen­turies of the Church were an oral cul­ture.

I do not think it was any acci­dent that the print­ing press was invent­ed in 1440 and Mar­tin Luther affixed his 95 The­ses to the church in Wit­ten­berg in the close­ly sub­se­quent year of 1517. This is not his­tor­i­cal coin­ci­dence. I am not sure whether or not Dr.* White is famil­iar with any of the ground­break­ing schol­ar­ship that has been done on the sub­ject of print cul­ture ever since the pub­li­ca­tion of Eliz­a­beth Eisen­stein’s The Print­ing Press as an Agent of Change. He may be. Suf­fice it to say that this scholarship—taken up lat­er by such giants as Mar­shall McLuhan and Wal­ter Ong—was very impor­tant in devel­op­ing an appre­ci­a­tion for the changes brought upon soci­ety by the print­ing press.

Eisen­stein and oth­ers do not specif­i­cal­ly apply their work to the ques­tion of sola scrip­tura—that was a real­iza­tion I myself made while I was in the process of con­vert­ing to Catholicism—but that is what my arti­cle will attempt to do. For my belief is that the print­ing press also changed epis­te­mo­log­i­cal assump­tions (or “inter­pre­tive par­a­digms,” to use Dr. Lic­cione’s words) such that it is the text that is now thought to be the stan­dard locus of proof, rather than the spo­ken word. There is a rea­son why in the Bible you con­stant­ly read words like “when they heard that say­ing, they were deeply trou­bled” or “you have heard that it was said.” Author­i­ty at that time is in the spo­ken word more than in the text.

wherein mr. x is shocked by accredited universities.

I do want to turn to Dr.* White’s and Mr. X’s dis­cus­sion of these words from Dr. David Anders, which I quot­ed in my post:

The Reform­ers had no defense for sola scrip­tura; they mere­ly assert­ed it. They had a few argu­ments here and there, but they basi­cally were things like, ‘Well, we should lis­ten to the voice of God and not men’—truisms that don’t amount to real argu­ment, that prove noth­ing. Or, ‘Jesus con­demned tra­di­tion when he assault­ed the Phar­isees and rab­bis.’ But no sus­tained argu­men­ta­tion in favor of it: We know from divine author­ity that the Bible alone is the sole rule of faith. … Of course, today in the 20th cen­tury, 21st cen­tury, you do find Evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gians who real­ize they final­ly have to tack­le this sub­ject and deal with how do we real­ly know that the Bible is the sole rule of faith. Very big, iron­ic dis­cov­ery: They appeal to tra­di­tion. To jus­tify the notion that the Bible is the sole rule of faith, they appeal to tra­di­tion. They find some Church Father who gets in a the­o­log­i­cal debate and appeals to Scrip­ture. … Or they point to Luther and Calvin. Or they point to their own expe­ri­ence. But their main argu­ment in favor of the Bible is an appeal to tra­di­tion.

Mr. X finds such words “shock­ing,” though he leaves a key part of them out. He quotes only the open­ing sen­tence, and fails to men­tion Dr. Anders’ lat­er words that clar­i­fy that he was refer­ring to a lack of defense for the doc­trine on the basis of divine author­i­ty. Dr. Anders does not claim that the Reform­ers had no defense at all; in fact, he refers to one.

Mr. X also says that, though he is a fre­quent read­er of Called to Com­mu­nion, he nev­er read these words there. There would be a very sim­ple rea­son for that: Dr. Anders did not write them for the Web site, but spoke them dur­ing an episode of The Jour­ney Home. It would not have been dif­fi­cult for Mr. X to have fig­ured this out, for I includ­ed a link, which takes the read­er direct­ly to the YouTube video of that episode. I even men­tioned that the rel­e­vant audio begins 34 min­utes into the pro­gram. Per­haps, if Mr. X can look at the word “supreme” and see “sole,” and look at the word “all” and see “only,” then it’s not too far a stretch to under­stand how he might look at the word “audio” and see “text.”

Mr. X says fur­ther that “Dr.” is a title that I have append­ed to Dr. Anders’ name, and he does not know what Dr. Anders actu­al­ly has his degree in. For some­one who claims to be a reg­u­lar read­er of Called to Com­mu­nion, I find this to be tru­ly “shock­ing.” Dr. Anders’ vita is here. He holds his degrees in the­ol­o­gy, Church his­to­ry, and bib­li­cal stud­ies from Wheaton Col­lege, Trin­i­ty Evan­gel­i­cal, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa: all of them top-notch, accred­it­ed schools. He suc­cess­ful­ly defend­ed his dis­ser­ta­tion, which was on the sub­ject of John Calvin, at Iowa. So it is not I who gave Dr. Anders his title; The Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa did that.

I rather sus­pect Dr. Anders (Ph.D., Iowa) can hold his own against claims of igno­rance from Dr.* White (Th.D., Colum­bia Evan­gel­i­cal Diplo­ma Mill) and Mr. X (iden­ti­ty and cre­den­tials unknown).

The term, dr.* white, is “singular positive.”

We come to the ques­tions I asked Dr.* White (Th.D., D.Min., etc., etc.). They are these:

• First, who was the first per­son to artic­u­late a defense of sola scrip­tura by speak­ing of it as a “nor­ma­tive con­di­tion” of the Church? Who first defined sola scrip­tura in these terms?
• Sec­ond, who was the first per­son to artic­u­late the doc­trine of sola scrip­tura itself—and I’m not talk­ing about Church Fathers who use the Bible to prove a the­o­log­i­cal point, or who speak high­ly of the Scrip­tures. Any Catholic worth his blessed salt will do the same, and has. No. I’m talk­ing about a Church Father, or any­one, who cred­i­bly and demon­stra­bly speaks of the Scrip­tures in terms of exclu­siv­ity as a “sole rule of faith.” One might want to look at my pre­vi­ous arti­cle here for a fuller dis­cus­sion of what I mean by “exclu­siv­i­ty.”
• Third, if sola scrip­tura is not to be found in the Bible, and it is not to be found in the Church Fathers, then how—outside of an appeal to tra­di­tion or “nor­ma­tive conditions”—is it to be defend­ed? And how is that not self-con­tra­dic­to­ry?

Dr.* White accus­es me of ask­ing him to “prove a uni­ver­sal neg­a­tive.” The accu­sa­tion is the same as the one he tried to use in his 1993 debate with Patrick Madrid on sola scrip­tura. Dr.* White com­plained that, in order for him to prove how unique is the Bible, he would have to scour the entire uni­verse in search of some­thing exact­ly like it and come up emp­ty. (Sola scrip­tura does not say that the Bible is “unique,” but nev­er mind. If that’s all it said, who could deny it?) Mr. Madrid replied that Dr.* White need do no such thing. All he had to do was find one verse in the Bible that taught sola scrip­tura. Just one. If Dr.* White could do that one thing, the debate would be over; he would win. Mr. Madrid lat­er referred to all this—play­ing off the title of a poem by Rud­yard Kipling—as “The White Man’s Bur­den.”

In ask­ing my ques­tions, I sought but to extend White Man’s Bur­den to pas­sages from the Fathers. It was my own vari­a­tion on Mr. Madrid’s theme. For the Catholic posi­tion is that sola scrip­tura was unknown to the ear­ly Church. To prove that wrong, all a Reformed apol­o­gist needs to do is to cite one pas­sage. Just one. It is not a “uni­ver­sal neg­a­tive”; it is a bib­li­o­graph­i­cal ref­er­ence. It is not a “uni­ver­sal neg­a­tive”; it is a sin­gu­lar pos­i­tive.

Can Dr.* White, with the help of Mr. X, meet White Man’s Bur­den? Let’s see.

does st. irenaeus teach sola scriptura?

On ques­tion num­ber one, Dr.* White and Mr. X cite this pas­sage from St. Ire­naeus:

Since, there­fore, the tra­di­tion from the apos­tles does thus exist in the Church, and is per­ma­nent among us, [Oops.] let us revert to the Scrip­tural proof fur­nished by those apos­tles who did also write the Gospel, in which they record­ed the doc­trine regard­ing God, point­ing out that our Lord Jesus Christ is the truth, John 14:6 and that no lie is in Him. (Against Here­sies III:v:1)

This, Mr. X claims, estab­lish­es sola scrip­tura as a “nor­ma­tive con­di­tion” in the Church. (Even though the phrase itself is Dr.* White’s.) The inter­est­ing thing to note is that, if Ire­naeus speaks of any­thing as a “nor­ma­tive con­di­tion,” it is tra­di­tion. Ire­naeus says that it is tra­di­tion which is “per­ma­nent among us.” “Per­ma­nent among us” is the only phrase here that would be syn­ony­mous to “nor­ma­tive con­di­tion.”

Apart from that, if one were to look mere­ly one chap­ter ear­li­er, he would find these words:

Since there­fore we have such proofs, it is not nec­es­sary to seek the truth among oth­ers which is easy to obtain from the Church; since the apos­tles, like a rich man deposit­ing his mon­ey in a bank—[There’s that “deposit of faith” the Church talks about, right there]—lodged in her hands most copi­ous­ly all things per­tain­ing to the truth: so that every man, whoso­ev­er will, can draw from her the water of life. For she is the entrance to life; all oth­ers are thieves and rob­bers. On this account we are bound to avoid them, but to make choice of the things per­tain­ing to the Church with the utmost dili­gence, and to lay hold of the tra­di­tion of the truth. (loc. cit.)

If Mr. X wants to claim that the pope’s words (that Scrip­ture is “not an inert deposit” but “the supreme rule of faith”) must be set next to his oth­er ones (that tra­di­tion is like­wise a “supreme rule of faith”), then he should fol­low the same advice with Ire­naeus. For in the text Mr. X does not men­tion, Ire­naeus writes about obtain­ing truth, not from the Scrip­tures, but from the Church. He refers to the Church, not the Scrip­tures, as the entrance to life. He pleads that his read­ers be dili­gent in pur­su­ing the things of the Church, because there­in is to be found “the tra­di­tion of truth.”

does origen teach sola scriptura?

With respect to my sec­ond ques­tion, Mr. X points me to Ori­gen:

All who believe and are assured that grace and truth were obtained through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, agree­ably to His own dec­la­ra­tion, I am the truth, derive the knowl­edge which incites men to a good and hap­py life from no oth­er source than from the very words and teach­ing of Christ. (De Prin­cipi­is 1; empha­sis belongs to Mr. X)

The “no oth­er source” part that Mr. X empha­sizes is noth­ing more than Dr. Mizzi’s same ruse with the pas­sage from Hip­poly­tus. I was not aware that sola scrip­tura meant that the Bible alone is our source for “a good and hap­py life.” I thought it meant that the Bible alone is our source for what­ev­er doc­trines are bind­ing upon us as Chris­tians. Once again, a shell game is being played with the mean­ing of sola scrip­tura: It means what­ev­er it needs to to suit the par­tic­u­lar pas­sage that is being hijacked to its sup­port.

until calvinists cease to be totally depraved.

Final­ly, Dr.* White and Mr. X cop out on the third ques­tion on the premise that they do not agree that sola scrip­tura is not in the Bible. They cite (once again) 2 Tim­o­thy 3:16 (a text I have already dis­cussed and need not go into again). Dr.* White has yet to refute my exe­ge­sis, and I guess I may wait for that refu­ta­tion until Calvin­ists cease to be total­ly depraved. But he also quotes Christ’s words in Matthew 15 regard­ing the Cor­ban rule. Here is the text:

Then came to Jesus scribes and Phar­isees, which were of Jerusalem, say­ing, Why do thy dis­ci­ples trans­gress the tra­di­tion of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread. But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also trans­gress the com­mand­ment of God by your tra­di­tion? For God com­mand­ed, say­ing, Hon­our thy father and moth­er: and, He that curseth father or moth­er, let him die the death. But ye say, Whoso­ev­er shall say to his father or his moth­er, It is a gift, by what­so­ev­er thou might­est be prof­it­ed by me; and hon­our not his father or his moth­er, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the com­mand­ment of God of none effect by your tra­di­tion. (Matt. 15:1–6)

Note that Jesus does not charge the Phar­isees with adding to the word of God. Rather, he accus­es them of trans­gress­ing the word of God—specifically, the fourth com­mand­ment. The Cor­ban rule was a method by which peo­ple could for­go the duty to take care of par­ents in their old age. They would give that por­tion of their inher­i­tance to the Tem­ple. Because the mon­ey was then God’s, it no longer could be used to take care of one’s par­ents. It was a shift­less attempt to avoid the fourth com­mand­ment; and it is that to which Jesus’s wrath is addressed. The text says noth­ing what­ev­er about tra­di­tions out­side of Scrip­ture, but only with tra­di­tions that vio­late a spe­cif­ic com­mand of Scrip­ture.

The rea­son I asked the ques­tions I did was to show, once again, that while the Reformed apol­o­gist may claim to find sup­port for sola scrip­tura in the Bible, or the Fathers, the texts they cite prove no such thing. When pressed, the Reformed apol­o­gist digs into his bag of quo­ta­tions and comes up with a dif­fer­ent set of inad­e­quate texts.

The White Man’s Bur­den remains unmet. Sola scrip­tura remains a false doc­trine.