Getting thunked

Hey all -

Last Tuesday I had a dinner conversation with some Roman Catholics on authority. To put it lightly, I got thunked. haha so God humbles the proud, even though I think it would have been more glorifying for me to thunk them =D.

But anywho, they've sent some long emails my way on some points I've challenged them on. I'm planning to write back eventually, but if you guys want to read things over and suggest topics to address or things to say, that'd be cool.

Help us work on our logic/reasoning skillz too =D

Begin email -

Hi, Mickey. Thanks so much for having dinner with us the other night! The discussion was very stimulating, and you certainly left me with a greater respect for your positions. I know we were totally talking past each other on more than one occasion, which can be very frustrating, so Charlie and I appreciate your patience and good-humor throughout.

You asked for quotes from early Christian writers teaching extrabiblical doctrines as apostolic in origin. I will send an e-mail in a minute with some of these.

I also wanted to clarify a few things that I didn't do a very good job articulating at dinner, which was probably one of the reasons for our many impasses in which we kept repeating the same comebacks at each other over and over again without getting anywhere.

I have to admit that, in the past when I have discussed II Tim. 3 with sola scriptura folks, I have focused on verses 16 and 17. That is why I was somewhat taken aback when you started hammering on the "is able" of verse 15.

I have been thinking over your approach to these verses, and must say that I remain unconvinced that they teach sola scriptura. Let's go through this verse-by-verse.

In verse 15, the scriptures "are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (my old King James version reads "are able to make thee wise unto salvation," which may have been closer to what you were quoting during dinner). This is exactly what Catholics believe--that the scriptures contain wisdom that leads to holiness and instructions that lead to salvation. This phrase implies neither the sufficiency of scripture for salvation nor even the necessity of scripture for salvation. All one can conclude from this verse alone is that scripture is at least one source of instruction that leads to salvation. Whether or not there are other sources as well is left open. It could be that the instruction imparted by scripture in combination with the instruction imparted by some other entity is necessary for salvation--in this case, scripture would be necessary but not sufficient. It could be that the instruction imparted by scripture is sufficient for salvation but that the instruction imparted by some other entity is equally efficacious at achieving salvation, in which case scripture would be sufficient but not necessary. It could be that scripture alone is sufficient for salvation, in which case scripture would be both necessary and sufficient. It could be that scripture in combination with some other entity imparts all the instructions needed for salvation but that a third entity is equally efficacious at doing so; in this case, scripture would be neither necessary nor sufficient. In all these theoretical cases, scripture imparts instructions for salvation and thus "are able to instruct you for salvation" is consistent with all four.

In fact, not only is your interpretation (that scripture is both necessary and sufficient) only one of four equally possible interpretations, but the rest of the verse precludes your interpretation. Paul explicitly states that Timothy has "from childhood been acquainted" with the very same writings credited with instruction for salvation. Therefore, the sacred writings referred to in verse 15 are necessarily the OT. Since we both agree that the OT is not sufficient for salvation, the phrase "are able to instruct you for salvation" cannot possibly mean "provide all the truths whose knowledge is necessary for salvation." Rather, it means exactly what it says--that the OT provides instruction that leads to salvation "through faith in Christ Jesus," that is, when read in light of Christian doctrine that has been imparted to Timothy orally.

Verse 15, therefore, does not prove sola scriptura, and in fact does not even lend it support because it is patently referring to the OT.

Verses 16: "All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness . . ." We both believe that all scripture is inspired by God. We both believe that all scripture is profitable for teaching, etc. Again, this does not say that scripture is sufficient for adequate teaching, reproof, correction, and training. It doesn't even say that scripture is necessary for adequate teaching, reproof, correction, and training. All it says is that scripture is a useful foundation for such teaching, reproof, correction, and training, which we both believe.

Verse 17: ". . . that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." This says that the teaching, reproof, correction, and training, when aided by and based in scripture, makes the man of God complete. This is the end of Paul's discussion of scripture, and, since he has given no indication that there is an alternative, equally efficacious route to completion that does not include scriptural teaching and training, it is safe to conclude that the scripture-based training and teaching of verse 16 is necessary to make the man of God complete, even if it does not explicitly say so. Even if we also assume that scripture is necessary for this teaching and training, then this would only mean that scripture is necessary for the man of God to be complete. You are still far from demonstrating the sufficiency of scripture from these verses.

Let's look at this more closely, especially since you placed great stock in the "is able" of verse 15. I claim that the "is able" has nothing to do with sufficiency. This kind of touches upon Charlie's ceteris paribus argument. I could tell you were confused when he started bandying this jargon around, and we didn't do a very good job of explaining ourselves. Basically, you can consider the following analogy: say I am standing next to a 10-foot-high wall, and I say, "I am able to jump over the wall." Everyone would agree that this is a false statement. But now let's say I am standing next to the 10-foot-high wall, and I have a pole-vault pole in my hand. Now when I say, "I am able to jump over the wall," everyone would agree that this is a true statement. Whether it is true or false depends on the unspoken assumptions; to say, "I am able to do X" does not necessarily imply that I am able to do it without the aid of anything other than my body. Are you able to go to China? Yes, of course. But not if your body were the only thing you were allowed to use to get there. Similarly, even if Paul's exact words were "the Bible is able to make a man complete," it wouldn't necessarily mean that the Bible is sufficient to make a man complete. To illustrate, let's suppose that the Bible AND Tradition are alone able to make a man complete--that the two of them combined are sufficient. If a man just has Tradition, he isn't complete. But then the Bible comes along, and suddenly he has been made complete; the Bible made him so. Thus, it is a true statement that the Bible is able to make a man complete. Whether or not the Bible is sufficient depends on the unspoken assumptions as to what the man in need of being completed already has.

So, we ask, "Are there any indications from Paul's writings that there are these unspoken assumptions as to what Timothy already has when Paul states that scriptures are able to make him complete?" As far as I can see, the answer is a resounding YES! The Pauline epistles are chock full of references to paradosis--usually translated as "tradition"--and other teaching that Paul handed down orally to the individual churches he visited (2 Thes 2:15, 2 Thes 3:6, 1 Cor 11:2, etc.). When he wrote letters, he wasn't repeating everything that he had taught them; he was mostly elaborating on specific points, clarifying disputes, and providing exhortation. If sola scriptura was really the foundation of the Christian faith, then his letters should have been bristling with references to this pivotal doctrine that all essential teachings are one day going to be written down in inspired form, and that his followers should be sure to get their hands on a collection of these writings just as soon as they were compiled. On the contrary, time and again, Paul emphasizes the importance of the unwritten doctrines he had communicated to the churches before writing any of his letters, without giving any indication that all the essentials will one day be written down by an inspired author. When Paul tells Timothy that scripture is able to make him complete, surely it is reasonable to suppose that he is assuming that Timothy already has the apostolic teaching handed on to him by Paul.

Suppose you remain unconvinced, maintaining that, even if the language used in 16-17 doesn't necessarily imply it, your sola scriptura interpretation of "that the man of God may be complete" is still plausible and is in fact what Paul actually meant. Now, I think that such an interpretation is overzealous at least, but never mind--your understanding of 16-17 still rests on an equally dubious interpretation of what "all scripture" means. "All scripture," of course, can mean two things: it can mean any scripture in the sense of "every scriptural document" or even "every line of scripture;" or it can mean the totality of the body of scriptural writing. For example, when it says, "All scripture is inspired by God," we would both agree that "all" could have either meaning here. The totality of scripture is inspired by God, as is any subset thereof. Personally, based on my interpretation of the rest of these three verses, I think that this first option could easily be the one that Paul meant. I believe that every scriptural document contains instructions for salvation, that it is profitable for teaching, reproof, etc., and that it helps you achieve completion. Therefore, saying that "all" is synonymous with "every" wouldn't bother me one bit. However, translating "all" as "every" would bother you very much since you believe that only the totality of scripture, once it has been completed, is sufficient, and you interpret the rest of the verses as stating sufficiency. But if the phrase did have the second meaning above, then Paul couldn't possibly mean what you think he means by "are able . . . [to make] the man of God . . . complete" because it wouldn't have been a true statement at the time he was writing it. Your position requires that Paul mean "the totality of OT and NT scripture once all scripture has been written," in which case he would have said "all scripture WILL make the man of God complete" because "all scripture" would not yet have existed. Therefore, either Paul does not mean "sufficient for salvation" by 15-17 or else he does not mean "scripture alone" by "all scripture." Either way, sola scriptura is not being taught.

"OK, OK," you say. "That's just a quibble about the tense of a verb. St. Paul is writing for the benefit of all who will come after 90 AD." Yeah, but . . . think about it. Besides getting the tense of the verb wrong, Paul would be giving seemingly practical advice to Timothy which in fact would not have been relevant and thus would not have benefited him for another several decades. If Paul had really meant, "The totality of scripture once it has been completed will be all you need," he would have made it clear. He would have made sure that Timothy did not interpret "all scripture" as "all scripture with which you are familiar," which would have been the obvious conclusion. While it is possible that Paul includes recent NT writings in the category "all scripture," it is in fact most reasonable to assume that he is referring to the exact same scripture as in verse 15, which is patently the OT. While his statements may certainly apply to any scripture, including later NT scripture, they MUST also be applicable to smaller subsets of scripture, such as the OT or the OT plus part of the NT, and therefore your understanding of these verses (which would only apply to the totality of scripture ever written) cannot be correct.

Charlie and I therefore think that sola scriptura is internally inconsistent because it does not teach sola scriptura. However, we also think that sola scriptura is internally inconsistent for a second reason. Again, the three of us went around and around about this at dinner with neither side understanding what the other was trying to say. I'm going to try to re-articulate my problem with your position.

As Charlie and I reiterated on numerous occasions, a belief in sola scriptura presupposes that the corpus of scripture is known for sure. By the definition of sola scriptura, that corpus could only be known for sure if it is attested to in scripture. But scripture nowhere says what documents comprise scripture. Therefore, you need some outside source to tell you which books are in the Bible. Since an essential element of faith and morals is coming from an outside source, sola scriptura isn't true.

Your response was always, "But scripture is self-attesting!" To me, this could mean two things: either every line generates such warm, fuzzy feelings in anyone who reads it with an open mind and an honest heart that there is no doubt (which we both agreed, with all due respect to sacred scripture, is not the case), or scripture says what it is. But we also both agree that the Table of Contents is not a scriptural document. Therefore scripture does NOT say what it is. When we brought up these points, you declared that your position was nonetheless tenable because scripture says that "the Word of God will not fail" or something like that (I'm not sure where it says this, but I'll take your word for it). Even if we take your assumption that "Word of God" refers only to the written Word, I still don't see how this guarantees that the particular Table of Contents in your Bible is the right one. Sure, based on "the Word of God will not fail," it is internally consistent with sola scriptura to say that no scriptural document will ever be irretrievably lost (as countless ancient manuscripts have been), and arguably even internally consistent (if you are a really zealous interpreter) to say that the true canon will continue to exist among a least some group of Christians somewhere in the world at all points in history. However, this is a far cry from saying that scripture self-attests to the canon of your Bible and self-attests against that of mine.

Your basic assumption here seems to be that, until Rome muddied the waters by adding the deuterocanonical Apocrypha to its canon in the 1500s, all Christians from the time of the apostles had used one and the same canon. Only if this is true could you, with a strained overextension of "the Word of God will not fail," argue that the scripture "self-attests" to its contents by implicitly guaranteeing the universal integrity of its canon throughout history.

We started to get into a discussion of the history of the canon at dinner, and then the subject got changed. Several years ago, I put a lot of research into the historical development of the OT canon because I had been having a discussion with a Protestant. Now, I will admit that I grew up being taught that everyone used the Catholic canon until one day Martin Luther came along and just out-of-the-blue kicked out some OT books that didn't suit his fancy. To my surprise, the Protestant claimed exactly the opposite--that everyone had used the Protestant canon until Rome, smarting from the Reformation, arbitrarily added in the deuterocanonicals just to spite the Protestants. Thinking that an elementary survey of history would prove my friend wrong, I looked into the matter and found that the truth, not surprisingly, was somewhere in between and that I was proved as wrong as he was.

Most of this is off the top of my head from what I remember from five years ago, and I haven't bothered to recheck everything, so I'm not going to guarantee that I don't get a little detail wrong here or there. But I'm pretty sure that what follows is a pretty balanced overview of the history of the OT canon. And, for our purposes, the general picture is what is important.

Back in the time of Jesus, there was no consensus canon among the Jews. Different sects had their own combination of writings. The Pharisees, for example, had exactly or almost exactly the same canon as the Protestants do today--they believed that divine revelation had ceased with Ezra. I think the Essenes had something similar, minus Esther and maybe one other book. The Sadducees--the priestly class and the religious elite of the time--emphatically insisted that only the Pentateuch was inspired and that the rest was not scripture. Many other Jews in Palestine, as well as most of the Jews scattered throughout the Mediterranean world, used the Septuagint (a standard Greek translation) as their Bible. For all intents and purposes, the Septuagint contained the books of the Catholic canon, although there was no official Table of Contents and sometimes there were minor variations (eg, perhaps Esther was left out of one compilation of manuscripts while another included 3 and 4 Maccabees in addition to 1 and 2--that sort of thing).

There is no internal evidence in the NT to indicate which canon was accepted by Jesus or the NT authors. Approximately 2/3 of NT quotes are taken from the Septuagint translation, but this doesn't prove anything. None of the deuterocanonical books are directly quoted as scripture in the NT, but neither are lots of other canonical books (Ecclesiastes, Esther, Song of Solomon, Obediah, Zephaniah, Judges, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, Nahum). There are certainly a number of allusions to deuterocanonical books, but this doesn't prove that they're canonical because Jude openly quotes such patently apocryphal works as The Assumption of Moses and The Book of Enoch without thereby conferring canonicity on them.

As Christianity began to spread throughout the Mediterranean world, most Christians naturally adopted the OT canon of the Jews in their region, which was generally that of the Septuagint. But not always--in fact, the earliest surviving OT canon written by a Christian, Melito in ~170 AD, actually includes only the protocanonical books (ie, the Protestant canon) minus Esther. Very few of his contemporaries explicitly wrote out canons, but many of them quoted from deuterocanonical books as though they were scripture.

Meanwhile, after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, the Jewish faith underwent an upheaval. The priestly class ceased to exist, and, of the many Jewish sects in Palestine, the Pharisees emerged as the dominant force in Jewish religion and came to define the subsequent character of the faith. In approximately 90-100 AD, they set in stone their canon, which was identical to the current Protestant canon.

The Jewish custom had some effect on eastern Christians writers, many of whom either accepted this official Pharisaic canon or else some combination of the Pharisaic canon and what is now the Catholic canon. Most of the western Christian writers continued using the same Septuagint canon as always. The first recorded time that a group of bishops met to discuss the question of the canon was in Hippo in 393 AD, followed a short time later by the Council of Carthage in 397 AD. Both times, the North African bishops declared canonical the current Catholic list. In 405, Pope Innocent I privately affirmed this decision in a letter to another bishop.

At approximately the same time, ~400 AD, Jerome was working on his famous translation of the Bible into Latin. For this, he wanted to translate the OT straight from the original Hebrew, so he went to Palestine and studied Hebrew with the Jewish scholars. Influenced by them, Jerome decided that the deuterocanonical books were not canonical. However, when Pope Damasus indicated his approval of the North African councils, Jerome deferred and included the deuterocanonicals in his Vulgate. Indeed, when a fellow scholar criticized him for reneging and including later Greek additions (yep, that would be Bel and the Dragon!) to the book of Daniel when he had previously declared them apocryphal, Jerome retorted that he had to follow "the judgment of the churches." Nevertheless, he retained personal reservations, and in his Vulgate prefaces he compromised by relegating the seven deuterocanonical books to a position of "lesser" inspiration, or something like that--hence the term "deuterocanonical."

So, throughout the Middle Ages, the deuterocanonical books were considered part of scripture, although, following Jerome, they were often labeled in the manuscripts as somehow being "lesser" than the others. However, a third local council of bishops, this time at Florence in 1442, again restated what is now the Catholic canon, making no distinctions between the protocanonical and deuterocanonical books.

Jerome's opinion was still influential among scholars, and, when critical thinking became in vogue (for the first time in centuries) during the early Renaissance, many of the Humanists reconsidered whether the deuterocanonical books should even be there at all, especially in light of the fact that the contemporary Jews rejected them and in light of the theological difficulties inherent in Jerome's cumbersome idea of "lesser" inspiration.

This was the state of affairs when Luther came along. The Church had not yet made an infallible pronouncement on the question of the canon, but every church council that had discussed the matter had endorsed the same canon (the current Catholic one), without any distinction being made among the various books. Jerome's prefaces in which the deuterocanonical books were relegated to a lesser status were frequently included in Biblical manuscripts of the time, however, and there was some discussion among leading thinkers as to the seven books' canonicity.

So Luther's actions did not come out-of-the-blue--many of his contemporaries were questioning the canonicity of the deuterocanonicals. Luther was simply the one audacious enough to take the next step and outright reject them. By all accounts, however, his motives for doing so were not because of critical scholarship but because the books of Maccabees clearly state the benefit of praying for the dead, which contradicted his interpretation of Paul. Fortunately, he was able to hang his hat on the historical controversy that had surrounded Maccabees and the other deuterocanonical books.

The problems that Luther had with the NT, however, were not so conveniently solved. You claimed that Luther never wanted to throw out James. This isn't true. Not only did he famously declare it "an epistle of straw" having "nothing of the nature of the gospel about it," but he also wrote that James "wanted to guard against those who relied on faith without works, but was unequal to the task. He tries to accomplish by harping on the law what the apostles accomplish by stimulating people to love. Therefore, I will not have him in my Bible to be numbered among the true chief books . . . . 'One man is no man' in worldly things; how, then, should this single man alone prevail against Paul and all the rest of Scripture?" His followers, however, convinced him that this would be too radical for potential converts to tolerate and James was quietly slipped back into Luther's canon.

Finally, due to the controversy generated by the Reformation, the Council of Trent in 1546 officially and infallibly declared the true canon to be that endorsed by the previous three councils that had discussed the subject--Hippo, Carthage, and Florence. Far from being a reversal from years of Christian practice, this was a reaffirmation of the dominant (though admittedly not overwhelmingly dominant) practice in Church history.

Of course, I haven't even begun to discuss the development of the NT canon and how the canonicity of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and Revelation were at least as if not more hotly contested during the first few centuries of Christianity. It was in fact the Councils of Hippo and Carthage which are credited with settling the debate. Clearly, there has NEVER in the history of Christianity been a single, universally agreed-upon canon; the period of broadest consensus was probably between 400 AD and 1500 AD, when the current Catholic canon prevailed, albeit with the question as to whether or not the deuterocanonical books were somehow inspired to a lesser degree than the others. For Catholics, this isn't an insurmountable problem, because we never claimed that our faith comes from the Bible alone. Christians were able to get along fine for centuries without a firm idea of what constituted scripture because they had the successors of the apostles and apostolic Tradition to guide their faith. This historical confusion SHOULD be a problem for Protestants because it implies that, if "the Word of God will not fail" means that the canon will remain intact and self-evident, then this passage was not very good at fulfilling itself during the first several centuries AD, and, thereafter, you have no way of knowing whether the Catholic or the Protestant canon is the right one since both are attested to in a fairly widespread manner throughout subsequent Christian history. The assumption for historical consistency upon which rest your claims concerning "the Word of God will not fail" is not true, and therefore this verse does NOT self-attest to your Table of Contents. You have to rely on the authority of the Pharasaic Council of Jamnia in 90 AD or else the authority of Jerome or else the authority of Martin Luther in order to know that your canon, not ours, is the one that fulfills "the Word of God will not fail." Therefore, there is an essential matter of your faith that is not contained within the Bible, and therefore you do not truly believe in sola scriptura.

So, in the end, I emerged from dinner with a better appreciation of the biblical basis of your position concerning sola scriptura, but I retain serious reservations about its internal consistency. I hope that I have articulated these out-standing reservations a little better.

I am sorry that this e-mail got so long--I promise I didn't mean for it to be this long. I'm not expecting an instant reply or thorough rebuttal of the jumble of long-winded points. Even if you don't get this far, I won't be offended :-) The document that you actually asked for is coming right up . . .

Have a good evening!

Cheers,

George

P.S. Sorry, I can't help saying one more thing, since it was alluded to during dinner: a brief note on whether or not Jesus' "adelphoi" were his full brothers. The Greek "adelphos" typically had about the same connotation as English "brother" and thus usually meant full-blooded brother (but, like in English, could be used more loosely). However, in Aramaic there were no separate words for "brother," "cousin," and indeed "kinsman" in general. Thus, in Jesus' culture, it would have been natural to have referred to Jesus' relatives using a word whose primary Greek translation would have been brother (note that contemporary Greek translations of the OT frequently translated the Hebrew word for kinsman as "adelphos" when it was clearly referring to uncles or cousins--hence, Jacob is called Laban's "adelphos" and Abraham is called Lot's "adelphos"). So, while the use of the Greek "adelphos" suggests that Jesus had full brothers, it certainly does not preclude the possibility that they were cousins or other kinsmen, colloquially termed "brothers" in the unspecific translation conventions of the time.

So (besides the fact that Christians from the earliest times were apparently unfazed by the patent and frequent references to Jesus' adelphoi when they claimed that Mary had no other children), we ask: is there any internal evidence in the NT to suggest that these adelphoi are not Jesus' full brothers? If not, then the default conclusion would be that they are in fact full brothers, since this is admittedly the primary meaning of the Greek word. But if there is internal evidence to suggest that adelphoi did not necessarily or even probably imply full brothers in the case of Jesus, then the possibility that these early Christians are right with respect to Mary's perpetual virginity must be entertained. The internal evidence is as follows:

1. James the Less and Joses are listed together as adelphoi of Jesus in Matt. 13:55 and Mark 6:3. Later on in those same Gospels (Matt. 27:56; Mark 15:40), they are again listed together and said to be sons of the other Mary at the foot of the cross (presumably Mary the wife of Clopas of John 19:25, who was said to be a relative of Mary the mother of Jesus). Now I will admit that this evidence is inconclusive for two reasons. First, it could be argued that the James and Joses in the first case are different from the James and Joses in the second case. Given the juxtaposition of the two names, I think that this is unlikely, but it is possible. Second, it could perhaps be pointed out that, in Matt. 27:56 and Mark 15:40, it never actually says that Mary the mother of James and Joses is Mary the wife of Clopas and not Mary the mother of Jesus. However, since the context is Jesus' crucifixion (at which neither James nor Joses were present), it would be highly illogical, even ludicrous, for the author to have referred to her as anything other than the mother of Jesus if that is indeed what he meant. Nevertheless, I will admit that there is room for ambiguity here.

2. Somewhat more convincing to me is the fact that, in John 19:25, Mary the wife of Clopas is said to be the adelphe (feminine form of adelphos) of Mary the mother of Jesus. Especially in view of Jewish custom, it seems highly unlikely that two full sisters, the children of the same parents, would both be named Mary. This strongly suggests that adelphe does not necessarily mean full-sister, which implies that adelphos does not necessarily mean full-brother either.

3. Even if we accept on the basis of this evidence that adelphos did not necessarily mean full-brother, you could still argue that it sometimes does in the case of at least some of Jesus' adelphoi. However, Jesus at his death entrusted his mother to John, who took care of her for the rest of her life; in view of the fact that the cultural duty to care for one's parents in their old age was very strong in Jewish society, this strongly suggests that Mary did not have any other surviving sons.

Obviously, nothing has been formally proven. But I think that our position is very reasonable, even in light of internal scriptural evidence alone.