It’s often puzzled me that those who hold to the radical version of sola scriptura fail to see that the radical version is not biblical.
Church Fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Jerusalem would disagree; they held the same understanding as did the Wittenburg Reformers.
Canonization only touches sola scriptura if you hold to it as resulting from some authority bestowed on the church, a view that cannot be sustained in the face of the actual process of canonization.
That was my observation in my university days; not only did it drive away outsiders but it accounted for the majority of students abandoning their faith.
But the last line is not accurate, or at least it didn’t used to be: Christians believed that the scriptures were God’s word not because they said they were but because they spoke of the Savior who had defeated death and came from those who knew Him.
Ahh - and here I thought I was being quasi-original, saying that! But I’ve probably used very similar words to those many times before, so … fair enough!
Thanks for that reminder. In a related reminder of allowing that one should be careful of just generally flailing around swords against this or that … I found this 2nd-part interview of Daniel Hummel - interviewed by Phil Vischer, to be quite fascinating. He discusses the legacy of dispensational theology here in the U.S. And the conclusion of the interview really captures (or has helped shape?) how I now think about much of Christian pop culture today (of which I’m very much a product as well.)
Now if you ask 20 different people what sola scripture means, they might all give you different answers. So I tread lightly. For better or worse, I understand it in relation to the Catholic Church. It (circularly) says the Bible is the only authority and it’s doing so explicitly to reject the authority of the church on certain issues. The Church puts magisterial teaching on an equal footing with scripture.
The Church itself canonized the Bible, hopefully under the influence of the Holy Spirit. But the Bible itself, our apparent ultimately authority on everything, doesn’t explicitly teach “sola scripture which, as it turns out, is just another tradition or interpretation of the Bible among many. Kind of odd how that works? Claiming to believe something as an ultimate standard that the individual books of the Bible don’t similarly claim to be/do. That claim or authority is hardly based-on the Bible and the very concept of “the Bible” presumes canonization because what “the Bible” actually is, is a collection of 72 discrete publications written possibly over a thousand years, lumped together by the Church.
Time and time again scripture shows itself to possess ancient cosmology and outdated worldviews (misogyny, slavery etc). It cannot be the sole authority on everything unless we espouse wooden literalism.
Prima scriptura is much better than sola scripture but since the Bible did not fall from heaven as a completed work, but was put together as individual publications from vastly different regions and times disseminated and became popular, one cannot remove tradition from the equation. Tradition/Church and the Bible are inseparably intertwined.
The NT and Jesus also seem to appeal to non-biblical source quite a few times.
That last part sounds to me like an appeal to extra-biblical tradition, something I’m not sure is consistent with “sola scripture.”
I’m pretty convinced that in the end, sola scripture saws off the branch it is sitting on. Not to mention if we used the Bible as our final authority on everything, a 6,000 year old earth, a global flood, a dome in the sky and so on would all still be believed in today. We have allowed science (and in many cases reason and common sense) to change how we understand the plain sense of scripture’s words. I mean, Luke traces Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam. In my experience, proponents of sola scripture aren’t the type to claim the Bible makes accommodated cosmological errors though they can and do fully admit Scripture can use the “language of appearance.” And I think a lot of Christians today just accept sola scripture as part of their tradition without thinking too much about what it means.
Couldn’t agree more, although evangelicals today seem hell-bent on creating newer, faster ways to drive people away. Someone needs to invent a word for the opposite of evangelism.
Whatever you might call it, a millstone comes to mind.
Are you familiar with reformed epistemology (in particular the work of Plantinga)? If I was a skeptic or came across it before becoming a Christian I probably would have thought it was some sort of slight-of-hand or “hat trick”. Reflecting on my own experience, though, it makes a lot of sense.
I’ve found Reformed epistemology offers an alternative to evidentialism (the view that religious belief must be supported by evidence in order to be rational) and fideism (the view that religious belief is not rational, but that we have non-epistemic reasons for believing). One of Plantinga’s points in his 2015 book Knowledge and Christian Belief is a suggestion that we can know things to be true through the Holy Spirit, and this can include certain truths when reading the Bible.
One of the issues your point brings up is the epistemology of reason itself. Its a weird question but I’ll ask it anyways: why are we justified using reason as a method of coming to truth. Can we use reason to prove or argue that reason itself is (the/a) way of coming to truth? The answer seems to be “no,” and unfortunately this leads to an infinite regress. Foundationalism on reason (a good choice IMO) seems to have epistemic parity to belief in God, and is indeed strengthened/supported by belief in God (one of Plantinga’s points).
Haven’t read that. Just to clarify, does he mean “we” or “I” can know certain truths through the Holy Spirit when reading the Bible?
Either way, I don’t think that solves the circular logic. Q: How do you know the Bible is true? A: The Holy Spirit revealed it to me.
I think inerrancy comes down to this syllogism:
I think he means it in an “I” sort of way, which can come to “we” by talking with others, using reason, science, etc. One can easily insert the quote by John Locke (in fact I think Plantinga himself did so) about reason being from God. It doesn’t get out off the circularity necessarily, but it does put the burden on anyone claiming theism is irrational to first have to show it is untrue (a very difficult, if not impossible, task).
I also don’t think this circularity/regress is unique to the Bible either. One can argue: Q: How do we know the deliverance of (reason, the scientific method, etc) are true? At a certain point, we have to use trust (or perhaps take a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith”) in something to avoid solipsism. Some theologians make the argument that accepting the Bible as true is no less rational than trusting the methodology/epistemology of reason, philosophy, etc. All of these seem to have the same problem of needing justification. Of course, under naturalism, we have good reasons (if we can call it that) to doubt that reason itself has any epistemic authority for metaphysical truths, which thus makes naturalism self-defeating. Plantinga develops this argument in a much more sophisticated way, but I believe it was Lewis who popularized it (though I don’t think he came up with it himself, according to him at least).
As for the syllogism (which is a great point), most errantists (if that’s a word 
) or people who are undecided about inerrancy like myself would doubt Premise 2, and say that the Bible includes the words of God, but isn’t a book that is word-for-word from “God’s mouth” so to speak. Perhaps this is the point inerrantists make about the original manuscripts to get out of any apparent contradictions. But I personally don’t see why the original manuscripts themselves even need to be inerrant; obviously God’s Words are going to be inerrant, but if God didn’t write the original manuscripts with His “finger,” inerrancy of original manuscripts isn’t necessary.
Inerrantists and errantists alike both still have the issue of interpretation of the Bible, which seems to be a whole other can of worms. This is one of the areas RE succeeds at mitigating in my view.
Okay, but putting the shoe on the other foot, anyone claiming atheism is irrational would first have to show it was untrue. Proving a negative is nearly impossible from either direction.
Anyway, we’re not talking about theism in general. We’re talking about belief in the Bible as inspired, authoritative, infallible, (possibly) inerrant, etc. Personally, I think none of those propositions can be proven from evidence or reason.
Yeah, the syllogism is flawed. I just think that’s their reasoning.
I’ve read John Frame’s Doctrine of God, but you’ll have to give me a synopsis of what you mean by Reformed Epistemology. For all I know, that could include Van Til’s presuppositionalism, which is bunk.
Nearly is all the room that is needed to prove there is an infinite being… and not an infinite number of things.
That’s straight out of C.S. Lewis in Miracles and maybe elsewhere.
Good enough only works in horseshoes and hand grenades, as yokels like me learned growing up. We’re talking about logical and evidential proof.
Have you ever read the beginning to Pascal’s Wager? Your complaint about an infinite number of things/objects makes as much sense as saying that an infinite number of coin flips must turn up odd or even.
Infinite—nothing.—Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe nothing else…
We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So we may well know that there is a God without knowing what He is. Is there not one substantial truth, seeing there are so many things which are not the truth itself?
We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite, and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because He has neither extension nor limits.
But by faith we know His existence; in glory we shall know His nature. Now, I have already shown that we may well know the existence of a thing, without knowing its nature.
Let us now speak according to natural lights.
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.
Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam;[90] and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in lacking proofs, that they are not lacking in sense.
Let me just stop you right there, saying you can do an infinite number of coin flips is one thing, doing it is another 
It’s a thought experiment. Just like an infinite number of things. I remember you saying an infinite number of points in space was impossible. When I called you on it, you clarified an infinite number of objects, meaning stars. I’ve never seen anyone claim there are an infinite number of stars. Have you? Do you have a reference? Has anyone in the history of science or mathematics claimed such a thing? If not, you’re basically arguing with yourself. Publish, perish, or quite afflicting us with this argument that convinces no one but yourself.
Do you suppose an infinite collection is possible through successive addition? That’s the question I am getting at.
I also don’t suppose an infinite collection can exist as a brute fact, but that’s a little more advanced and a subject of thought that one is not ready for if they still think a sequential process can produce an infinite number of things or events.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell claimed an infinite number of stars? Reference, please.
Honestly, quit wasting everyone’s time with your pet theory. You’ve already said elsewhere that you’re just here to spam us with it.
@moderators, how long does the rest of the community have to put up with this?
“It is to be presumed, for example, that there are an infinite collection of trios in the world, for if this were not the case the total number of things in the world would be finite, which, though possible, seems unlikely.”
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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