Transcription
Even when I was Protestant, and many years before I had read a single Catholic author or a church father, I had already concluded that sola scriptura was false. Here's why.
Welcome to eternal Christendom, consecrated to Our Lady for the glory of Our Lord. I'm Joshua Charles, very eager to get into this topic of sola scriptura today. But before we get to the road map, I want to give a little bit of an introduction.
So, since becoming Catholic, I have sometimes been accused of holding Catholic assumptions which necessarily lead to Catholic conclusions. Ironically, this accusation is sometimes made by various Protestant acquaintances who know I was raised and lived as a devout Protestant for the vast majority of my life, and indeed shared many of those years with me. The reality, however, is that long before I had read anything by a Catholic author, I had already concluded that certain fundamental ideas held by a majority of Protestants, sometimes virtually all of them, were false. I'd reached these conclusions in two ways: first, studying scripture often and carefully, and second, thinking through the logical and unavoidable implications of my Protestant ideas.
Chief among the Protestant ideas I concluded were false, several years before I began reading the Church Fathers, was the doctrine of sola scriptura, or scripture alone. This is perhaps the most famous and fundamental Protestant doctrine, and therefore concluding it was false was quite traumatic. I continued to remain open to the possibility that sola scriptura was true, but at the time, I simply didn't see how that was possible. Not wanting to disturb the faith of others, I never mentioned my change of mind publicly. I continued to study the issue and raise it with various learned mentors and friends. Virtually all of them acknowledged I was raising powerful points, and none of them had good answers for them, quite honestly. Uh, this was not only before I became Catholic but before I had even read a single Catholic author.
After my conversion, these various good points became, among some of these same Protestant acquaintances, Catholic assumptions. But of course, this was not so because I had never been Catholic, never desired to be Catholic, and knew nothing particularly substantive about the Catholic faith when I reached these conclusions.
So, with that in mind, I want to cover our road map for today so that you all know where we are going. And so the road map today is as follows: My thesis is that long before reading anything from Catholic sources, I rejected sola scriptura for valid reasons. And I'll show this by first correctly defining sola scriptura according to respected Protestant sources. This is sometimes not done by some Catholics. Second, by showing how I concluded sola scriptura was logically incoherent. Third, by showing why I concluded sola scriptura was inconsistent with the sacred history narrated in scripture itself. This is what I call the logistical issue. Fourth, showing how my intuitions were confirmed by a widely respected Protestant figure, R.C. Sproul. And finally, by summarizing the various questions I had about sola scriptura as a Protestant and how they ultimately led me to conclude that sola scriptura was false.
And finally, before we get into the meat of today, I want to thank our patrons who are making all of this possible. Uh, we've got so much more to do, so much exciting stuff that's coming down the pike. If you have been blessed by our content and you're not a patron, please consider becoming a patron. You can go to the button, "Become a Patron," on our website at eternalchristendom.com. Thank you all very much.
So, the first point in making this case about sola scriptura, what I concluded about it as a Protestant, is that we need to get the right definition of sola scriptura. So, before proceeding to all the other reasons, let's get that part right. Over the years, various Catholic apologists have incorrectly defined sola scriptura as the belief that scripture is the only authority in the church. Not all Catholic apologists, but certainly some. This is not correct, actually, though. The doctrine of sola scriptura is the belief that scripture is the only infallible, meaning without error, authority in the church. Various Protestant sects leave room for human reason, interpretation, and their own historic creeds, but nonetheless assert that scripture alone is infallible by its very nature.
A quick note for the purposes of this uh, this episode is that I will use the word infallible in the sense I understood it as a Protestant at the time, which was without error. The definition of infallible in Catholic theology is more precise. It is a gift granted by Our Lord to His Church that confers an exemption or immunity from error upon the authority of the Church in its formal teachings on faith and morals. So, as such, infallibility in Catholic theology is a feature of only living authorities. But for the sake of this uh, this episode, I'm using infallible in the sense I understood as a Protestant at the time, which was simply without error.
So, while I was never a Reformed Protestant, which refers to various forms of Calvinism and Presbyterianism, etc., Presbyterianism, excuse me, etc., I nonetheless acknowledged that the Reformed tradition was among the more intellectually rigorous in Protestantism. So, in dealing with my doubts about sola scriptura, I mostly drew on Reformed sources in order to make sure I wasn't doubting a scarecrow. But it was Reformed sources themselves that finally drove me to reject sola scriptura. Foremost among them was the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith, one of the classic Protestant creeds, whose sections on scripture could be affirmed by most Protestant sects to this day. Its first chapter, "Of the Holy Scripture," defined sola scriptura as a doctrine resting on two pillars: First, all that is necessary for salvation is found in scripture, and two, scripture is the only infallible authority in the church.
So, the first pillar is found in section six of this confession, which says the following: "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men." Unquote.
The second pillar is found in sections 9-10. And the former, section 9, reads as follows: "The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself. And therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture, which is not manifold, but one, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly." Section 10 reinforces this same point: "The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, that's a key line, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the scripture."
So, thus we have the doctrine of sola scriptura: All that is necessary for salvation is found in scripture, and the sole infallible authority by which the meaning of scripture is determined is scripture itself. It is also important to note another affirmation of the Westminster Confession that I emphasized, that is that in all controversies of religion, the only thing in whose sentence we are to rest, it says, is scripture. In other words, the only thing that can bring disputes to an end, disputes about the faith, is scripture. But as I discovered, this assertion was completely incoherent.
So, this gets to my first objection: that sola scriptura was logically incoherent. The incoherence of sola scriptura becomes clear by asking a simple question that is assumed but never addressed by sola scriptura, namely, what books are part of scripture? The reason this question is so important should be obvious. If you're going to claim scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith, one must know what is in that scriptura. Otherwise, the doctrine and its claims become meaningless, if not false. Yet, not only does sola scriptura never answer this question, it cannot answer this question. The reasons why are pretty straightforward.
Let's say someone who asserts sola scriptura is asked it by anybody. It doesn't have to be a Catholic, but they're asked, "What books are part of scripture?" Their answer will be X books, where X for most Protestants will be 66 books: 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. But the questioner has a logical follow-up: "Well, how do you know those are the right books?" This would certainly qualify as one of the controversies of religion section 10 of the Westminster Confession of Faith refers to. How could it not be? We know there were numerous controversies about what books should be considered scripture from the beginning of the church. And section 10 of the Westminster Confession gives us a clear answer as to the only way this controversy can be brought to a conclusion: by "the Holy Spirit speaking in the scripture." Section 9 also makes clear that the only way we can arrive at an infallible meaning, certain and without error, answer to such questions is scripture itself. Therefore, the question, "What books are part of scripture?" can only be infallibly answered by scripture itself.
This is where sola scriptura falls apart. There is no inspired table of contents which would ensure and enable us to answer this question about which books are part of scripture from scripture itself. The list of books included in scripture are neither, as the confession says, "expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence deduced from scripture." In other words, scripture itself lacks an authoritative list of books. This can only mean that if sola scriptura is true, we are incapable of answering one of the most important questions of our faith in any coherent fashion, namely, what books are part of scripture? And yet, to add insult to injury, we are told in section seven of the Westminster Confession of Faith that this very glaring knot can be undone, even by the unlearned. Here's the quote: "All things in scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all. Yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." Unquote.
Now, these ordinary means did include the teaching of pastors. But such pastors are not infallible, and thus they could not answer this question with the level of certainty they ascribe to scripture alone. And what if the different pastors disagreed on the canon of scripture, as they certainly have? What if the different pastors disagreed, which I ran into all the time? What then? Thus, on its own terms, as expressed by its most devout adherents, I concluded sola scriptura was totally incoherent. It could not even answer the question of where the Bible came from. To the extent its adherents tried, it would necessarily be mixed with a degree of doubt, since they acknowledged scripture alone to be infallible. And to my great surprise, as we will discuss very soon, every account of the canon of scripture I found among Protestants ultimately relied on appeals to extra-biblical tradition.
That gets us to objection number two, namely, sola scriptura was inconsistent with sacred history. The logistical issue, as I call it. So, the essence of this objection stemmed from a simple question I asked myself: If sola scriptura is a doctrine revealed by God, where do we see this doctrine put into practice in scripture itself? I was a good Protestant. I wanted to find it in scripture. I kept thinking of the process by which we obtain the scriptures in the first place, particularly the Old Testament. If the timeline provided by scripture is trustworthy, which we had to believe if it was in fact divinely revealed, that meant that the events narrated in books like Genesis were written down centuries, even millennia, after they took place. But if sola scriptura was a divinely revealed doctrine, how could this be? Where would the great heroes of the faith, such as Noah and the patriarchs, go for their final religious authority? Likewise with the other books of the Old Testament. If sola scriptura was true, how could books be added to scripture at all? After all, if sola scriptura is true, all the truths of salvation had to be derived from one authoritative scripture. But this closed the door on the formation of scripture itself.
I knew that some Protestants admitted that sola scriptura only applied post-inscripturation, meaning after the scriptures were complete. But if that was so, how could one claim that sola scriptura was divinely revealed? So, this may sound a bit silly, but it shows how I arrived at a simultaneously provocative conclusion at the end of a line of thinking that was, for me, devastating to my belief in sola scriptura. Sola scriptura assumes a defined scriptura, a closed set of books. Thus, sola scriptura could not have been normative throughout sacred history during which scripture itself was written. This meant that if sola scriptura is true now, then it had to have become true. And therefore, the only way it could have become true is if scripture clearly revealed something that was necessarily very specific, namely, the time and manner of the closing of the canon.
This provocative and logically necessary conclusion led to a question that would bring the whole house of cards crashing down for me: Where did scripture reveal the timing or the manner in which the canon was complete and therefore closed? The answer was both obvious and disturbing: It didn't.
As a Protestant, there is one verse above all others that I and others relied on to defend sola scriptura. It's not the only one, but it's the primary one. And it's 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which says the following: "All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." Unquote. Note that nowhere does this verse or any other in the New Testament state explicitly, let alone implicitly, when or even how the canon of scripture would be completed and closed. If anything, this verse only aroused more questions for me. After all, the New Testament wasn't even complete when Paul wrote these words, and therefore, the scripture he referred to had to be the Old Testament, and at most only some of the New Testament. He also likely wrote this letter in the early AD 60s at the latest, but the New Testament itself was not complete by then. Therefore, since it was impossible to claim from this verse or any other that scripture revealed when or how its canon would be closed, hence why I call it the logistical objection, let alone what books were included in it, which goes back to my first objection, sola scriptura could not be true.
This made perfect sense the more I thought about it and simply read scripture on its own terms. For example, throughout all of the sacred history narrated by scripture itself, you either had some sort of divinely guided community by itself or a divinely guided community with divinely breathed scripture alongside it as the norm. Not once was scripture or any form of it ever considered the sole infallible authority throughout sacred history. So, this is easily proven if one simply reviews the history of some of the most prominent heroes in the Bible. At the time of Adam and Eve, Noah and his family, Abraham and the patriarchs, there was no scripture at all. It was simply a community of some kind that was directly guided by God. Moving on to Moses and the Israelites, the events described, including the various revelations God made, you know, writing, writing the Ten Commandments with his own fingers on the tablet, for example, took place first and are only later written down in scripture. A divinely guided community, the Israelites, and scripture, the Torah, grew alongside one another. God spoke to Moses in the burning bush before Moses wrote about it in the Torah. Egypt was devastated by divinely wrought plagues before Moses wrote it down. God wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger on stone before Moses recorded it for all coming time. The same is true for the rest of the events in Israel's history, with some scriptures being an entirely new revelation rather than simply recounting past revelations, such as the wisdom literature, the Psalms, and the prophets.
The New Testament is the exact same. Christ nowhere writes anything, nor commands his apostles to write anything. The apostles do not explicitly or implicitly indicate when the canon of scripture will be or is complete, which they would have to do if sola scriptura is in fact divinely revealed. If sola scriptura was revealed by Christ to the apostles, why did he never command them to write anything down? And why did none of them reveal when these written instructions were complete and final, and thus the canon closed? So, in fact, my love of scripture and my constant reading of it caused me to notice that never once were early Christians encouraged to believe or act as if sola scriptura was true, despite the fact that I attempted to do both. Not once does a believer in good standing presume to contradict an apostle or an elder appointed by them with a counter-interpretation of scripture premised on the ostensible superior authority of the Bible. In fact, at the first great council of the church in Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem, the apostles primarily appeal not to the authority of scripture, but to their own and the Holy Spirit's authority. A fact whose significance I explain in great detail on the Becoming Catholic blog. It's number 12 if you want to look it up.
So, in short, while I assumed and acted as if sola scriptura was true virtually my entire life, the more I studied scripture and long before I ever read a Catholic author, I realized that sola scriptura did not seem to be believed, let alone practiced, by any of the Christians in the biblical church. Nor did scripture ever speak to the one thing it logically had to speak to if sola scriptura was true, namely, the time and manner of the closing of the canon. The New Testament exhibited the same pattern witnessed in the Old Testament, namely, a divinely guided community possessing revealed truths prior to a divinely breathed scripture, and a divinely guided community alongside a divinely breathed scripture which issued forth from it.
So, in conclusion, this logistical issue, this second objection, helped me realize two facts that were devastating to sola scriptura: First, it was impossible to claim sola scriptura was a divinely revealed doctrine throughout the time period scripture was being written. And therefore, two, the only way sola scriptura could be theoretically true was if scripture itself revealed the time and manner of its completion, otherwise known as the closing, uh, closing of the canon and its contents, which it never did. Sola scriptura was thus not only incoherent on its own terms, but totally inconsistent with the logistics of scripture.
This gets me to my next point, which is that my intuitions on this matter, on sola scriptura, were confirmed by a Protestant. So, all of this I had begrudgingly recognized after years of studying scripture, thinking, studying what my elders in the faith had written about the issue, not the Church Fathers, all Protestants, and asking tough questions. But I continued holding out hope that someone had figured it all out and I simply hadn't found them yet. That was the case with many issues, actually, not just sola scriptura. As it turns out, the final nail in the coffin came, of all places, from a Presbyterian Protestant who believed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, R.C. Sproul. I had loved and admired Sproul for many years. So, when I concluded his account of the canon of scripture simply made no sense, once more, several years prior to reading the Church Fathers or any other Catholic authors, my rejection of sola scriptura was complete.
In a lecture on the canon, Sproul said the following, a key quote for my dealing with this issue: "Classic Protestantism would say the compilation of the canon was a fallible collecting of infallible books. The church was trying to be diligent. The church was trying to be obedient. The church prayed for providential help and support. But the church didn't claim to be infallible here. We just said, 'To the best of my knowledge, to the best of my ability, best of our judgment, these are the books that we believe and we receive to be sacred scripture.' But we could be wrong. That's the position I take. You ask me, 'Is it possible, R.C. Sproul, that there's a book in the New Testament that doesn't belong there?' I'd say, 'Yes, it's possible.' If you said to me, 'R.C. Sproul, is it possible that there's books that were written like Clement that didn't get in that should get in there?' I'd say, 'It's possible.' If you asked me then to give you the probability quotient in my judgment, I wouldn't give you one in 10 jillion chances." That's how he actually phrased it. "There's no work of the church in council in the history of the church about which I have more confidence than that the church made the right decision on recognizing the scripture. It's clear and it really wasn't that hard of a task. It's a historical process, a process led certainly by the providence of God, and one that I don't think any Christian needs to be concerned about because I think we have every reason to believe with the fullest possible confidence that the right books, by the grace of God, have been delivered safely throughout the ages to the church today."
So, there are many problems with that. Uh, again, I'm only covering today what I thought as a Protestant. So, uh, there's many historical points I would make about that comment now as a Catholic, but we're not doing that today. Just what I was thinking as a Protestant at the time, trying to get to the, uh, the ground truth on this issue of sola scriptura and the canon. And after watching this lecture by Sproul, I concluded two things: First, he's right. This is as far as Protestantism can go. And two, this is totally absurd. That's honestly what I concluded. Makes no sense whatsoever.
So, this was another shock to my system, as yet still completely ignorant of what Catholics had to say on the matter, for I had read none of them. In fact, it would be nearly two years before I even considered the Catholic Church a viable option. And yet, without my knowledge, the complete absurdity of this answer by one of the preeminent Reformed apologists was ineluctably leading me there, to the Catholic Church. That answer was not only completely circular but entirely dependent on my judgment, his words, among other extra-biblical appeals. Instead of addressing the various inconsistencies at the heart of sola scriptura, it exacerbated them. Despite all of this, as far as I was concerned, my potential rejection of sola scriptura wouldn't lead me to Catholicism, not even on my radar at the time, but to just another more biblical version of Protestantism. However, given how important sola scriptura had been to my Christian faith up to that time, Sproul's statement shocked me. So much so that at the time, I typed it out on a Word document and included the link to the YouTube video where I found it for future reference. And this video unfortunately has since been made private. But, uh, but I wrote it down then and there. So, I, I needed to remember it. It was that important to me.
So, in a lecture on the canon of scripture delivered later in his life, this is still available, we can provide the link for that. Sproul not only makes the exact same claim as the earlier lecture but offers what he called three rules that were supposedly used by the church to determine whether certain books belonged in the Bible or not. All three of them only increased my doubts, as they violated the very sola scriptura they supposedly defended.
So, the first rule was as follows: Rule number one, according to R.C. Sproul, for the book to be part of the canon, the book must be of apostolic origin, which means that it was written by an apostle or written under the direct and immediate sanction of an apostle. So, again, I'm fine with that rule in a Catholic context, but as a Protestant, where we had to prove everything by scripture alone, this rule just didn't make any sense in that kind of a framework, especially as defined by the Westminster Confession and other Protestant creeds. For example, Sproul used Luke's Gospel as an example of a gospel that wasn't written by an apostle, but by a non-apostle, "under the direct and immediate sanction of an apostle." Sproul claimed that Luke "had the apostolic authority of Paul sanctioning his literary output." But where does scripture make this claim? Nowhere. The only mentions of Luke in the New Testament, all by Paul, are Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, and Philemon 1:24. None of which specify the Luke Paul is referring to. Even if we were to assume it's the same Luke who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, something which neither book claims for itself, Paul never mentions that he approves of the writings of this Luke. Thus, in this controversy of religion, quoting the Westminster Confession, and namely the canonical status of the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, Sproul's claims rely entirely on extra-biblical tradition, an irony that was not lost on me at the time, because I still rejected extra-biblical tradition as an infallible source of knowledge about the faith.
Likewise, with respect to another book written by a non-apostle, the Gospel of Mark, Sproul claimed that "Mark was seen as the spokesman for the Apostle Peter, so that the authority of Peter stood behind the Gospel of Mark as the authority of Paul stood behind the Gospel of Luke." And again, I can accept that as a Catholic based on, uh, historical grounds. But again, scripture itself nowhere makes this claim. I believed it was true, but based entirely on ancient Christian testimony outside scripture, not scripture itself. Mark is mentioned several times in the New Testament and by Peter only once in 1 Peter 5:13, where he calls him "my son." But neither the Gospel of Mark nor Peter ever make the claim that Mark "wrote" the Gospel ascribed to him. Peter does not express approval of anything Mark has written or will write. Nor does the Gospel of Mark ever claim it was written at Peter's direction. Once again, Sproul's claims are not found in scripture itself, but rely entirely on extra-biblical tradition. And it is upon the basis of these extra-biblical traditions that Sproul goes on to assert that "From the very beginning, there wasn't any doubt about the apostolic authority and biblical canonicity of the four Gospels, of the basic corpus of Paul's writings, and so on." Unquote.
But clearly, the fact that there wasn't any doubt, a claim that could be contested with certain books, could not be because of anything contained in scripture itself. This certainty must have originated from outside scripture. Thus, Sproul's first rule, "quote," violated sola scriptura, as the canonical status of the various books he mentions clearly, one of the controversies of religion, to quote the Westminster Confession again, could not be solved by Sproul by appealing to scripture alone. His own confession stated that the only source "in whose sentence we are to rest" in controversies of religion was scripture. But clearly, that was not possible when it came to the canon of scripture itself. Hence my realization, even as a Protestant, that his claims about rule number one were simply incoherent, at least in light of Protestant theology and his own confession.
Sproul then moved on to what he claimed was the second rule the church used in ascertaining the canon of scripture. And this rule number two was reception by the primitive church, meaning the ancient church. So, for this rule, Sproul appealed to the fact that Christians in the third and fourth centuries could say, "We know that this particular book was received and quoted as authoritative very early on." Therefore, despite the fact that Sproul is quite clear the church is not infallible, though he is certain that it made the right decision on the canon, he appeals to the usage of the church as a valid criterion by which to determine the contents of the canon. Hence his admission that Protestantism can only claim scripture is a fallible collection of infallible books. Once again, Sproul's second rule violated sola scriptura. He could not solve this controversy of religion by appealing to a sentence, the, the word that, the Westminster Confession says can only come from scripture, in which he and other Protestants could rest, and they couldn't rest in any sentence from scripture alone because scripture has no sentence on this topic. So, once more, for his second rule, he appealed to extra-biblical tradition.
So, Sproul then moved on to what he claimed was the third and final rule for canonicity. So, this rule number three, I'll just call Sproul's rule of doctrinal compatibility, namely, whether or not the doctrine found in what Sproul called a second level of debatable books agreed with the basic core of New Testament books that were never doubted, such as the Gospels and the Pauline letters. So, Sproul illustrates this third rule, supposed rule of doctrinal compatibility, with the example of the book of Hebrews, which doesn't claim to have been written by anyone in particular. He claimed this book was doubted by some. That's true, because, but he says that it was doubted because Hebrews 6 "has often been interpreted by the people as indicating that a person who has been redeemed by Christ can lose his or her salvation, and that seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the teachings of the scriptures on that subject." Unquote.
So, in other words, Sproul claimed canonicity of the book of Hebrews was debated because it seemed to contradict something that contradicted Reformed Protestant doctrine. But who in the church made this claim in the debate about the canonicity of Hebrews? Absolutely no one. As far as I can tell, Sproul made it up. And in doing so, I realized he relied on a hidden assumption I would later discover was far more compatible with the Catholic view of the canon of scripture. Namely, this is very important: that pre-existing doctrine and belief can and necessarily must stand side by side with scripture. This is part of what the Catholic Church calls sacred tradition, of which scripture is a part. After all, even according to Sproul's position, the canonicity of Hebrews was only debated because of a set of beliefs that were held before its canonical status was finalized. But if sola scriptura was Christian doctrine, how could Christians do what Sproul claimed they did in determining the canonicity of Hebrews, namely, use doctrine by which to judge whether or not a book was part of the scriptura rather than the scriptura to determine if something was doctrine?
If, in fact, the early Christians did what Sproul claimed they did, they were doing something that was inherently far more compatible with the Catholic faith. An implication he avoided by erroneously claiming a widespread belief in Reformed Protestant doctrine when it comes to the possibility of a true Christian losing their salvation. Reformed Protestants deny that a true Christian can lose their salvation. But as I would later discover, this claim was also false, because the ancient church virtually unanimously believed that real Christians, Christians who had been regenerated, reborn in baptism, that they believed that unanimously, too. That they unanimously believed that real Christians could lose their salvation through unrepentant mortal sin. And you can actually find a ton of quotes on this in the quote archive on eternalchristendom.com. You go up to the top, the Resources tab, go to Quote Archives, and you'll see a quote archive called "Mortal Sin: Christians Can Lose Their Salvation." You'll see a bunch of quotes from the Fathers. We're adding to it all the time, but you'll see an example of what I'm talking about. I didn't know that at the time I was hearing this from Sproul, but I certainly discovered it later.
So, but in the very same lecture, Sproul admits that "The thing that finally swung the debate over Hebrews was the argument that Paul was its author, and it was the belief of the church in the early centuries that Paul was the author of Hebrews that really got it in the canon." Unquote. In other words, Sproul's use of the book of Hebrews as his preeminent example of this third rule of doctrinal compatibility is not only based on false premises, but is totally pointless, since his canonicity was ultimately determined not by this third rule of doctrinal compatibility, but by the first two rules, which, like the third rule, ultimately rely on extra-biblical appeals rather than scripture itself. In short, each of the three rules that Sproul claimed were used to determine the canon of scripture were themselves violations of sola scriptura. Sproul seemed to recognize this, hence his formulation of "quote, a fallible list of infallible books," unquote, which has become rather infamous. But since his own Westminster Confession claims that scripture alone is the infallible authority for the church, in whose sentence alone all controversies of religion can be brought to a rest or a conclusion, that's the Westminster Confession's own term, "rest," his assertion of a "quote, fallible list of infallible books," unquote, is an implicit admission that the canon of scripture itself is a controversy of religion that can never be finally settled. There's no rest that can be obtained because scripture itself doesn't provide the answer. A startling conclusion that I, as a Protestant, reached again long before reading a single Catholic, long before reading a, uh, a single Church Father.
So, final point on this is the aftermath of my encounter with Sproul. Because this was actually a very traumatic experience for me. Sproul's lectures on the canon of scripture, in many ways, echoed the same arguments I had seen and heard elsewhere in the Protestant world. Prior to listening to Sproul's lectures, I had already reached the conclusion that based on sola scriptura, there was no way I could be certain about the contents of scripture. Certainly not in the same way that I was certain that there was a Trinity or that God was real, things like that, let alone claim my certainty was based on a revelation from God. Since such infallibility could only be said of scripture itself, at least in the sola scriptura framework, there was no possibility of attaining rest on this issue, to use the language of the Westminster Confession. The furthest I, and anyone else, could get was a guess, which ultimately placed the foundations of Christianity, as a supposedly supernaturally revealed religion, not in God, but in man, which was hyper-ironic, given the Calvinist claim to always make take everything from the supposedly man-centric Catholic religion to the God-centric Calvinist religion. I turned to Sproul in desperation, hoping he could solve the problem for me. Instead, he openly admitted that the classical Protestant position was, in fact, that scripture was a "quote, fallible collection of infallible books," unquote, and that this claim relied on assertions about an historical process, his words. For reasons I could not fully articulate at the time, this argument struck me as fatal to true faith, which I knew must ultimately rely on a certain and public revelation from God rather than scholarship about an historical process.
In other words, long before reading a single Catholic, I knew that the books of scripture had to be not only individually infallible, but part of a collection or list which was itself infallible, without error. Again, I, with the Protestant understanding of that term at the time. This is exactly how Sproul articulated the Catholic position on the canon: an infallible collection of infallible books. A position I realized I had arrived at without reading a single Catholic when I watched his lecture, because it was simply logical. I would later come to realize that Sproul could never admit that this historical process he referred to was infallible, since it was, by his own admission, carried out by the church. And if the church was infallible, he would no longer have an excuse for being Protestant. And despite his admirable intellectual consistency, I genuinely mean that, I admired it, Sproul nonetheless claimed there was nothing "about which I have more confidence than that the church made the right decision on recognizing the scripture." He claimed the probability the church erred was, in his words, "1 in 10 jillion chances," unquote, and thus we could have "the fullest possible confidence" in the canon of scripture. Another R.C. Sproul quote: "I believe with every conviction I have," he said in that later lecture, "that the church made the right decision at every point, that every book that should be in the Bible is in the Bible." Unquote.
And yet, despite holding to the Westminster Confession of Faith himself, which claimed the truths necessary for salvation could only be derived from scripture, and it cannot be denied that the canon of scripture must be among the truths required for salvation, Sproul hinged his entire case for the canon of scripture on the extra-biblical church, thereby violating his own creed's definition of sola scriptura and thus implicitly admitting that the issue of the canon could not rest on the infallible foundation he ascribed to scripture alone. But how can one build an infallible structure of faith on top of a fallible foundation? The very concept makes zero sense. And I didn't need any Church Father to realize this. I simply needed a brain. I admired Sproul's intellectual honesty. I really did. He had arrived at the exact same place I had. But that's what terrified me. It completely demolished everything I thought I knew about the canon of scripture and thus the very source of my faith as a Christian, namely, the Bible. While I didn't begin reading Catholic authors for at least another year, I had to wonder how on earth we Protestants could claim we were justified in separating from a church whose chance of erring, at least on the canon of scripture, Sproul himself calculated to be 1 in 10 jillion. Those seemed like pretty good odds, the kind of odds you stick with.
So, in conclusion, as I began reading the Church Fathers in June of 2017, along with other Catholic apologists, I frequently reread, relistened, and repondered Sproul's statements and others who are kind of in his, his, uh, part of the Protestant world. And I found them even more absurd. I would ask myself overlapping questions such as the following: This question: So, the church could be genuinely guided by God on the canon of scripture, except when that canon included books or doctrines Protestants didn't accept? Or this question: So, we can be virtually certain with the fullest possible confidence, as Sproul said, about the church's judgment on the canon, but nothing else? Of course, I'm not even getting into the deuterocanonical books, but we'll leave that to another day. Another question: So, if it really wasn't that hard of a task to compile the canon of scripture, which is what Sproul claimed, why were Protestants disputing it 1500 years later? And, you know, why did it take centuries if it wasn't that hard? Another question: How could the chances the church was wrong in the New Testament canon be 1 in 10 jillion? And yet, we Protestants rejected what the same church had determined about the Old Testament. Again, that's in the deuterocanon, but these are the kinds of questions I was thinking through. Another question: If the chances the church had been wrong in the canon was 1 in 10 jillion, how is it possible for us to say with certainty that this same church could be wrong on almost every major doctrine, including the gospel itself? And this came into play more as I read the Church Fathers, where I was seeing the Church Fathers believe a very different faith than R.C. Sproul. Very different faith from me. And yet he's saying that this same church, the same ancient church, in, you know, was only one in 10 jillion, to use his language, kind of channeling his inner inner child, right? We all use language like that when we're kids. Um, that this same ancient church would have been wrong. Only had a one in 10 chance of being wrong. And yet, if Sproul was right on other doctrines, including the gospel itself, this church was wrong about all sorts of stuff. So, again, that just, it just made less and less sense as I dove into the Church Fathers. And here was another question I asked myself: If sola scriptura is divinely revealed, why do we see nothing like it in practice in either the Old or New Testaments, where a divinely guided community is either on its own without any divinely revealed scripture, or operates alongside divinely revealed scripture, etc., etc., etc.? These were the kinds of questions I was struggling with.
So, in short, and in conclusion, before I read a single Catholic, I realized sola scriptura was not only logically incoherent but logistically incoherent. The very definition of sola scriptura, straight from the mouths of its most ardent adherents, made it impossible to believe. As I discovered simply by carefully reading and pondering the scriptures themselves, it was in every way a self-refuting doctrine. Without realizing it, by adhering to sola scriptura, I had believed in traditions of men most of my life. And with that, we will close with our normal anthem verse, Psalm 73:25-26: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And on earth I desire nothing besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
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