Heat. Heat. And all the feedback has been solid and good and it's good to hear the good feedback and you guys are really enjoying yourself. So, that's definitely a blessing. So, now we have reached our grand finale.

Uh, we have Trent Horn and Anthony Rogers. And many of you have been waiting for this debate um for months and months and months. And I have as well, and I'm just excited to finally see it happen. And not on online, you know, sometimes online debates can be uh a little downgrade to what some debates really need. You know, I think uh I respect Trent Horn very very much and I respect Anthony Rogers very very much and so these type of debates I think only are to be done in person, you know. Um just to add that extra layer of of of importance to it, you know. Um so I am definitely grateful and thankful for both of these individuals agreeing to debate um and being the grand finale of this conference uh TGT conference 2026. Um, and you guys have been gracious and I thank you guys for joining us in this debate. Um, and so for this debate and so before we get into it, I'm going to do one more raffle. It's the last raffle of the the conference. And this one be an interesting one here. Okay. All right.

So, the way we're going to do this raffle is I want everybody to take their phone out real quick. All right. Everybody take your phone out. Who has the lowest percentage or battery on their phone? >> Who got four? >> You got four. >> First of all, you out of line. You know you out of line. >> Anybody else got lower than four? >> No, that don't count. That don't count. That don't count. Sorry, man. Sorry, man. Anybody else got lower than to four? Nah. Ain't nobody else irresponsible about their phone. Come on up and get your your your gift, man. There you go, man. No problem. No problem. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, man. Good stuff. That's all the rounds for the conference. So, good stuff. Good stuff. All right.

So, we're going to introduce our debaters tonight. Um to my right we have Anthony Rogers is a graduate of Christ College in Lynchburg, Virginia and of uh and of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor's uh South Carolina. He is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as a regional director in South Carolina for uh Metaninoa Prison Ministries, a branch of the missions agency of the PCA. Anthony has been actively engaged in evangelism and apologetics since the 90s, has contributed to many uh periodicals um and theological journals and is a co-author of the book Our God is Triune. Anthony Ro Anthony is married and has four children. Let's welcome Anthony Rogers.

Trent Horn. After his conversion to the Catholic faith, Trent Horn earned three master's degrees in the fields of theology, philosophy, and bioeththics. He serves as a staff apologist for Catholic Answers when he speech where he specializes in teaching Catholics to graciously and persuasively engage those who disagree with him. Trent is the host of the Council of Trent and has authored or co-authored over dozen a dozen books, including the case of Catholicism, persuasive pro-life, and why we're Catholics. our re uh uh why we're Catholic. Why we are Catholic? We're Catholic. Our reasons for faith, hope, and love. Let's welcome Trent Horn.

All right. Today's debate is concerning Solar Script Tura. Uh the fir the format is 20 minute openings, 15minute rebuttals. We go cross-examination. It'll be a total of 30 minutes with both parties get 15 minutes each to ask questions. 20 minute with a 20-minute Q&A and then the closing will be a seven-minute closing after the Q&A. So, that should prompt you guys to get your questions in early. All right. Uh, make sure you get the index cards. You might want to grab them now and so you can write your questions down while you're listening to the debate. And we're going to have after the Q&A 7 minute closings. Good to go. Good to go, Anthony. All right. He's arguing their phone. That's right. So, Anthony, uh, you're up for your 20-minute opening.

Good evening. I want to begin by giving all praise and thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ who loved me and gave himself for me. I also want to thank Marlon for organizing this event, Trent for engaging me on this topic and all of you for giving us your ear this evening. The word of God is and always has been an existential threat to Satan's kingdom. And so also to any individual or group that seeks to seed itself in the place of God and bind the consciences of men with doctrines and duties that cannot be proven to come from God. Economic historian Jacob Rubin has written that there is quote a very strong connection between towns that adopted the reformation and those that had a printing press which is just to say those towns that had a copy of the Bible as an heir of the Reformation. The position I'll be defending in this debate is that found in the classic creeds and confessions of the Reformation summarized as follows. Scripture as the word of the self-contained triune God is his self-authenticating inspired revelatory word which is as such inherent sufficient and clear so that it may as by divine design it was intended to function as the ultimate or final norm and regulator of all Christian faith and practice.

Well, first then scripture is self- authenticating. Cardinal Stannis Law Hosius, a member of the body that produced the decrees and anathemailled cannons of the Council of Trent, not Trent's YouTube page. And so, a representative of the spirit that animated that counterreformation council infamously said, "The scriptures have only as much force as the fables of Esop, if destitute of the authority of the Catholic Church." Thomas Stapleton, a Catholic theologian and controversialist much loved by Pope Clement VII, who made him an honorary prelet, said, "One must not believe God as he speaks in his written word unless the authoritative judgment of the pope stands in between." Although Catholics have learned to express this idea in less overtly scandalous ways, the same view is still heard from Catholics today. Carl Keading, the founder of Catholic Answers, Trent's organization, said, quote, "The same church that authenticates the Bible that establishes inspiration is the authority set up by Christ to interpret his word." The upshot of such statements is that according to Rome and her apologists, in order for God's word to be authenticated, he needs his papers stamped by popes and bishops. He needs their neil abstto and impreer. Well, in stark contrast to this, we maintain that the triune God, the author of scripture, is self-contained. He has all life and glory in and of himself and doesn't stand in need of any creature. As self-contained, God is self-referencing, which is to say, he speaks with self-authenticating authority. When Moses asked God for his name, the Lord identified himself in terms of himself as his own reference point. I am who I am. He didn't look outside of himself to declare who he is or point Moses beyond his self- testimony to some creature or body of men. Analogously, when God swears, he swears by himself, there being none greater by whom he could swear. God can't deny himself and is the ultimate authority. He always speaks with ultimate authority, self-authenticating authority. Accordingly, when the prophets spoke from God, they prefaced and followed their utterances, saying, "Thus saith the Lord." The true God is his own notary. He stamps his own papers. Jesus and the apostles taught the same thing. As the great I am incarnate, Jesus, the eternal word of the father, spoke with selfattesting authority. Hundreds of times, Jesus fronted or prefaced his words with his own solemn declaration, ratifying their truth. Amen. Amen. I say to you, because Jesus spoke with such unprecedented authority, suspending the truth of all his declarations on the mere fact that he said them, the people reacted at every turn, never has any man spoke like this. Where did this man get this authority? Well, uh, that's a good bit better, although it still falls short of faith, than the response of the religious leaders. When Jesus said, for example, I am the light of the world, the Jewish leaders replied, you testify concerning yourself. Your testimony is not true. In other words, they were saying, "Your word needs our approval. It is our magisterium that declares such matters. We authenticate what's from God." To this, Jesus replied, "I am he who testifies about myself, and my father who sent me also testifies about me." He went on to say to those who rejected his self- authenticating testimony and that of the father by saying, "You know neither me nor my father. If you knew me, you would know my father also." Anyone then who does not hear this magisterium, that of the father and the son, and devolve all their confidence upon their word, but instead hearkens to the voice of another, does not know the father and the son. In the same context, Jesus also said, "He who is of God hears the words of God. For this reason, you do not hear them because you are not of God." Later, when speaking to Pilate, Jesus said, "He who is of the truth hears my voice." This word then is self- authenticating and it imposes itself upon those who are of the truth.

Second, scripture is inspired and therefore inherent and infallible. The uniform teaching of the prophets and the apostles is that God is the origin or source of holy scripture. Moses, the fountain head of the prophetic tradition, the written law, said that man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. A statement the Lord Jesus repeated when making an end of Satan's temptations. It is written, Satan, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." In the writings of the prophets who followed in the wake of Moses, we see the same thing in the incipit of their writings. And so indicating how we're to view their contents, we frequently read expressions such as the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel, to Hosea, to Joel, to Jonah, to Micah, to Zephaniah. All such expressions indicate and underscore that scripture originates with God and is conveyed to his chosen instruments who then under his mighty hand superintended by his spirit passed on to us what they received from him. The apostle Peter expressed it this way. Prophecy did not have its origin in the will of man, but holy men spake from God as they were born along by the Holy Spirit. In the context, he's talking about written scripture. The Lord Jesus taught this same view of scripture when he said that David spoke the words of Psalm 110 in the spirit and when he quoted Psalm 82 as God's word to the people of old which could therefore not be broken. The apostles were consciously aware that the same spirit of inspiration at work in the prophets was also at work in them according to the promise of Christ such that what they put down in writing was his inspired word. In 2 Corinthians, Paul contrasts the words of merely human wisdom with those given through the apostles by the spirit. In the same context, he says that the spiritual man, the renewed man, a person born of the spirit, receives the words given by the spirit. Later in the same epistle, and note this well, Paul said, "If anyone thinks he's a prophet or spiritual, that is a spiritual man, let him acknowledge that the things I'm writing to you are the Lord's commandment." That is his authoritative word. Paul goes on to say in the same section, very next sentence, "If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized." Speaking in harmony with Paul and in fact on behalf of the entire apostolic college, John wrote, "We are from God. He who knows God listens to us. He who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Because this word is from God, who is truth itself, it is in the very nature of the case altogether true without any darkness or error. That's why David could say, "The entirety, the sum of your word is truth." Because God's word is truth and is full of glorious promises from God. Even the great promise to David concerning his greater son, David could say, "You have magnified your word above your name." That is, God's word surpasses all the other tokens or ways by which he has made himself known. In concert with this, Jesus said, "Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth." Paul told Timothy, "Accurately handle the word of truth." The word being from God who is truth is therefore without lies, without errors. John said, "No lie is of the truth." Well, scripture is the truth. Therefore, there is no lie in this word.

Third, scripture is materially sufficient. Although Catholics today are of two minds regarding whether or not scripture tells us everything we need to know, regarding what we are to believe, how we're to worship and live before God, with some saying it is sufficient, some saying it isn't sufficient, both parties saying this is what the magisterium teaches of Rome. We can be thankful that nevertheless scripture itself is not of two minds on this topic. According to scripture, there isn't anything a Christian must believe requisite to salvation. Nothing he must do in worshiping God or right. Nothing he must do in living before God that is not taught in scripture either expressly or by logical inference. David said, "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." Speaking of this sufficiency, Micah also tells us he has shown you, oh man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you. He's shown you, Micah says in written scripture. Paul said to him who is able to establish you according to my gospel, which he calls the mystery. He says it is now manifested and by the scriptures of the prophet, according to the commandment of the eternal God, it has been made known to all the nations leading to the obedience of the faith. Paul's saying, "The faith is already there in the Old Testament, how much more then also in the New? If the previous scriptures contain the sufficiency of the uh of the faith, and so must we say the New Testament all the more." John said of the things recorded in his account, "These have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and believing you may have life in his name." To Timothy, Paul said, "From infancy, you've known the holy scriptures, the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation." And he uh Peter says his divine power has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness. And he says this divine power is given to believers through the true knowledge of him. A knowledge they have of him through the precious and magnificent promises his inscripturated promises. Promises that Peter says he is reminding the church of in this very epistle. So scripture is sufficient to convert the soul to make one wise unto salvation to communicate the whole faith and for everything pertaining to life and godliness.

Fourth, scripture is formally sufficient meaning it is sufficiently clear. James Gibbons, once the bishop of Baltimore, who eventually became a cardinal in the Roman church, said, "We must conclude that the scriptures alone cannot be a sufficient guide and rule of faith, because they are not of themselves clear and intelligible, even in the matters of the highest importance, by which he means things like the doctrine of the Trinity, or that we're saved by grace through faith in Christ apart from works." These things are not clear in scripture. Expressing the uh same sentiment. Catholics since the Reformation have said things like uh scripture is a mute book, a dead letter, a wax nose, an idol, and an active word. Again, I don't think they would as openly say that today, but this is the underlying view of Rome. According to them, scripture doesn't speak. It doesn't explain itself. It is insufficient to communicate the words of life and salvation. To the contrary, in scripture, we have not only what God spoke, but that in which he still speaks. God is still speaking in this word. This word is full of life, light, and saving power. Through Moses, the Lord declared, "This word is not an idol word for you. Indeed, it is your life." Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord said, "Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" Jesus said, "The words I've spoken to you are spirit and they are life." Stephen in Acts 7 said that Moses received living oracles to pass on to you. How could it be otherwise? God's word and the spirit who gave it, the spirit who works by and with the word in the hearts of men, brings about new life, creates the saving graces of faith and repentance. Paul says, "Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God." Uh, and so on. Because this word is full of life, light, and saving power. It is clear. Light is by very definition that which illuminates, makes clear. It comes to and gets through to God's people, those born of the spirit. Moses said, "This word is not too difficult for you, nor out of reach." That is, it's clear and accessible. In Jeremiah 42, the prophet said, "The word of warning, which he delivered to the people from God, was clear." The prophet Ezekiel is told to be a watchman on the wall and warn people, otherwise their blood would be on his head. as he spokes to speak garbled words. In Habac 2, the prophet is told, "Record the vision, put it on tablets, and make it clear so that the one who reads it may run." You can read it while running and understand it. The whole reason for God giving his word through the prophets was to communicate to his people, which means he communicated. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be understood. The Lord Jesus and the apostles also taught the clarity of the word of God. which doesn't mean of course that blind men can't fail to see the light and it's receive its illumination. In in John 10, the religious leader said to Jesus, "If you're the Christ, tell us clearly." This is the question of our debate. Is Jesus clear to this? Jesus didn't reply, "You don't understand my word. Uh, it's unclear." And and that's because there's no pope standing in between us. Rather, in response to their statement, Jesus said, "I did tell you and you didn't believe." He went on to say, "You don't believe because you're not my sheep. Not because my word's unclear. If a blind man doesn't see the light, there's nothing wrong with the light. It's something wrong with his eyes." The same Jesus repeatedly upgraded the religious leaders for their failure to believe the truth. Rhetorically asking, "Have you never read?" The implication, the upshot is, "If you read it, then you'd understand it." The fact that you don't understand it means either you haven't read it or you are blind. Certainly, there are parts of scripture that are harder to understand than others, but on the whole, scripture is clear, and the occasional hard things can be understood by comparing scripture with scripture.

Fifth, scripture is the ultimate norm and regulator. Because scripture is the inspired, the self-authenticating, inherent, sufficient, and clear word of God, it can and by divine design was given to function as the ultimate norm and regulator of all Christian faith and practice. Everything is to be held to the standard of this word. All preaching and teaching must be according to and come from the scriptures. Now, to be sure, when God raised up the prophets and the apostles, he first put his words in their mouths and directed them to preach orally to the people, and people were to hearken to what they heard immediately from them or those proximate to them. But scripture is clear how the word was to be preserved for and conveyed to distant generations. The Lord said to Moses, "Write this in the book as a memorial." That is so that it might serve as a record, a reminder to future generations. The Lord reiterates the point several times over to Moses, saying in another place, "Take this book of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God so that it may remain there as a witness against you." The prophets after Moses are told the same thing. To Isaiah, the Lord said, "Go write it on a tablet before them and inscribe it on the scroll." so that it may serve in the time to come as a witness forever. Likewise, David in the psalm said, "This will be written for the generations to come so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord." This is why Jesus updated the religious leaders. For while they should have clung to the written word alone, they claimed to be in possession of traditions, oral teachings from God through Moses that were not written down. And Jesus said, "Thereby they had nullified the word of God for the sake of their traditions." The apostles followed suit. Uh, they Paul said uh to the Romans that what was written the four time was written for our instruction. What was written about Abraham. He says the same thing to the Corinthians. After quoting the law, he says for our sake it was written. Referring to what happened to the Exodus generation. Paul think Paul said these things happened to them as an example and were written for our instruction. In Acts Peter said that Moses received living oracles to pass on to you. It was this word long after it was originally given, the written word that served as the sole norm. Accordingly, when the apostles preached and taught, they always did so from the scriptures. They did not pass on anything that could not be demonstrated from the scriptures. Acts 8, Philip opened his mouth and beginning from this scripture, he preached Jesus to him. Elsewhere in Acts, it says, "According to Paul's custom, he went to them and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the scriptures." This is what Paul's doing orally, not saying anything but what's already in the scriptures. The same speaking of Apollos, a mighty man in the scriptures. It says he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. Yes, the apostles and early Christian evangelists and deacons preached and taught orally just like the prophets. But they always did so from the scriptures, neither speaking contrary to them nor going beyond them. Toward the end of the book of Acts, after decades of preaching orally, Paul said to King Agria, "Having obtained help from God, I stand to this day testifying to small and great, stating nothing but what Moses and the prophets said was going to take place." Recognizing and operating on this principle, the Jews in Berea, contrary to those in Thessalonica, who rejected Paul and what he preached to them from the scriptures, it says, "These were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica. For they received the word with great eagerness, examining the scriptures to see whether these things were so." This is God's modus operandi, his established pattern of communicating his truth to future generations. And just like in God's prior dealings with his people, the Lord, always consistent with himself, moved the apostles to write by his spirit what they preached from the scriptures so that it together with the old could function in perpetuity as the reminder, the objective standard by which all things were to be measured. In Peter's final epistle, he tells the recipients that he is writing in light of his impending death, employing all diligence for that reason, so that quote, "At any time after my departure, you will be able to call these things to mind." How is the word of the apostles to function? Uh, how is how in the future are we to have access to this word and know it? It's by the written scripture. This was God's pattern in the Old Testament through Moses, through Isaiah, through Jeremiah. It is a consistent pattern, an unbroken pattern. There's no indication that this changed or turned around. The apostles preached and then they committed it to writing. And they call the church to imitate their examples. They call the church to say nothing but what is found in the scriptures. Everything is to be according to the scriptures, from the scriptures. Nothing can be contrary to it or beyond it. This word is sufficient. This word is clear. This word is inherent. This word gives life. No other word is like this word. And this is why the world throughout human history has always been opposed to this word in countless different ways. Countless different groups, kings and princes and others have always attacked this word because as soon as you could get people off of this word, then you can make them submit to all sorts of things. This is the this is the program of cults. This is the program of every group that has another agenda than God's agenda. I'll conclude with that.

All right. Thank you for that. Uh, now we have a 20-minut opening statement from Tren Horn.

All right. Excuse me. Good to go. All right. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, Marlin, for hosting me. Anthony, thank you for participating. Thank you guys for being really welcoming to me. I've met I think the majority of people here are Protestant, but I think a lot of Protestants came up to me today and said I was their favorite Catholic apologist. So, so don't tell my colleagues Joe Heshmire and Jimmy Aken. We'll keep that we'll keep that between us. So, I think you could tell in Anony's opening statement, he certainly is a pastor. Uh, I I'm not a pastor. So he he gave a a wonderful sermon with lots and lots of Bible verses but kind of an unclear argument as to how they prove all of the elements of soloscriptor. So I want to break that down and show that there are no good reasons to believe this doctrine is true and many reasons to believe that it's false. Uh, and I'm really grateful by the way that Anthony is defending what the Westminster Confession of Faith says about scripture. So here's what it says. This is his position. The whole council 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 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. This is called the sufficiency of scripture. By the way, the line or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture was omitted from the London Baptist 1689 confession. If you have Baptists here uh ch it was changed to or necessarily contained in holy scripture to avoid logical entailments like infant baptism which Presbyterians believe in. Of course, all this begs the question whose definition of solos scriptor is correct because the Bible certainly doesn't say which or provide any definition of its own because the Bible doesn't teach solos scriptor Torah. Indeed, if God wants us to know solos scriptor is true means according to Anthy's position, the Bible needs to teach that solos scriptorer is true. And if it doesn't, his position is false. Next, Westminster says, "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. This is also known as the perspu of scripture." Uh, now I so which says what we must believe for salvation is deduced from scripture. Now, I agree there are some essential doctrines like that Jesus is the Messiah or that salvation comes through Christ that are very clear in scripture. But consider these other questions. If I gravely sin, do I need to restore my saving relationship with God or can salvation never be lost? Which actions are gravely sinful and which are not? Is baptism the ordinary means of salvation for infants? Is the Catholic Church a Christian denomination or does it preach a false unsaving gospel? For many people's salvation, they need to know how to answer these questions. But there's widespread disagreement on these questions among Protestants. Think about the important theological questions that were debated here this weekend at this conference. Do those who disagreed with each other here on stage, was one correct and the other is just spiritually blind and can't see what the scripture clearly says or were they people of goodwill who disagree about a document that's not entirely clear on those issues. I think the latter is the more charitable interpretation of all the great guests who joined us at this conference. So going on, Westminster says the infallible rule of interpretation is the scripture itself. Uh, the only infallible rule of faith are the scriptures. That's the claim. But that can't be true in the history of uh the Christian faith because in the first century uh the council of Jerusalem was an infallible rule of faith that decreed for Christians and it its decrees were infallibly binding long before they were recorded in the 15th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. In the Old Testament, a prophet's unwritten proclamations were infallible rules of faith. And in the New Testament, the preaching of the apostles was an infallible rule of faith. That's why Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, "When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God." Paul reaffirms this in his second letter to the Thessalonians. Stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter. In fact, the Bible never uses the term word of God to refer to a written human document. It is always used to refer to an orally proclaimed message about God from a prophet, an apostle or from God himself. And I think that was the biggest problem in Anony's opening statement is he quoted scripture a lot about the word of God. And I agree the word of God is our highest authority. We don't disagree about that. Where we disagree is that the he thinks the word of God is only contained in the written word. And the Bible is very clear the word of God exists in the unwritten word. And we have to logically deduce it's in the written word. The Protestant apologist James White, who was also here with us at the conference yesterday, he says, "Protestants do not assert that solos scriptorera is a valid concept during times of revelation. How could it be since the rule of faith to which it points was at that very time coming into being?" But the Westminster confession of faith says that uh when it comes to scripture unto which nothing at any time is to be added whether by new revelations of the spirit or traditions of men. So that means soloscriptor could not have been true in the old testament because then prophets could never have added to god's revelation. Soloscriptor could not have been true during the time of the new testament authors because then the apostles could have never added to scripture. If they did then there could have been no new teachings. So to prove solos scriptor is true, Anthony has to cite a scripture passage which teaches that at some point in the future from the biblical author's perspective all doctrine would be confined to the written word alone and no new public revelation would be given because at the time the biblical authors are writing there was public revelation and it was not confined to the written word alone but there is no scripture passage which says this. So solos scriptor is false.

All right, let me break down my case against soul scriptor into three arguments. Here's the first one. This is the problem of defining scripture. First, the proposition the 66 books in the Protestant Bible are the sole infallible rule of faith for the church that itself is an infallible rule of faith. This proposition is not in scripture. Therefore, an infallible rule of faith exists outside of scripture. Therefore, solos scriptorra is false. Now, Anthony agrees with premise one that the proposition about the 66 books of the Bible is an infallible rule. It's not just true. It can't it's infallibly true. Can't possibly be false. But this proposition is not in scripture. So, how do we know that it's true? Anthony might say, well, scripture self-authenticates that it's scripture and the church isn't needed. But he hasn't given evidence for that. And how could it be self- authenticating? In the early church, all the church fathers agreed that God existed because God is self-evident. He self- authenticates his existence, you could say. But the early church fathers did not agree on what books belonged in the New Testament. They had serious doubts about second Peter, James, second and third John and Revelation. Revelation is not even in the canon list of Gregory of Nazanzis or serial of Jerusalem. So much for being self- authenticating. So where did Anthony get this infallible proposition about divine revelation? Look, if he's honest, he'll admit the reason he believes in the 27 books of the New Testament, the reason I think many people here believe that is because he and you and I trust Christians who came before us who said these books were scripture. And those Christians, trusted Christians before them, etc., etc., which shows infallible rules of faith can be transmitted in unwritten means apart from written means. And that in itself disproves soul of scriptorra, which says the only infallible rule of faith is the written word of scripture. All right. So, uh, we'll probably cover the canon a little bit later. I'd love to hear Anony's explanation of how he knows this infallible rule of faith outside of scripture is true.

Here's my second argument. The absence of solos scriptorra in scripture. All right. In order for Anony's position to be correct, not only does scripture have to tell us what scripture is for solos scriptorer to be true, you have to know what the scriptor is. Scripture has to tell us as the Westminster confession says that the whole council of God is found in human writings in a way that even the unlearned can understand its essential elements. But there is absolutely no scripture verse that says this. Instead, second Peter 3:16 says, "There are things in Paul's letters that are difficult to understand, which the unlearned and unstable misunderstand." It does not say that they maliciously distort scripture. It says, "Scripture in Paul's letters is so difficult to understand, the unlearned misunderstand its essential teachings, not just a tangental point." Because it says in 2 Peter 3:16, "They do this to their own destruction. Now, none of the scripture verses Anthony cited in his opening statement came anywhere close to establishing Westminster's definition of a self- authenticating, only infallible rule that's all sufficient, formally sufficient, and prospicuous in matters of essential doctrine. None of them came close. And I would encourage you, do not judge a debate on who cited scripture more than the other person. When studying the Bible, it is not about the quantity of verses. It is the quality of verses and more importantly of the argument that uses them one must pay attention to and I'll respond to more of those that he put forward in his opening in my rebuttal. But right now I'm just going to give a general reply to some commonly cited verses in defense of solos scriptor. So Jesus appealing to scripture to show Satan or the Pharisees that they were in error that doesn't prove soloscriptor. I appeal to scripture all the time to debate heretics but that doesn't mean that I believe in soloscriptor. So likewise, when Jesus told the Pharisees that their tradition about donating money to the temple was a tradition of men, that doesn't prove soul scriptor because Mark 7 and Matthew 15 never mentioned the word scripture. Jesus says the Pharisees contradicted the word of God. And what was the word of God? It was the orally proclaimed words that God spoke to Moses in Exodus 20. That's why the textual variants of Matthew 15:6 say, "You have made void the law of God or the commandment of God rather than the word of God." Because I said in scripture, the phrase word of God is never used to refer to a written document. A written document might record what God or Moses spoke, the word of God proceeding from their mouths, but it does not say this scroll or this writing is the word of God. Now, Luke's saying the Bereans search the scriptures daily to confirm Paul's message. That doesn't prove solar scriptor either. Luke says the Bereans were noble because they didn't riot against Paul like the Thessalonians, not because they only believed what was in scripture alone. They were noble because they searched the scriptures daily. They loved the scriptures and they were open to hearing from God's apostle. But they still had to trust Paul's new message as the word of God that they received. And we see in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul commends them for receiving his spoken words as the word of God, which shows the word of God is not confined only to the scriptures. And so solos scriptorra is false. Other verses that are cited, St. Paul telling the Corinthians, Anthony obliquely referenced this verse, telling the Corinthians to not go beyond what is written in 1 Corinthians 4:6. Uh, you know, don't go beyond what is written. That is an incredibly vague verse. Uh, if you took it literally, if the Corinthians took 1 Corinthians 4:6 literally, don't go beyond what is written. Well, they'd have to throw away 2 Corinthians because you can't go beyond what has been written to them. Once again, the problem of solos scriptorra not being true during apostolic times. And in my third argument, you'll see how that becomes a problem for Anony's position. And scholars aren't even sure what that verse means. Prior refers to Paul saying that the the Corinthians should imitate him in the same way that children trace letters uh in order to imitate that which they are learning and Paul calls himself a father to the Corinthians that would make use of his analogy very well. Finally, we have 2 Timothy 3:16 is a very common one uh to cite scripture the claim that you know all scripture is inspired. Yeah, it does use the word theoponta that scripture is inspired. But as the Baptist scholar Lee Martin McDonald writes, there is no evidence that the early church confined inspiration to an already past apostolic age or even to a collection of sacred writings. In the early church, the writings of church fathers, ecumenical councils, even epitaps were called theopatoas. Okay, so they were called that. But that doesn't mean that word then entails something as an infallible rule of faith. That's an assumption that's being made later, not what the authors are speaking at that time. Moreover, 2 Timothy 3:16 that we often render all scripture is inspired. There's a genuine translation issue here in pas graphos. It can be translated every scripture is inspired. Now, if that means every scripture gives spiritual life, so it is helpful. As Paul says, the Greek word aelamos, it's helpful. I agree. All scripture is helpful in giving believers spiritual life and teaching them what God wants them to know. But it does not follow then that scripture, every scripture is inspired and that every scripture is an infallible completely sufficient rule of faith. That can't be true of every scripture. If it were, that means that all you need was the letter of Filon or the epistle to the Hebrews. We certainly don't uh, we certainly don't need that. We need everything that God has revealed in his word. But we must not operate with the assumption that the word of God is restricted to the written word alone. Because in the time of the prophets and the time of the apostles, the word of God was both unwritten and written. And it's Anony's burden tonight to prove it was eventually restricted to the written word alone. He can't just assume that. So he needs to prove it. And that gets me to my third argument. The early Christians did not believe in solos scriptorer. Okay? So scripture had to become if it was not true as James White says, if solos scriptoral was not true during the time the New Testament was being written, it had to become true or normative at a later time. But where is the evidence for that? Here is my argument. If solos scriptor were true, it would be binding upon God's people. Soloscriptor was never binding upon God's people. Therefore, soloscriptor is false. So how could we know? Anthony needs to prove that an unwritten and written word of God would eventually be consolidated only to the written word of God. So we'd have to look backwards or forwards. We could look in the New Testament maybe the apostles or Jesus said this would happen in the future. They don't say that. In fact Jesus far from teaching solos of scriptor during his earthly ministry. Jesus never told anyone to write Jesus never told anyone to write anything down at all in his earthly ministry. Think about that for a minute. The apostles never say in their writings that scripture would become the only infallible rule of faith and that the whole council of God would be found there. Instead, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:15, the church of the living God is the pillar and foundation of truth. So, nothing pointing forwards. Well, maybe the early Christians can say, "We received this from the apostles and we live by the written word of God alone." They look backwards. We don't find that either. Ignatius of Antioch in AD107 never cites the New Testament as scripture. But he tells his audience to follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the father. Clement of Rome in the first century did not call the New Testament scripture or the word of God. But he said in the first century the apostles chose successors to carry on their work. In fact, the apostles creed, the ear, one of the earliest creeds in the church's history mentions the holy Catholic Church but not scripture. According to then renowned Lutheran scholar Yaslav Pelican in the antyine church pyene church there was no notion of solos scriptor let's see here all right so we have no evidence then that solos scriptorera uh began during this early period uh do we have no evidence the first century no church fathers in the second century I would love to hear Anthony maybe in his rebuttal period he could say oh here's some church fathers who said it happened in the in the second century uh maybe he'll site Irenaeus saying we've learned from none others the plan of our salvation than those through whom the gospels come down to us. Right? We've learned from none other than the apostles. But Irenaeus is very clear that God's revelation is not confined to the written word alone. Because in the next chapter after that verse says to heretics, we refer them to that tradition which originates from the apostles which is preserved by means of the succession of prespits in the churches. Irenaeus condemned heretics saying they believe in neither scripture or tradition. In fact, that's why Irenaeus says in the second century, how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down? So, if solos scriptor did not start in the second century, which we know is the case because no early Christian in this period lived under a rule like soloscriptor, then solos scriptor never started at all. And so, it's not a doctrine that comes from God. It's a doctrine that comes from a man-made tradition. Now Anthony might cite later uh church fathers St. St. Augustine Athanasius where they talk about scripture being sufficient and they praise scripture. I do believe I do not I will not mention bad or dumb things Protestants have said in the past even though Anthony has chosen to mention bad or dumb things that Catholics have said in the past. Uh I believe as scripture it is the word of God. It it is the lamp unto my life. I love the word of God. When I converted and became Christian in high school, I read Acts's testimony about Saul's conversion over and over and over again. But I was also like the Ethiopian unic in Acts 8 that Philip comes up to him and he says, "How you know how I don't understand what I'm reading?" Well, how can I understand it unless someone shows me? All right. So, moving on. Oh, and if he does cite Augustine and Athanasius, I think that's that would be very humorous, by the way, to say, "Oh, these these men in the early church followed Soloscriptor." Did they St. Augustine who said that after death believers undergo pennet purgatoria that's where we get the word purgatory from. Augustine who said he would not attribute sins to the blessed virgin Mary uh who believed Augustine himself who said I would not believe you know Anthony made a a big deal about Catholics saying they won't believe in the Bible without the church. Well Augustine said uh I would not believe in the gospels if I was not first moved by the ca the authority of the Catholic church. All right. So, to pull everything together, Protestant apologists love to pepper Catholics with questions like, "Where is the pope in the Bible? Where's the mask in the Bible? Read my book, Case for Catholicism, to find out." So, but they demand Catholics prove all their doctrines according to a man-made tradition of solos scriptor Torah. Fine. Well, I demand that Anthony prove his doctrine by his own standard. So, here are my questions. Where does the Bible say a 66 book collection of writings are an infallible rule of faith? Where does it say anonymous writings like Hebrews or something like Mark which is not written by an apostle or cited by the

apostles is inspired scripture? Where does the Bible say everything God wants us to believe is found in scripture? Where does the Bible say all public revelation would cease at some point in the future? That's a fun debate with your cessationist friends or continuationists. We might have a little bit of a disagreement right here in a theological rumble later over that. Where does the Bible say all divine revelation would one day be confined to the written word? And where did the early Christians in the first 300 years of church history say divine revelation once existed in the unwritten form and written forms, but now it's contained in the scriptures alone to be the only infallible rule of faith. I think you'll see that Anony's inability to answer these questions will show that solos scriptor is false. So, thank you very much. Thank you guys for the opening statements. Before we go into the rebuttal, I just want to announce there is no recording of these debates should be taking place. Um, I got eyes and ears everywhere, even on Tik Tok, even on YouTube. So, stop, please. Don't be disrespectful. Uh, do not record any of the content here. I will get security and escort you out if I find you. Um, now we have rebuttal rounds. Anthony, you're up for your 15-minute rebuttal.

Thank you, Trent. Well, I want to roundly agree with one thing that Trent said just a moment ago. Trent said, quote, "Catholics have said some pretty dumb things." That's true. >> Notably though, the person that I quoted was Cardinal Stannis Lazosius, an attendee of the Council of Trent, that council that anathematized Protestants for believing that scripture is God's self-sufficient word that is sufficient to communicate to us life and salvation. Trent has said on uh even in this debate, scripture is not self- authenticating. He's he's echoing Stannislaw's Hosius though he doesn't put it as colorfully as Hosius did. Remember that's the guy who said that scripture is as authoritative less or without authority as fables without the Catholic Church. That's one of the members of the Council of Trent that gave them their doctrine of scripture. Yes, Catholics have said some pretty dumb things. Catholic bishops who gave them their theology. He said scripture is not self- authenticating. He said, "Anthony didn't give any evidence for this." Well, that's one fine way to try and refute somebody. Just pretend they didn't give you an argument. I repeatedly gave you arguments. The God of scripture is self-contained. He speaks with self-attesting authority. When God spoke to Moses, Moses didn't say, "How do I know this is your word? Where's the Pope to tell me?" He didn't say, "Oh, God, I I can't possibly know this unless I have the Pope's imper." Moses heard the voice of God. If your mother calls you on the phone, do you have to farm out the question to somebody else? How do I know that's my mother on the phone? This is the God of the universe. You don't think he can speak to his creatures in such a way that his word gets through to them? And the fact of the matter is, if the word does not get through, there's not any problem in that word. There's a problem in the individual. Of course, a blind man can't see it. Do Am I supposed to put out my own eyes because a blind man can't see it? He can't hear this word. Am I supposed to stab my ears because somebody else can't hear it? I hear the voice of my savior in these words. I don't need a pope to tell me, especially when that pope is going to tell me that scripture says something different. That's the whole goal here. Yes, scripture is self- authenticating. It's light. Your word is light. A lamp to my feet, a light to my path. Paul says explicitly in Ephesians 5, light manifests itself. Well, if light manifests itself and God's word is light, then it manifests itself. Don't tell me I didn't prove that from scripture. Jesus said to Pilate, he said, "Those who are of the truth hear my voice. They hear my voice." His word is self- authenticating. In John 8, I pointed out that Jesus said, "This is my testimony." They say, "Oh, it's not true. It's not true." It's not self- authenticating. Jesus said, "Well, then you don't belong to us. You don't know the father. You don't know me." This is the true magisterium you must listen to. Don't sell your soul and your brain to somebody else. He he says that scripture doesn't teach, it seems to me, I might have misunderstood this, maybe I'm thinking of a past debate, but it seemed to me like he was suggesting that scripture doesn't teach its own inspiration and inherency. the the the statements about 2 Timothy 3 which I didn't bring up I don't think uh he mentioned that it you know it's lifegiving you know instead of saying inspired but by the way the the Latin Vulgate says inspired and according to the council of Trent that's the authentic version that's to be used in public disputations this is a public disputation so it is inspired but that isn't the verse I appeal to there are numerous texts that say these words are from God that's what it means to be inspired they proceed from God God gave this word and we are to therefore listen to it, hearken to it. Why would anybody want to do otherwise? There's no win here. There's no win going to somebody else and listening to what they say when you have the words of the living God. He said scriptur is not materially sufficient. Anthony can't just assert this and these sorts of things by lens. What was I doing up here? All of this is just ignoring what I said. Perhaps it was so that he didn't have to give an answer so that I don't get another chance to respond to him. He gets another rebuttal after this. I don't get an opportunity to respond to that. But let me remind you so that if he repeats this again, you know it's not true. Scriptur is not materially sufficient. How many passages did I cite to show this? John tells us that he wrote so that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ and believing you have life in his name. You can have life in his name because of the word that John gave us. And if that word's sufficient, how much more the rest of scripture? Of course, scripture is sufficient. It's sufficient at every stage at which God gives it. When God gave the law to Moses, it was sufficient for the people of God. Sure, there was going to be additional revelation, additional revelation that would be inscripturated. But at every stage, it was sufficient. Moses said, "This word is your life. It's not an idol word. You're to live by this word." He was told to write it down so that people would know it. This word is sufficient to give you life. Don't hear somebody telling you otherwise. Don't hear somebody else saying, "Has God said?" This is the what got us into this whole mess. Scripture is materially sufficient. Peter tells us that in it, we have all that we need for life and godliness. Hos uh Micah says, "He's shown you, oh man, what you must do. You don't know what to do. You don't know how to live before God. He has shown you. He has shown you. You have it in the scriptures." Paul told Timothy, "You have known from infancy the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation." Wise for sal is that not sufficient at least for life salvation. So everything for life in godliness, for conversion, scripture converts the soul. Yes, I indeed prove the material sufficiency of scripture. As for formal sufficiency, Trent said a number of things about how people disagree over the word of God. Nothing about the claim that scripture is objectively clear is undermined by the fact that some people do not acknowledge what it says for one reason or another. Scripture is full of explanations for this. There are all kinds of reasons why people come to different conclusions. But I'll give you the major overarching theoretical reason, the principal reason why people come to different interpretations. It's because people aren't really going by solar scriptor. Look at the the sects and the cults that litter the landscapes. The Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Criselians, the other Unitarians that were here. They all hearken to the voice of others. They all listen to other voices telling them what this word says. My favorite judge on television always says, "Am I supposed to believe you or my lying eyes?" When she's looking at the objective evidence and somebody's telling her otherwise, she's that's the question. Are we supposed to believe somebody else when they say Jesus is not God, the Trinity is not true? Are we supposed to believe what God says in his word? Yeah. When Roman Catholics say the scriptur is not formally sufficient, he brought up issues like the question of the subjects of baptism, infants or adults only and so forth, but he didn't really tell you the real things that they start objecting to. They will tell you that the trinity is not clear in scripture. I have a litany of quotes from Catholic scholars, including Catholic Answers people, who have said the Trinity is not clearly in scripture. The true God is not clearly revealed as triune in scripture. I'll debate somebody any day of the week on that. I have, in fact, of course, these things are taught in scripture. There are all kinds of reasons why people fail to believe what scripture says. And sometimes it can be true even of people who are uh Christians, good faith, we have to grow. and there's all kinds of stuff that has to happen. Well, he he said that uh scripture is not the norm and regulator of faith and practice and so forth because after all uh different things were being taught orally and then things were coming along later. I already anticipated this in my opening statement. That's why I hope you carry this forward when you're listening to his rebuttal. I pointed out that God's modus operandi in scripture is to put forth his word, put it into the mouths of his prophets who preached it and then command them to commit it to writing. Trent, by the way, says Jesus never commanded his apostles to write. Go read the book of Revelation. Write. How many times does it appear there? Yes, Jesus commanded his apostles to write. And by the way, do you think that they're a bunch of rogue individuals? They're the apostles of Christ. Were they out there? I got this fancy idea that I'm going to put these things down in writing. Hopefully, the Lord will be pleased with this. Is that the kind of apostles that Jesus raised up and sent? Of course, they wrote scripture. Then they certainly must have done so at the impulse of God's spirit. And that's exactly what scripture says. The apostles say this. They spoke by the spirit. Paul says the what I'm writing to you is the Lord's commandment. So, is Paul violating uh no command of Christ or something like that when he writes the Lord's commandment? These are absurdities, I think. He points out that the apostles talk about oral tradition. I already anticipated that. There's no question. But the apostles, first of all, always preached from the scriptures. I quoted Acts 8, Acts 17, Acts 26. Tread said that, for example, I mean, some of these things just honestly astound me. He said in Acts 17, what Paul's commending them for is not because they're going by scripture alone, but because they didn't riot. Where does it say that in the text? It doesn't say that anywhere in the text. Here's what the text says. These were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. That's what the text says. But guess what happened? You heard somebody add something to the text. I don't know if that's from the magisterium or not, but that's what happens when you don't go by scripture alone. And by the way, even Christians who are committed to the principle of scripture alone can do that inadvertently. That's another reason why people can come up with some different interpretations. Well, he said, uh, my argument was unclear. Well, the only thing was unclear is apparently what Trent heard from me. I made very clear what I believe. Scripture is the self- authenticating word of God. It is inspired, inherent, sufficient, materially, and formally, and it is the sole norm and regulator of Christian faith and practice. He points out, well, there's somebody else that has a different definition. Okay, debate that that person. I'm debating today and I've given arguments and I want something better than simply, oh, he he didn't uh say this, he didn't say that when I did say it. Uh he says the the the word of God is never used to refer to scripture. I find this astounding too. He says that Jesus in Matthew 15 when he undermines the Pharisees, the religious leaders appeal to their traditions, he says Jesus isn't quoting scripture here as the word of God. He he says there's even a textual variant here. First of all, the textual variant is not preferred by scholars. That's just sort of a red herring. But secondly, I mean, he says it's he's quoting the oral uh law that was given by God, the Ten Commandments. I don't think he read the text very well. Here's what it says in verse four. God said, "Honor your father and mother." That's the Ten Commandments. And he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death. That wasn't put on the tablets. That is part of written scripture alone. That's how it's come down to us. And it is this that Jesus calls the word of God. You say, "Whoever says to his father or mother, whatever I have that would be help uh you uh has been given by God. He's not to honor father and mother. By this you invalidate the word of God for the sake of your tradition." Yes, it does refer to written scripture. The same thing is true in John 10. Jesus said, "It's written in your law. I said you are gods. If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, do you say of him whom the father sanctified and said into the world, I'm blaspheing?" He calls the scriptures the word of God right there explicitly. This is found all over the place. You could only possibly miss it if you've got the Pope's glasses on. If the Pope is interposing himself between you and your God, don't let somebody do this. The living God deserves to be heard. He's the only one, the ultimate one that deserves to be heard. Listen to him. There's no statement listen to somebody else in the ultimate sense. He says a number of things uh as well questions. I'm happy to address these things in cross-examination. That's the proper place to deal with them. He asks questions about the canon of scripture. Uh the alleged absence of solos scriptor in scripture. This just begs the question by the way. His three arguments. He says uh you need to define scripture. We could deal with that in the cross- examination. How do we know the 66 books? Happy to do it. I in fact I wanted to debate his colleague before this Joe Heshmire on the canon. something happened with that debate. I'll leave it at that. But he says there's an absence of solos scriptor in scripture only if you ignore all the arguments I gave. He said the early Christians did not believe in solos scriptor. Well, let's assume for a second that it's it's the case. What does Paul say in scripture? He says, "Let God be true even if it makes every man a liar." That's the proper response of a Christian. Now, I'm not conceding that the early fathers, lock, stock, and barrel held to some uh other authority outside of scripture that was equal to or superior than it. But uh nevertheless, it's simply a fact. If solos scriptor is true, then it's true because of the standard of scripture, not because of some other standard. That just begs the question against solos scriptorera. But I happen to believe the early fathers did believe in soloscriptor. We could talk about that. uh he said uh and in fact I'll mention one he mentioned Irenaeus says uh if the apostles had not left us anything in writing wouldn't it be necessary to go to the churches the apostolic churches no notice I mean he's saying go to the apostolic churches for the truth first of all I think the churches were preaching the truth I don't have any problem with that but notice what Irenaeus says it's a conditional what would it be what would we have to do if it had been the case that God had not left us writings If it had been the case, good news, folks. It is not the case. God has spoken. God has given us his word. God's word is self- authenticating. God's word is inspired. God's word is inherent. God's word is sufficient for life and godliness. Believe this word. Don't let anybody get you off of this word. Again, as I said, that's what got the whole human race into this predicament. There would be no pope or controversy even between Protestants and Catholics if somebody had not said at one point has God said and if that person was not insinuating that you you can't believe truth and falsehood unless it's verified by me. The true and living God speaks to his creatures. He speaks clearly. He is to be hearkened to and obeyed. And remember what Jesus said talking about the self- authenticating nature of scripture. He who is of the truth hears my voice. If somebody doesn't hear that voice, they are not of the truth. Thank you for that. We now have 15minute rebuttal from Tren Horn.

Well, this is fun, isn't it? All right, let's uh let's address Anthony brought up a lot of points and I will do my best to address all of them. Notice a consistent pattern in his presentation that he will attribute to me a position that I denigrate the word of God or I don't trust the word of God. We are not debating the fa the trustworthiness of the word of God. We are debating whether the word of God is confined to the written word alone. Even appealing back to Genesis, the book of Genesis, uh, has God said, and we don't trust God. What does that have to do with soul scriptor? It's not like God wrote that down on a piece of paper for Adam and Eve to read. He spoke it to them because the spoken word of God, the unwritten word of God has the same binding power as the written word of God. And that's what we see through the Old Testament and the New Testament and in the early church fathers. Anthony has the burden of showing that's not the case. And he certainly hasn't done that. So, I'm going to go back through, we'll go through, remember my three arguments. My first argument was dealing with the canon of scripture. Uh, the problem of defining scripture, which I think is the most fatal flaw in this entire argument to say that you're going to believe in scripture alone, but how do we know what is and isn't scripture? That is a huge problem. And I think it's very unfortunate that Anthony is choosing to wait to address my first and most important argument for cross-examination when that should be dealt with in the rebuttal period, which is what that is for. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. The 66 books in the Protestant Bible are the sole infallible rule of faith of the church. That's an infallible rule of faith. Where is that in scripture? It's not in scripture anywhere. God would, if God wants to reveal it to us, if scripture has the whole council of God, something like that would be in there. Or at the very least, you know what scripture would say? Here's how you can know what human writings are scripture and are not scripture. Scripture doesn't say that. Scripture is self- authenticating. That's how you know. Does scripture say that? No. Anthony has had to pull that from different verses where people can identify not scripture, but when God speaks to them. Moses knew it was God because the bush was on fire and it's not being consumed. Jesus's spoken words could be heard by his sheep. There's nothing here about scripture. But Anthony is importing it to others. In fact, it's it's incredibly ironic, by the way. His main objection to say, well, the this cannon is scripture. It's inspired scripture because it says so. This circular argument, I feel like I'm not debating Anthony. I feel like I'm debating Jake, our Muslim debater who is here with us. Though, even Jake and I were talking before this. He said, "Well, we believe in the Quran, not just the Quran alone. We understand the Islamic tradition." And even he says I don't see how soul scriptural will you know get off the ground in that respect. But this idea this circular reasoning well, it's inspired because it says so that's what people will defend the Quran they'll defend the book of Mormon. Uh, that is a huge problem. Why these books and the fact that it's self- authenticating? I also remember I gave an argument not just a undercutting defeater. I gave a reason to doubt that scripture is self- authenticating in the way that Anthony thinks it's self- authenticating because as I said in the early church if scripture were self- authenticating how come there were doubts about many of the books of scripture how come books like Revelation don't appear in some canon lists you even have Martin Luther threatening to throw the letter of James into a fire because he believes it's not really the writings of an apostle. He didn't end up going that far, but he had very many serious doubts about that and even other New Testament books. That really cuts against the claim itself authenticating. As I said before, the early church universally recognized Jesus is the Messiah. God exists. God is triune. So, we can see there's things that are self-evident, but the canon of scripture was certainly not self-evident for them and it would not become coalesced until we have the councils of Carthage and Hippo in the 4th century. So I think here so I would say that uh my argument from the problem of defining scripture that still stands solos script Torah absolutely cannot get off the ground if you have an infallible rule of faith that defines what the canon is or you could say well you know the canon could be wrong it's fallible uh if you want to go that route then you're going to have people who could deny Hebrews because it's not it's anonymous who deny Mark because it's not written by an apostle or cited by apostles I don't think you want to go down that road few other points were brought though I do have a few things that he said here. Uh when Jesus never told anybody to write anything down, I spoke very clearly. I had the qualifier during his earthly ministry. I'm well aware in Revelation where Jesus says to write these down. That's why I qualified. It said during his earthly ministry. He didn't tell anyone to write anything down which should be somewhat problematic if you believe in solos scriptor. When it comes to Irenaeus, did I believe in solos scriptor? Well, if he did, why in against heresies 3.3.3 in that section of against heresies does say it is the duty of every church to agree not with scripture but with the church of Rome which is the most preeminent and ancient of the churches. kind of odd for someone who believes in solos scriptor to say this is a standard you all need to agree with and which further underscores my third argument which is that uh the early Christians people didn't they didn't practice solos scriptorera and I didn't see any rebuttal here any proof from we didn't see any citations from church fathers from early Christians uh maybe we'll have to deal with that in cross-examination I'm not sure but that should really startle you right like if this was if God the whole council of God. And by the way, he brought up the point about material sufficiency of scripture. I don't deny that scripture is materially sufficient. Scripture has everything it needs for me to do theology in the same way Home Depot has everything I need to build a house. But if I tried to build a house or everything at Home Depot, you'd probably die in a fire trap very quickly because I don't know what I'm doing when I try to put all of it together. And the same is said of scripture. It has everything we need to believe. You can believe that as a Catholic, which by the way, this is not a Catholic Protestant debate. Anyone up here could be poking holes and see there's a problem with this doctrine, but you need to know how to put all of it together. Speaking of Irenaeus, by the way, Irenaeus when he said about heretics, he used a very interesting illustration against heresies. Anony's been saying, well, you need solura because the heretics, they always want to go beyond scripture. That's how we know that they're heretics. No, you want to know what heretics do? They twist scripture. How many times have you talked to a Jehovah's Witness at your door and all they did was really tried to turn scripture into a pretzel? Think about the debate on the Trinity and and Unitarianism of God that you saw here earlier. What was going on? One person was expounding scripture correctly, which I know it might be ironic for me to say that about James. Why? Because we've clashed in the past, but James has got good stuff on the Trinity. I love it. I got the I got the forgotten trinity. I should have brought it with him and signed it, too. So, I got to find James later. And the other person was twisting scripture. So, says it against heresies that the heretics that what they do is like how you could have a mosaic like a different colored stones and let's say it makes the image of a king a handsome king just as a vandal takes these stones and rearranges them to look like a fox instead of the king heretics take the words of scripture and rearrange them to mean something different that's always been the essence of heresy is to take the scriptures and say well it actually means this why St. Jerome in his letter to the Luciferians he said the essence of scripture is not the letter but the meaning and that is the problem when you say scripture interprets scripture a book cannot interpret itself especially when that book was written within the context of an apostolic community to be able to give meaning to it and then when the apostles die we see as I cited in my opening statement the early Christians did not say oh we just follow the Bible they did not have a concept of the Bible. They were still discerning what is and isn't scripture, but they knew follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the father. Ignatius 107. James was quite happy to, you know, he's quite happy to quote how someone like Ignatius of Antioch received the apostolic truth that Jesus is God. Amen. But then Ignatius didn't receive the other truth that's being defended here tonight. That soul of Scriptor is true. Scripture is the only infallible, allsufficient, completely prospicuous rule of faith. He didn't receive that. He said to people, if you want the truth, follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the father. Do nothing apart from him. Let's see, we had other things here. Yeah. The the other examples that are given, he said the apostles only preached that which was in scripture. Really? Where's the evidence for that? In second Thessalonians chapter 2, Paul talks about the Thessalonians. He says by word of mouth or by letter. And he says to them in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, do you not remember what I told you about who is restraining the man of lawlessness from acting? Now go to a Bible commentary and you'll find something interesting interesting in 2 Thessalonians 2. Bible scholars don't know what Paul is referring to. There's six or seven candidates for the power or force that is restraining the man of lawlessness. Maybe it's the Roman Empire. Maybe it's angelic power. We we don't know. He told the Thessalonians that, but he didn't write it down for the rest of us. He just reminded them that he told them that. So it is not true that the apostles only preach what was in scripture or that scripture contains everything that they preached or all of revelation was confined to the written word. It doesn't say anything like that. Um, other things he said that I'm wrong about saying that scripture does not call itself the word of God. The things that he referenced are not be are not references to the word of God. John chapter 10 when Jesus says he's talking about the word of God came to them. That's a reference back to Psalm 82, which is a reference, and there's different ways of interpreting what's going on in Psalm 82. Is it God speaking to the judges of Israel? Or the more common interpretation that this is about God and the divine council speaking to the angelic hosts. So all Jes Jesus doesn't comment on who it is. He just says when the word of God came to them, he said, "Ye are gods." The word of God was not a scripture. God didn't give them he didn't give the divine counsel or the judges uh a written text. He spoke to them just like when we see in all the Old Testament, the word of God came to this prophet. The word of the Lord came to him. It was spoken orally. There's no reference here to scripture being the word of God. It just says that scripture records the word of God being given. So, we have a lot of assumptions here. We have a lot of assumptions, but we don't have an argument to prove these very these really important points that scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. That the whole council of God, everything necessary for faith in life. See, I thought there was a little bait and switch here, too, because he was going on and on about material sufficiency. We we can agree on that. Uh, he has to prove formal sufficiency. Not just that scripture has everything we need to believe, but that scripture is prospicuous about the whole council of God. Everything for faith and life is in scripture and that the learned and unlearned can access it through ordinary means as the Westminster confession says. But if that's true, whole council of God, faith and life, doesn't God want us to know if election is conditional or unconditional? Debate we had right before this. Doesn't God want us to know whether the ordinary means. He was downplaying infant baptism. But I think it's a really big question which also it's not just about Presbyterians and Baptists. What about Lutherans and Anglicans who say that through baptism a baby is spiritually regenerated and that takes away original sin. So the ordinary means of getting your baby to heaven is baptizing him. That's really important. That would fall under something essential for salvation and the Protestant community is hopelessly divided on that. What about the Eucharist? Is it just a memorial or is it uh as Lutheran would say Christ is not is sacramental union? The bread and wine are Jesus is in the bread and wine. So much so that receiving the bread and wine takes away sin. the the reformers uh at Marberg could not could not uh Luther really wanted Zwingley to come around on that but they couldn't. So I get really concerned about this particular defense of solos scriptorra which says which I I appreciate by the way a lot of protestants will say well scriptur is just the one infallible rule of faith it's a very narrow definition when you're under attack it's nice to have a narrow target and then you go living your life under soul scriptural with a wide target the whole council of god all sufficient pspicuous that's okay well I'm glad that he is defending the wider target and I appreciate that but then that really does lead to a problem to explain If it is perspicuous and it's clear, especially on these really important issues, why do people not get it? And the answer seems to be, if you don't get it, if you don't agree with the Presbyterian Church of America on important doctrines, you must be spiritually blind. I don't think you're spiritually blind. I think you may have made a mistake. I think all of us when we do theology, it's easy to misunderstand things. I know that. I know it's easy to misunderstand scripture because Peter tells us that in second Peter 3:16. There are things in Paul's letters difficult to understand which uh those who are unggrounded uh misunderstand to their own destruction. Uh, let's see here we have uh the but you'll notice a lot of the things that he said it's not talking about solos scriptor it's very lofty praise Moses received living oracles right god spoke to him it's not a written word I of course believe that scripture is the written word of god but he has the burden of proving it's only that and he can't do that see I have anything else oh about self- authentication well Jesus authenticated he was self- authenticating Actually, what did Jesus say in John 10:28? Even though you do not believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I in the Father. Jesus didn't expect people just to take his word for it. He proved it. A lot of times people ask me when they give me grief about the Old Testament. They'll say, "How can you believe in a God who slaughtered children, who drowned the world, who did all of these awful things and an atheist?" This is, by the way, free apologetic tip for everybody here because we can agree on this one. They'll give you, you know, how do you answer that in 30 seconds, right? here all these bad things in the Old Testament. How do you believe that? And I tell them, hey, look, I may not understand all that, but Jesus believed in it, and I'm going to trust a guy who walked out of his own grave. So, that's good enough for me. So, Jesus authenticated himself through his works. He said, "If you don't believe me, at least believe the works." And much the same way though, scripture does not try to authenticate itself. The words of scripture, they do not say that they authenticate themselves in this way. The early Christians, which I would really challenge Anthony, maybe we'll get into that here in cross, I don't know, but they clung to the church Christ established, the church that Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against to guide believers and that they would not be left orphans with just a written document, but with a church to be able to explain its meaning and bring all people in salvation to Jesus Christ. So, thank you very much.

All right, thank you guys for those opening your rebuttals or so now we're about to jump into the cross- examination portion of this debate. Um, and it'll be 15 minutes each for each party uh in the cross- examination to ask questions. Uh, please remember that the 20-minute Q&A is right after the cross- examination. So, if you have yet to get your question in, get it in because I'll be collecting the questions here soon. So, uh, let's get into it. All right, doc. Uh about to call you Dr. Anthony Rogers. >> I'll take that. >> Yeah, take it. Anthony Rogers, you're up first for your 15-minute cross- examination. Turn horn.

Okay, I get to start. >> This is >> I'll start I'll start your time as soon as you ask your first question. >> Ready? >> Okay. Uh a moment ago, Trent, you said you don't deny that scripture is materially sufficient. Correct. We can agree on that. Uh, yeah, I I we can say that it's it's a position that's a valid one that can be held that scripture contains everything we need for salvation, either an explicit or an implicit form, >> including the canon of scripture. >> That it oh that it's materially there. >> Yeah. >> Well, I don't think you necessarily need to have the canon of scripture for salvation if you have a universal and living magisterium that teaches you what you need to know to be saved. So, so you're ret restricting material sufficiency to salvation. Is that the qualification? >> Uh, yeah, that would be um I think that's one way to be able to put it. There's different positions that are held on material sufficiency. >> So, you don't hold that scripture is materially sufficient with respect to other doctrines of the faith? >> Well, no. I don't think I don't think every single doctrine of the faith uh is going to be found in scripture. For example, one doctrine of the faith is that the council of Nika was a legitimate ecumenical council and so we ought to believe the nyine creed and that certainly is not in scripture. >> Well, yeah, that assumes Catholicism. Of course, I don't think that's a doctrine of the faith. >> I hope I hope you believe the nine creed. >> Yeah, I I accept the nine creed, but there's nothing about the acceptance of that that makes the acceptance of it a doctrine. But, uh, so you would say scripture is not really materially sufficient just just with respect to salvation. very limited scope, not that wide scope kind of thing that I was doing earlier. >> Yeah, I could I it's a position that could be held. I'm not necessarily committing to something for the purpose of this cross- examination. What I believe about scripture is irrelevant to the resolution of the debate, which is that scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. >> But but you're making arguments against the sufficiency of scripture >> assumes a position. So what I'm trying to get at is what do you mean by material? is if I'm going to have to respond to your objections, then I need to know what it is you're conceding when you say material sufficiency and what it is you're not conceding. >> Yeah. One can hold that what is necessary to believe for salvation uh is found either explicitly or implicitly in scripture. You don't have to believe in order to be saved, you don't have to believe um you know that u certain you know he Well, I guess I guess that um >> I'll let you continue. Yeah. Yeah. I should ask you. So I I'm just thinking, you know, when you said it, and I've heard you say it in the past, it just seemed to me like you were conceding material sufficiency of scripture. What reformed people mean, but what you deny is formal sufficiency. Absolutely. And the reason that >> Yeah. I don't think scripture interprets scripture. I I deny that. >> Well, we'll get to that. But this is the reason I have a problem with all that is because you kept saying things that assume scriptur is not materially sufficient. Doesn't tell us what's restraining the man of lawlessness. doesn't tell us the cannon of scripture. >> I don't think you have to I don't think you have to know who was restraining the man of lawlessness to be saved. >> I I don't think that either, but I didn't realize you seriously attenuate what you mean by material sufficiency. I think the fathers clearly meant more than simply that it contains what we need to know for salvation. It contains all the doctrines of the faith. Okay. But but uh you said the problem with JWS and groups like that is not that they uh you know have something else besides scripture, but they twist scripture. Why do they twist scripture? And how do they twist scripture? >> Well, they get it wrong. >> Yeah. But what is it? What is it operative? What's operative in their activity of misinterpreting the scriptures? >> They make either a cognitive or a moral error depending on the person who is reading the text and they don't arrive at its true meaning. >> And and what's the source of that cognitive error? I I think you know the answer. >> Uh it would be the knowetic effects of sin. In other words, sin makes us stupid. the the the answer is they hold to the primacy of the Watchtower Bible and track society. >> They don't they don't believe the Watchtower is infallible though. >> They certainly believe the Watchtower Watchtower is authoritative. They believe they believe it's authoritative just like Protestants believe that their creeds and confessional histories are authoritative. >> They believe the Watchtower Bible and track society is moved by God's spirit. They're the anointed class. That's built into their doctrine. But in any case, >> they have to say they they can't say it's infallible. That's their way to get around all the time the Watchtower has been wrong about the about the world ending. >> Okay. So you don't think the doctrine of solar scripture >> I've had to deal with them a lot. So >> you don't think the doctrine of solar scriptor is taught in the fathers right? >> I I don't believe that the fathers uh I don't believe my argument was that the church did not operate under soloscriptor as a binding rule of faith. It is possible that there were some Christians who held to that error. But I'm saying that Christians did not operate under this rule. It was not binding. The fathers would be a witness for us to know how Christians operated, what their authority was during that time. >> Okay. So, uh, in this book, I'm sure you're familiar with it. You had him on your show. This is Casey Chalk's book, The Obscurity of Scripture. Here's what Casey Chalk says, no friend of the Reformation. He's writing as a Roman Catholic. He says, Luther's theory, remember what Trent just said a moment ago, Luther's theory that the clearer verses will interpret the obscure ones. Scripture interprets scripture had ancient pedigree. The Augustinian monk Luther could find validation for this thesis in none other than the inspiration for his religious order, St. Augustine. According to Chalk, early fathers like Augustine most certainly did believe that scripture interprets scripture. So what is your response to that? Yeah, I do not believe uh I agree with you that the early Christians didn't just only listen to what the church said to follow for doctrine. They were deeply steeped in scripture. Which is why we can believe for example that Augustine who was deeply steeped in scripture that his beliefs in purgatory, the sinlessness of Mary, prepary sacrifice of the mass are certainly biblical. But he did believe that there were scriptures that can interpret other scriptures. But it's the idea that it's all you need is scripture. He certainly didn't believe that. For example, in one part, Augustine says about that Adam was saved because the church celebrates the feast day of Adam and Eve, Staint Adam and Eve that they're in heaven. These there are things like this as we believe from whatever source it was handed down to the church. Although the authority of the canonical scriptures cannot be brought forward as speaking expressly in its support. >> Okay. So you ranged beyond the issue that I'm zeroing in on which is the issue of >> I agree with you. >> Yeah. Scripture interprets scripture >> in some cases. Yes. Well, does we don't we can't rely for everything. >> Does Augustine whether he's consistent with himself and I'm sure you could bring up examples of him just like anybody else being inconsistent. Did Augustine actually teach that scripture interprets scripture not just an isolated passage here or there but as as a rule scripture interprets itself? >> No. If you put the phrase bluntly, scripture interprets scripture in the sense that there are passages we may not know, understand, there's other passages that illuminate them. That is true. But if you take the wider view when you say scripture interprets scripture so that scripture is the only rule of faith we need to understand scripture. We don't need any other authority beyond scripture to properly understand it. Then I would say no. The fathers did not believe that. In fact, there's an evangelical scholar Keith Ward. Uh he says, uh, sorry, Timothy Ward. He says, "In general, the fathers assert the material sufficiency of scripture but deny its formal sufficiency." >> Now, I I could easily quote a litany of Catholic scholars saying that in fact the fathers did. But my point >> but they still understood that the church had infallible authority. It was another authority. You had Ambrose said that you cannot flee from the rule of faith that's been given at Nika for example. >> That that doesn't prove that the magisterium is infallible. >> Yeah. It it says that this this is our ancient tradition that one must hold to. >> Yeah. And I hold to that. But that's not the same thing as saying that the magisterium is infallible. Okay. But let's move on. Uh, you uh, you said that Acts 7 when Stephen said Moses received living oracles, you said that's referring to oral preaching or teaching. But what Stephen says there is he received living oracles to pass on to us. Do you believe that Christians in the first century or Jews had the oral law passed down outside of written scripture or was Steven actually referring to written scripture? >> No, they had the word of God that had been given to Moses that was transmitted to them through tradition but also what was written down in the Torah? >> So the Jews had in addition to the written scriptures an oral law that they were to follow. >> No, they had an oral tradition also that people would teach people by word of mouth. But that's equivocating on the word tradition. When you use the

word tradition relevant to the Roman doctrine over against solos scriptura. You mean something that's equal in authority to scripture, not just a history of interpretation?

No, no. They also had a tradition of how to interpret the word of God that had been given. That was the central point of the Corbond dispute in Mark 7 and Matthew 15. The problem there was that the Pharisees had overly interpreted a passage in the book of Numbers that says a vow cannot be broken. And so if one gives to the temple instead of one's parents, you have to do that. Jesus says, "No, what takes precedent over Numbers here is what God said in Exodus and what Moses orally proclaimed in Deuteronomy 27, that you should honor your parents and not curse them."

So you're saying that the Jews merely thought that what they were propounding as doctrines was just their history of interpretation, their way of interpreting scripture and not actually something handed down by God through Moses orally?

What had been handed down is that they had a particular kind of understanding of scripture. That was their tradition of men that Jesus was uprating in Mark 7, Matthew.

Jesus called it the traditions of men. But did the Pharisees think it was a tradition of men?

No. The Pharisees had misidentified. They had attributed a label, the tradition of God, to tradition of men because it's quite possible for people to identify a counterfeit unwritten word of God as the word of God, just like it's possible for people to identify a counterfeit scripture. Much like we have the apocryphal works in the early church, or you have early Christians thinking that Enoch was scripture. So people can misinterpret and think that a tradition is the unwritten word of God and be wrong. But that doesn't take away from the fact there are authentic unwritten words of God that are sacred tradition, like the canon of scripture itself. Or that there are counterfeit written words of God doesn't take away there are authentic written words of God.

Okay, let's move on. So do you think the early church fathers taught the self-authenticating nature of scripture?

I think that they taught that scripture had elements to it that one could identify. So it was not merely the fact that the church arbitrarily decreed what scripture is, but that scripture has markers to it. But that's not necessarily something you can apply to every single scripture. It's not like we would say the letter to Philemon has some kind of outstanding amazing quality to it that just screams that it's scripture, or Second and Third John. For example, Augustine, understanding the nature of scripture, it does have its own internal elements to interpret itself in some respect. He says, "If when attention is given to a passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of scripture and from the authority of the church." So he puts both on those platforms in order to yield the truth that scripture can teach us. But scripture has its limits. The church is able to step in where scripture is limited in that way to give us the whole counsel.

That goes beyond Augustine. And of course, Protestants accept the authority of the church. We just don't think it has magisterial authority. It has ministerial authority. But you mentioned Augustine. Augustine said in a sermon, "Let us treat scripture like scripture, like God speaking. Don't let's look there for man going wrong." It's not for nothing, you see, that the canon has been established for the church. This is the function of the Holy Spirit. This is just another way of saying that scripture is self-authenticating. But here's another example. And this one is quite conspicuous. This is from Nemesius of Aessa. He says, "For us, the sufficient demonstration of the soul's immortality is the teaching of holy scripture, which is self-authenticating because inspired by God." So do you believe that all the books, even whether we agree on the limits of the canon, you would at least agree all the 66 books are part of the canon, right?

Yeah, they are part of divine scripture. Yeah. So here's the logic of Nemesius of Aessa. He said the holy scripture is self-authenticating because inspired of God, which means logically, if Philemon is an inspired part of scripture, it is self-authenticating.

That sounds like one giant circular argument.

You could call it circular, but notice you're objecting to Nemesius of Aessa. My point is...

But I also don't think the church fathers are infallible.

Well, I don't either. I don't either. But you're the one that's making so much of the church father.

No. What I'm making of is the fact that the church was understood to have its particular authority beyond scripture in an infallible way. For example, when Augustine refuted the Donatists. So, I agree with you. There are things like the immortality of the soul that fathers said this as well.

He doesn't limit it to the immortality of the soul. He says, "Because they're inspired of God."

But there are other issues, like what arose with the Arian controversy. The Arians had their list of scriptures also, which is why Augustine said to the Donatists, "The truth of this question has been placed beyond dispute by the investigation and decree of a plenary council." And St. Vincent of Lérins, who was Augustine's contemporary, said, "By the decree and authority of a council, the rule of the church's faith may be settled." They certainly didn't see it as just having some kind of merely ministerial authority or something like that.

Oh, I think that's perfectly consistent with ministerial authority. If something is grounded on scripture and demonstrable from scripture, which is always how these councils were conducted, then they can apply to it the...

Right. But they understood there was one universal church that can settle it for everyone, not an untold number of denominations that I hope people will buy into their definition.

That's the claim, but...

That's what they believed.

So back to the self-authenticating nature of scripture. So when not only Nemesius of Aessa, but here's one from Clement of Alexandria. He says, "He who believeth the divine scriptures with sure judgment receives in the voice of God, who bestowed the scripture, a demonstration that cannot be impugned. Faith then is not established by demonstration proofs. Blessed then are those who have believed even though they haven't seen." This is, I mean, I could go on and on quoting a litany of fathers.

So can I.

Not on this issue.

Are you sure?

Yeah, I'm absolutely sure.

We've got negative 16 seconds to find out. For example, Clement of Alexandria also says, by way of demonstration by the scriptures themselves, how the heresies failed. How in the truth alone and in the ancient church is both the exactist knowledge and truly best set of first principles. And Clement used the church in order to condemn the Quarto-deciman heresy about when Christians need to celebrate Easter, which is certainly not found in scripture.

Well, all right. That's time right there. That's time. Anthony's about to go back in. About to go back in.

All right. Right now, we'll have our 15-minute cross-examination of Trent Horn to Anthony Rogers.

Be nice.

I've been very nice. We're having so much fun. Let's see here. All right. Does the Bible say anywhere that a 66-book collection of writings is an infallible rule of faith?

So, the reason I didn't address that in the opening statement is because, as you surely know, this is a large question. I have a very definite answer to this, but it's not the sort of thing that's easily done in two minutes. And I think you can respect that. There are all sorts of questions.

Nice would have been nice to share that in your 15-minute rebuttal.

I had a whole bunch of other errors you made to address, but my position is that scripture does indicate what belongs to it. And it would take some time to work this out. But let me give you some of the beginning of an answer to some of this. When you look at the text of scripture, we don't notice certain things in our English translations that are actually there in the Hebrew. And so, for example, the book of Exodus begins, "El Shamotees." Jews will usually just say "El Shimote," which means "these are the names," but it actually begins with a vav, "v'el Shimote," which is a connective, and it always means this belongs to something that comes prior to it. So you already have this is just a small indicator, an internal indicator, that this belongs to something else. This sort of thing, and a whole host of other things. Numerous scholars with respect to the canon of scripture have been pointing out in recent years the what's called the seams of scripture, how the endings and beginnings of various books are so weaved together that it's indicating this book is preceded or followed by that book. And so my point is just that this sort of thing, when there's time, sufficient time to explicate it, is an internal way of determining the books of scripture. That's why, for example, just think of the law of Moses. We think of it as five books, but nobody ever in scripture refers to it as five books.

So let's go back to the New Testament then. So what at the beginning and end of Third John tells us this is inspired scripture rather than what you might find at the beginning and end of the Didache?

I didn't say that's the only way. So limiting how I know Third John, I think you said Third John.

Third John. Yeah.

Limiting it to Third John isn't a refutation of me. One of the things I would observe here is that Third John is one of the general epistles or Catholic epistles, and canonical scholars have observed that significantly it begins with James and it ends with Jude, the two brothers of Christ. And in between, you have the writings of Peter and John. And this order is given, for example, when Paul talks in Galatians, he talks about the pillars of the church, and he mentions them in this very order. Obviously, there's a whole lot more that needs to be said. I'm just showing, I'm just pointing out to you that at least, at least in principle, I think these things can be proven from scripture.

No, I'm saying how do we know? Does scripture say the canon of scripture, the inspired writings God gave us are X? There is no verse that says that.

But that's not a refutation of sola scriptura.

Let me... well...

Is sola scriptura the statement that everything that we believe is expressly stated? You mentioned the whole counsel of God.

Yeah, but you mentioned it earlier. You said a difference in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Baptist Confession. You said we believe it could be logically deduced. Okay. Right. You're going to... And what I'm trying to find is any stream of logic here. Let me... All right. Let me get other factual questions on the ground.

Does the Bible, is there a verse that gives a criteria to distinguish inspired writings from uninspired ones?

There's all kinds of criteria. One criteria would be Deuteronomy 13, Deuteronomy 18. In the law of Moses, Moses says if somebody comes along and preaches to you another god, calls you to believe in him, that's not a problem.

So as long as, as long as it doesn't have heresy, as long as it doesn't have heresy, it's scripture.

No, that's not what I'm saying. You said, "Give me a text of scripture that enables us to identify things." This is part of it. Obviously, there's a whole lot...

That tells us what's not scripture, not what is.

Right. Okay.

I said what is.

So it also, take for example, Moses' statement in Deuteronomy 18. God is going to send a prophet in the future like me. Listen to him. This is a forward-projecting statement. It enables us to identify.

So we can know what scripture is because God will appoint someone to orally tell you.

That's not what I said.

God will send a prophet like me. Listen to him.

Yeah, listen to him. But you think that "listen" is necessarily an oral activity?

Isn't that what we're doing right now?

Yeah. But but is the word, are you seriously saying the word "listen" always refers to something that's oral?

Listen. It does most of the time. But what I'm saying is it's not confined to the written word alone.

The apostles say, "Listen to the prophets."

So what you're saying here is...

Are you listening to their oral words?

So what you're saying though is that you need a written...

That Deuteronomy 18 is saying that a prophet will tell you what is scripture. He'll either write it down or say it.

No, no, no. I'm saying if you look at Deuteronomy 18, by the way, Jake's here. Listen closely. It says, Deuteronomy 18, it says that God is going to raise up for the people in the future a prophet like him, and they're to listen to him, and anybody who doesn't will be cut off from God's people. That means when this figure comes, he's already been pre-authorized by Moses. That's why Jesus could say repeatedly, "If you believed Moses..."

And here's my question. Here's my question. Has this figure come and told us what the canon of scripture is?

Oh, yeah. He says, "Listen to the law of Moses." "If you believe Moses, you'd believe me." That's part of the...

Who is this person?

He's called Jesus Christ.

And where did he give us the entire canon of the New Testament?

Well, you're asking now about the canon of the New Testament. But I'm pointing out how you originally were asking, you've done a bait-and-switch. You were originally asking if we have any kind of principles that enable us to ferret out true scripture from false scripture. When I say canon, it's a 66-book...

What I'm pointing out is that scripture does have ways by which it enables us to isolate certain things out from other things as the word of God. And one of the things that it does is it points to this future figure, the Lord Jesus Christ, and says everybody's to listen to him. That Jesus said the law of Moses is scripture. He said the prophets are scripture. He said the writings are scripture. So we have the canon of the Old Testament from Jesus. That same Jesus said that he was going to inspire his apostles and they were going to speak his words, and anybody who listened to them would be listening to him. Anybody who didn't listen to them was not listening to him.

During his earthly ministry, did they tell, did he tell the apostles to write anything down?

Are so, but did they write it down during his earthly ministry or after?

No, I said the question is during. Do we have a record of Jesus during his earthly ministry telling the apostles to write anything down in the present or the future? But I don't understand how it's relevant if he said it after he ascended into heaven.

Everything was written after Jesus ascended.

He told one person, John, to write something down in the book.

And you think the rest of them were just doing their own thing?

I'm asking you to prove your conclusion that Jesus gave us sola scriptura, and you have not.

Now you're saying sola scriptura, but you were asking the command to write.

They, he commanded John to write. I would say by analogy, he commanded the others to write because they weren't their own men. They weren't autonomous. They weren't making up their own religion. They were following Jesus.

But you don't have any command of Jesus doing this.

I have a logical inference, which is part of sola scriptura.

We'll get to other logical inferences for sure. In fact, maybe we've got time for that.

You've got time.

Yeah. Let's um, okay. So, as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, do you agree with this statement from the Westminster Confession of Faith? "Not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized."

Yes.

Okay. Do you agree with the next statement in the Westminster Confession? "It be a great sin to condemn or neglect this ordinance."

Yes.

Okay. Audience participation time. How many of you here in the audience believe in the doctrine of sola scriptura? Raise your hand. Now, keep your hand raised. How many of you agree with that statement from Westminster that it is a great sin to not baptize a baby? Keep your hand raised if you agree. Let the record show we've got a lot of hands that went down. The vast majority in this very room with us.

Let's have a baptism debate.

Well, no, the debate that I have is all right. So why can't they determine, why can't they logically deduce this truth from perspicuous scripture?

Well, okay. So there are any number of things, as I pointed out, that could account for why somebody sees something differently.

The basic here.

Yeah. Yeah. But when I look at scripture and read what it says and logically deduce certain things, it's clear to me that it does say to baptize your children.

When somebody... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But when somebody else comes to a different conclusion, do you deny that upbringing could have anything to do with impinging how they're reading scripture?

Does scripture record an infant ever being baptized?

Yeah, it speaks of household baptism.

I said, "Does it explicitly record an infant?"

But you're... So throughout the Old Testament, God told his people to apply the covenant sign to their households, which included infants. If a household includes an infant, then it is to be baptized. We have numerous instances in the New Testament of household baptisms, which necessarily entails, if there was a child in that house, it would have been baptized. Do you think scripture is clear enough that people can use ordinary means to deduce the sins God wants them to avoid?

Yes.

Then how do you explain the fact that almost everybody here can't avoid the sin of not baptizing their baby?

The noetic effects of sin.

So sin made them all stupid.

You say you say it made them all stupid. You were the one who said a moment ago, "The noetic effects of sin are a reality." So are you saying everybody's stupid? I mean, that's not a fair response.

But I'm not, what I am not saying though is that scripture is clear enough that even the unlearned can come to these saving truths on their own. You are claiming that...

I don't know how you... What I'm asking...

Now you said it's a saving truth. When the, when the Westminster Confession says it's a great sin, it's not saying those who don't baptize their children are damned. This isn't the Council of Trent.

No, the whole counsel of God. The whole counsel of God would want us to...

All things necessary for man's own salvation, faith and life are plainly stated in scripture or by good enough consequence can be deduced from scripture.

Does God want us to avoid great sins?

Yes.

Okay. Like worshiping creatures. Is scripture clear enough to help us avoid great sins?

Yes.

But not for everybody here who doesn't agree about the sin of avoiding...

Disputing somebody else's failure to the word of God, which is illicit. The fact that somebody else fails to accurately understand something doesn't prove that thing itself is not clear.

Well, what happens if somebody has cataracts and they can't see certain things? Is the object itself objectively...

Are you saying they're spiritually blind?

A cataract doesn't necessitate that they're absolutely blind.

They're spiritually Mr. Magoo.

Yeah, there are some Mr. Magoo's. We I think we'd all agree that.

All right, let me do, let me go to another question. Hold on. It's my turn to have fun here. Uh, all right. Uh, can a Christian? Okay. Does the Bible contain... So, God wants us to know the whole counsel of God, everything necessary for faith and life.

And I think you would agree there are doctrines you might call essential and ones we can disagree in good faith about.

Right.

Okay. Does the Bible contain a list of essential doctrines?

It has. I don't know where all this list stuff comes from. That's not how the Bible operates. It has...

I love the list of Jesus's ancestors in Matthew. It's really...

So, so there's not a, there's not a chapter in the Bible or even in, if you look at Roman Catholic de cretals and encyclicals or other things where it just lists everything.

Does the Bible here? Go ahead.

So scripture has a way of indicating things that are essential. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul said, "This I delivered to you as of first importance." Does that sound like he's telling you this is an essential? Jesus said in John 8, "If you do not believe that I am, you'll die in your sins." Does that sound like...

Here's my question. What is the way that scripture has to reveal something as an essential doctrine?

If you don't believe this, you'll die in your sins.

So, so a doctrine is not essential to believe if it doesn't have that qualifier in scripture.

No. No. You're trying to flatten everything to one thing, as though when Jesus said, "If you don't believe that I am, you'll die in your sins," that's one way of saying it's essential. When he says in 1 Corinthians 15, "This I deliver to you as of first importance," that's another way of saying it's essential. And these aren't the only ways. These are only examples. So scripture does have a way of demarcating those things that are essential from those things that can people can disagree on. Look at Romans 14, where Paul talks about brothers having differences and how to handle those differences. Or 1 Corinthians 8:10, how to deal with the weaker brother. Scripture very clearly does demarcate those things that are essential from those things that aren't. And so I really don't think this line of argument is a good one against sola scriptura.

Do Protestants agree on these essential doctrines?

Yeah, by and large, of course. I mean, what's an essential doctrine that Protestants don't agree on that they would say is essential that I would say is essential?

That the ordinary means of providing salvation to an infant is by baptizing him.

No, no, no, no. You said the ordinary, ordinary means of providing salvation. Where does the Westminster Confession say...

No, I'm saying Protestants like Lutherans and Anglicans will disagree with you on that.

But they don't disagree on the material issue when it comes to salvation. Like when they say baptism and they speak of it as a saving ordinance, they're thinking of it in the sense of a confirming or sealing. They're not saying that it itself is the grounds of salvation. They're not saying that it's the instrumental cause of salvation.

They believe they do. They disagree. And Protestants disagree. You'll have Protestants who will not baptize their babies at all. Protestants in your church will baptize them to dedicate them as part of a covenant community. And Protestants will baptize them to remit original sin so that they can be saved. That's a clear difference about an issue of salvation.

Do you think that Presbyterians who disagree with Baptists over the fact that they don't baptize their children think their children are going to hell?

No, that's why I brought up Lutherans and Anglicans about baptismal regeneration.

The other examples were irrelevant.

No, I'm showing there's disagreement there, and there's disagreement about the core issues. Let me, let me give you, let's try some other examples. Son.

You got 25 seconds.

All right. Um...

Just tell me. So, so the Bible, the Bible is clear about faith and life. If someone in your church wanted to hire a surrogate womb, a woman rents out her womb for a baby so they can use IVF. Would you say that's sinful?

Wait, say that again.

Yeah.

Surrogacy. Hiring a woman to carry your in vitro embryos to be born. Surrogacy. The Catholic Church condemns that as a sin, but this was invented thousands of years after scripture. I think it's a grave sin. Does scripture anywhere say that something like this would be a gravely sinful thing to do?

Well, we would have to look at the principles of scripture and see if we can deduce anything with respect to that. And of course, as a person committed to sola scriptura, I believe we can. That that's a big issue in your time.

We're out of time. That's fine.

All right. Good job, guys. Fantastic. Let's get another round of applause for the debaters. Had a fantastic debate and a very, very satisfying cross-examination. And so now we're transitioning to our 20-minute Q&A. Then I'll follow up with a 7-minute closing by each party. And so the way this cross, this Q&A is going to work out is that both of you will get one minute each to respond to the question. Um, and then the person, the question was initially for, gets an additional 30 seconds to respond after the other person responds. Hopefully, you understand that, right?

We'll figure it out.

Yeah, we'll figure it out. I've been messing that up all day, Trent. So people have been getting on me about it, but it's all good. All right. So, the first question we have here is for Trent. How did the councils who canonized the Bible know the canon? If they appeal to external criteria, Protestants can too. If God revealed it to them, then you have to affirm the Catholic Church receives new public ongoing revelation.

Right. So the church does not determine the canon of scripture. God determines the canon of scripture when he inspires each sacred author to write. But the church also did not fallibly discover the canon either. The church has the power to authoritatively declare the canon of scripture. Going all the way back to Matthew 16, where Jesus says he tells to Peter and then he tells the other apostles, "You have the power to bind and loose. What you bind on earth is bound in heaven. What you loose on earth is loosed in heaven," giving them authority to be able to teach and proclaim. So the church is able to authoritatively declare, and it does. It does this authoritative declaration through varying means, different levels of authority. So we see this authoritatively declared at regional councils at Hippo and Carthage in the 4th century, when there were, as I said earlier, there were disputes about the canon in the early church, especially about 2 Peter, Second and Third John, the book of Revelation, Hebrews. So it's able to teach authoritatively through these regional councils, and they do that by looking at things like apostolic authorship, reception by the church. So there are external factors that are considered, but there's no rigorous set of external factors that says, "Oh, it's just these and these alone." The Holy Spirit also guides the church in teaching true doctrine to the faithful. And then this was reaffirmed infallibly at the councils of Florence and Trent at the latter end of the Middle Ages. So the church is able to authoritatively declare. In making its judgments, it relies on things like apostolic authorship, reception in the Christian community, but especially things like the sense of the faithful, how the faithful received this, even if, you know, some church fathers had doubts here or there. So there are external markers, but it was never reduced just to external markers to reverse engineer. You cannot go back through church history and say, "Oh, these are the markers we use in order to determine what is and what isn't scripture." Rather, the church is guided by the Holy Spirit in looking at all of this evidence and been given by the apostles in order to reach the correct truth of the matter.

All right, Anthony.

One question real quickly. Was that one minute?

Yeah, I don't, I was wondering the timer's not on there.

Oh, shoot. Yeah.

So even I was thinking in my head like...

It felt like a long minute.

I don't mean that I need to or anything like that. I just, I just...

I'll use a stopwatch here. I just wanted to know that I had some sense of time.

Yeah, Anthony, go ahead, man. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Go text me later. Give me a hard time. Anthony, go now.

No, no, that's fine. So, so the question was...

On what basis does Rome infallibly determine or declare scripture to be scripture, that these books are scripture? And I think this sounds something to me like a Euthyphro dilemma, right? If the church is determining it based on some inherent qualities, well then the church isn't needed. Other people can recognize those inherent qualities. On the other hand, if the church is actually determining it, well then the church could have determined something else to be scripture, right? So I do think that's a real dilemma, and I don't think what Trent said answers it. In fact, here's something interesting about the Council of Trent, which is the council of the Roman Catholic Church that is considered by them, not us, ecumenical, that spoke to the canon of scripture. If you look at the Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, it's the Council of Trent that you have the first ecumenical council to decide this matter. Out of the 800 bishops that existed in the Catholic Church at that time, only 55 were present for the session that determined the canon of scripture. And get this, only about, and I don't remember the exact breakdown here, but around 25 people voted for Rome's canon out of the 55 present. That's not even a majority. And that's because many people abstained. So for the entire Christian church throughout all of human history, you had a piddling number of bishops, even for those that existed at the time, determining the canon. And remember the kind of people who were determining the canon of scripture who said it has about as much force and authority as fables apart from us. You're going to trust that?

All right, 30 seconds.

I would say that the church is able to teach authoritatively and declare. It's able to draw from scripture. The church certainly drew from scripture and drew from external criteria in order to determine things like the deity of Christ or other things like Christ's human nature, that he has a human and a divine will. That's something that's not very clear in scripture, but is a heresy that was condemned at later ecumenical councils. But it's not just the external factors. It's saying different people can look at the external factors, but this is the declaration that cannot be gainsaid anymore. The argument is done. Infallible teachings are definitive, brought to an end. And there has to be one final authority to bring the discussion to an end.

All right, this question for Anthony.

That timer is throwing me. That looked like 45 seconds.

All right. This question for Anthony. We just watched two Protestants argue election from scripture and reach incompatible conclusions without a mechanism for adjudication. What prevents the outcome from becoming more fragmentation? At what point does the Bible is the final authority become my interpretation of the Bible is the authority?

Yeah, so just because sola scriptura is true doesn't mean everybody's going to agree on things. That's not even true in the Roman Catholic alternative to sola scriptura. What they point these things out so that they say, "You have to accept this view that'll solve the problem." Well, guess what? Catholics end up writing books called "Confusion in the Kingdom," subtitled "How Progressive Catholicism is Bringing Harm and Scandal to the Church." This is a book written by Trent Horn. He's talking about scandal. He even refers to certain things as heresy and damnable and so forth in here. Rome's alternative hasn't solved this alleged problem that if it undermines sola scriptura, it's a two-edged sword. It undermines the Roman Catholic view. The problem isn't that people disagree and therefore sola scriptura is false. It's that somebody's just not listening to the text of scripture. That doesn't mean that they're, you know, terrible people or non-Christians. People can disagree on issues. There are disagreements in the Bible. Why do you think the apostles are writing epistles? And who are they writing to, by the way? The apostles with their oral tradition. How did oral tradition do in the days of the apostles? People were disagreeing all over the place. So they happily wrote scripture. Look at First Corinthians. What's Paul doing? He's writing scripture because of these knuckleheads, right? These Mr. Magoo's are all bouncing into each other like a bunch of Keystone Cops, right? But by the way, notice there's a fundamental difference in how Paul responds to the Corinthians who are acting like a bunch of rugrats and how he responded to the Galatians, "You stupid Galatians, who has bewitched you?" These were people that were corrupting the gospel and essential. So, scripture is very clear on...

Well, am I done?

Yeah.

Just let me go on.

Oh, I'm like trying to let you know. Like, all right. All right. All right.

Trent.

The problem here is we don't claim that the church and its teaching is as perspicuous as the Westminster Confession claims that scripture is perspicuous. I would just say the Catholic Church's teachings are clearer than many of the teachings that we might find in scripture, especially on issues today, because we have a living teaching authority that can say, "Oh, you didn't get it. Here it is again." So we're able to have that. And I don't think you want to start talking about liberalism in the Catholic Church. I wrote that book. Yes, it's unfortunate when we have a priest might celebrate a Pride Mass and say, just say, you know, speak in oblique references, but that's certainly not like the Presbyterian Church in the USA, which your denomination broke off from in 1973. That's a much larger one that will have a female pastor married to another woman preaching about abortion. We don't have that in the Catholic Church. So let's not throw stones in liberal houses, though. I'm grateful you're in the conservative breakaway.

So, so you're actually...

30 seconds.

Yeah, you're actually wrong. My church didn't break away from the PCUSA. I'm the PCA is from the Southern Church. That has nothing to do with the northern church, which ordains homosexuals and the like. And by the way, you want to talk about them being especially bad. I guess we shouldn't... Well, anyway, I was going to go somewhere else with that. But in this book, Trent, Trent talks, I mean, these aren't just minor differences now. He says the creeds and confessions of Rome are clearer. But even in this debate, Trent isn't clear on what these things, what his actual position is. Look at material sufficiency. Oh, we could believe this, we could believe that. That's just a moving target, right? That doesn't seem to me like it's clearer. We have a very clear position on sola scriptura. It's materially sufficient. What is material sufficiency according to Rome? We don't know. Nobody knows.

All right.

Oh, do I get 30 seconds?

No, that was my 30.

That was his 30 seconds.

Yeah. Yeah, that was his 30. See, we're all confused.

Now there's three. If it's just one and one and it's three, it's you lose track.

So it's one and one and then if the question was for you, Trent, you get 30 more seconds to respond.

Okay.

Okay. It's not perspicuous, is not lived out in practice only if it was about salvation.

All right, this question is for Trent. According to 2 Timothy 3:16-17, "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." If scripture equips us for every good work, why do we need tradition and magisterium? What other good works are tradition and the magisterium needed for?

First, I would say that Paul in 2 Timothy is referring to the Old Testament here. So if you want to stretch it too far, you could say, "Oh, all you need is the Old Testament to be able to do every good work." And that's certainly not the case if you're going to proclaim Christian doctrine. But if you speak about scripture in the broader sense here, you're taking that phrase "every good work" and stretching it too much. In 2 Timothy 2:21, Paul tells Timothy, "You will be a vessel for noble use if you stay away from bad influences." Just stay away from bad influences. You'll be ready for every good work. "Pon arggon agaton." So there in 2 Timothy 2, it says, you know, you'll be ready for every good work if you just stay away from bad influences. It doesn't follow that's all you need in order to do the Christian life. The letter of James, it says if you grow in the virtues of patience, it will perfect and endurance. It says if you grow in endurance, in James 4, it will perfect and complete you. You don't only need patience. Scripture equips us for many good works. But scripture, for example, as we've seen in this debate, it doesn't tell us what is and isn't scripture beyond kind of a vague, "trust me, bro, it's there."

Anthony.

Yeah, you all heard that from me, "trust me, bro." Or did you hear me quote scripture after scripture? So much so that Trent had to say, "It's not how many verses you quote, it's the quality." Right? So certainly I quoted scripture. I demonstrated my point. And these sorts of things are just throwaway lines that hopefully will do more than they actually can. Well, Trent says that when Paul says "all scripture is inspired of God," he's just talking about the Old Testament. Well, read the whole context. I used to think that, and I think there are a lot of Protestants who think that, but just reading the context. Notice what Paul says to Timothy. This is Paul's final epistle to Timothy, his last written letter to Timothy. And he says that from infancy, he's known the holy scriptures. And then he says, "These scriptures are able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." Christ Jesus. This presupposes that he was acquainted with New Testament scripture. And that same Paul says that other things are scripture. He refers to Luke, "whose praise is in the gospel throughout the churches," meaning he's praised for the gospel that he wrote. In 1 Timothy 5, he quotes Luke's gospel as scripture. Second Peter 3, the verse he kept quoting about Paul's writings being unclear. It says Paul's writings are scripture. And by the way, it doesn't say "all of Paul's writings" or "most of Paul's writings." It says "some things in Paul's writings." Some doesn't mean all, and it doesn't mean most. And therefore, if some things are unclear, most of it is clear. And how do you determine those things that aren't clear? Well, by interpreting scripture with scripture.

All right, Trent, 30 seconds.

Yeah, I'm not saying all of scripture is unclear. You can have 99% of scripture be clear, but to kill a soul, you only need 0.1% of scripture to be unclear to go on to a heresy to your own damnation. That's the problem. It's not that it isn't clear. It's certainly clear in many places. I affirm that about Jesus being the Messiah. Faith in Christ leads to salvation. But to the finer points of theology that are debated, and it's not just academic nerd stuff, there are things where even if scripture, even if it's just a handful of passages, even just a handful of passages is all it takes for somebody to fall down the rabbit hole of heresy. Unless you have an authority beyond scripture to say, "You're free to interpret scripture," you just can't cross this theological guardrail. And sola scriptura doesn't provide that.

All right, this question is for Anthony. If your canon comes from fallible history, how do you have infallible scripture? How do you know the Epistle to the Hebrews is inspired but the First Epistle of Clement isn't?

Can you read that again?

If your canon comes from fallible history, how do you have infallible scripture? How do you know the Epistle to the Hebrews is inspired but the First Epistle of Clement isn't?

Yeah, this question presupposes that I think our knowledge of the canon comes from fallible history. Now, admittedly, I haven't had enough time to explicate my full position on how we can demonstrate the canon from scripture, but I have at least stated my conviction that you can demonstrate the canon from scripture. And were this a canon debate, I'd have an opportunity to lay that case out fully. I do believe that there are internal ways of determining what belongs to the canon of scripture. And by the way, there's a fallacy that's going on here as well, where it assumes that what we first have is this infallible list and then, you know, we gather up those books. That's not how it worked. We have these infallible books, and we derive the list from that. Right? It's kind of like asking, you know, saying we have 13 parables of Jesus. Now we got to go find out, you know, go and find those parables. No, we say 13 parables because that's what we have, right? It's derived from what we have. So the relevant question is, how do we look at these books and recognize that they are scripture? And I'm arguing that they have inherent qualities that demonstrate them to be the word of God. Scripture is light. Light manifests itself. These words have self-convincing power. I was in a jail cell when this word of God came into it and pierced my soul to believe unto its salvation. I didn't need a pope. I didn't need a magisterium.

All right.

I didn't need somebody cutting me off.

All right, Trent, you got it for one minute.

I will amend my cheeky description of Anthony's definition of we can know these books are scripture, that they have inherent qualities. The inherent qualities were not revealed tonight. So I said that it was essentially a case of "trust me, bro." They're there. The only quality I've seen, rather, I'd like to give another term. He's essentially appealing to what would be a burning in the bosom that when you read this, it convicts you. I've heard lots of people say stuff like that. I've heard people who are in jail read the Quran, and it does that to them, or the Book of Mormon, or Christian Science. So lots of people make that claim. We have still throughout this debate, and maybe Anthony can make a video after the debate and go through the whole thing, and I'll happily engage that material too. But that doesn't answer the question. If you believe in sola scriptura, you have to know what the scriptura is.

And the scriptura doesn't tell us that. And we have not gotten any list of the qualities in the scriptura that answers that crucial question.

Please tell me I have 30 seconds.

30 seconds.

Trent said this sounds like a Book of Mormon burning in the bosom sort of thing. Listen to Luke 24. "Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?'" Now, with all due respect, that's not the same thing as the self-authenticating nature of scripture. This refers to why somebody will accept that word, which is self-authenticating, because of the operation of the Spirit in the heart. So you're conflating things. Objectively, I'm saying this word is from God. The sun is shining whether anybody recognizes it or not. But it's because God gives people eyes that they can see the sun. The same thing is true spiritually. The light is shining. This is God's light. And those whose hearts he operates on experience it to the saving of their soul. And yes, it's called a burning in their heart. That's not Mormonism, though, by the way. I wish I could say more.

Right. This question is for Trent. Eastern Orthodox likewise say that revelation came...

From outside of scripture. Yet Rome disagrees with various EO doctrines. How are we to judge between Rome and Greece if not by scripture? And would that not entail scripture is the final norm and regulator?

>> No. Because we can look to see where has the church that Christ established uh remained in continuity throughout history. I think another problem with solos scriptor is we will hear lip service being paid. Oh well, we believe the church is an authority. uh it's just not you know it's just not an infallible authority but under solos scriptor the church in Protestantism cannot be an authority are you going to listen to every Lutheran Anglican Methodist Anabaptist Menanite PCA PCUSA pastor who has multiple conflicting definitions about so many topics the church becomes a moot uh point really I it can't serve if the church if the here's the thing if the church is just the invisible bond of all true Christians it can't guide you in any way but or if the church is the just the denomination that is the most correct, then we got a lot of people here who aren't in the church and don't even know it. Uh so I think that that's a really big problem there that it's not just scripture. We have to look where is the church? What body has the best claim to being the historical continuation of that church that Christ established? And I would say that it is the Catholic Church. You want to get into the nitty-gritty historic Catholic versus Orthodox, my friend Eric Ibara has a great book on that. Uh so that there is nitty-gritty but it's very clear and very different from something that happened 500 years ago.

>> Anthony,

>> I do have to say that clock loves train. Uh so the question was how do you adjudicate between the eo claim that it is the true church of Christ conveying to us authentic tradition and Trent's answer is we have to find continuity. But guess what? According to Rome, the way you determine what the authentic tradition is is by the pope, which is entirely circular. Then h how do we know that this is the true church? Well, we got to look for continuity. How do we know what continuity is? By the pope. Why should we listen to the pope? Well, because that's what the continuing teaching of the church is. How do we know that's the continuing teaching of the church? Because the pope says that this doesn't solve the problem. He said something earlier about self- authentication being circular. That's circular. Okay? The sun shining and you seeing it is not circular. It's self-evidencing. Just like logic is self-evidencing and so forth. I'll conclude with that.

>> That's right.

>> I believe Jesus when he said, "I will establish my church on the rock of Peter and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." That that church still exists to this day. It is visible, enduring, hierarchical, and capable of teaching believers universally. So, one would then try to use a historical investigation to see which church body today has the best claim of being that same church or the continuation of that church from 2,000 years ago. I would say yeah, it might be a bit closer between Orthodox and Catholics, but between Protestantism there, the comparison is not even close.

All right, thank you guys. That concludes the Q&A. All right, we are going to jump into our closing remarks. Um, after the closing, guys, uh, they are going to be sending in a cleanup crew to get things ready because they do have service tomorrow morning.

So, uh, I ask that everyone as soon as we're done here that you begin to exit out. I know we want to hang out, take pictures, but we do have to close the doors rather quickly. Um, so, uh, once everything's closed up, we close out the conference, then you guys, if you guys don't mind, head right towards the doors. So, with that said, Anthony, you're up for your 7m minute closing. Hope that clock is seven minutes print style.

You had fun with time, too. I'm just suggesting Well, I want to thank all of you again for coming out tonight. I want to thank Trent. It's been lively. I don't think he expected anything less than a knockdown dragout. Though, I will also register my sentiment that I do think that Trent is, if not the best, certainly one of the best. I only say maybe not because I don't think I know every Roman Catholic apologist. There might be one out there. Uh, but I do want to thank Trent this evening for this debate. I relished this opportunity to speak to you on this topic. These are momentuous issues on this turn. Incredibly important matters. This is a momentuous issue. Can you trust the text of scripture to convey to you the truth of God sufficiently to the saving of your soul? I have argued tonight that you can. These words have been written so that you may believe in believing have life in his name. You can have life in his name by believing in this word. Is it there clearly? Well, that's the whole assumption of the statement. These things have been written so that you may believe, not so that you may not understand and then have to cast about for somebody to interpret it. And by the way, there's no papal office in scripture. There's no there's not even an option to seek out a pope at this point in history. All that stuff is being read into text like Matthew 16. But uh in this debate, one of the important things has been whether or not scripture is self- authenticating. He says, "Well, why can't a Mor a Muslim and a Mormon say the same thing?" Well, their books are not self- authenticating. They're self-refuting. Right? The the God of Islam and Mormonism can't speak with self- authenticating authority because the God of Islam in Mormonism is not self-contained. That was the whole point about my opening about self- authentication. This God has all life and glory in and of himself and so can speak self-referentially. He can swear by himself. There's none greater by whom he could swear. Go look at the Quran. Ask Jake afterwards. Does the God of the Quran swear exclusively by himself? No. Why not? Because he's not self-contained. He swears repeatedly by everything under the sun, including the sun. Is the Book of Mormon, is the God of Mormonism self-contained? Absolutely not. The God of Mormonism is a man that lives on a star near the planet Collab. You think that being selfattesting, self- authenticating? Nothing could be far further from the truth. And that's why all these this talk about, you know, burning in the bosom and so forth has nothing to do with what scripture is talking about, what I'm talking about today. This word is self- authenticating. It is life. And you can believe it. You could bank on it. And of course, there are going to be things that you you have to work at to understand. It's not like God uh didn't want us to work at things. One of the things Augustine used to say is the clear stuff's there so that, you know, by it we may be fed, have salvation, and so forth. And then there are other things there that God put so that we would have something to do in a sense. I don't mean think he meant it that in a flippant way. He's just saying that to exercise us, right? We're to be workmen who are diligent, who don't need to be ashamed. So this word is generally clear. There are some things that require work. And some of those issues are things like baptism. So all my Baptist friends here today, you need to work harder, right? And I need to do better getting the word out to my fellow Presbyterian brothers and sisters to turn up to these things so that more hands can be up when Trent does the audience participation stuff. But uh the main thing I'm trying to convey to you though is that you could trust this word. You you don't need a pope to interpose himself between you and your God. God didn't make you through a pope. Why does he need to speak to you through a pope? God doesn't save you through a pope. Well, I guess some popes would say you're not saved unless you're in submission to the pope. I forget which pope it was who said apart from submission to him, the pontiff, that there is no salvation. But this this word is clear. You can believe it. You can bank on it. And and the whole reason for trying to get somebody off of it is precise. Of course, people can twist this word, but it's a whole lot easier once you're saying you got to listen to what I'm telling you this word says. Right? Once you do that, well, then you might as well start a uh, you know, your own group, your your own faith church. You could you could build people for their money. You might sell indulgences, right? To build St. Peter's Basilica. You might do something like that, right? That's the whole goal. That's been the goal throughout history is to get people off this word. This word is life. It's light. It's salvation to your souls. Do the scriptures want anything for salvation? Do they lack anything that you need to know? What do you need to know for salvation? Tread said it's materially sufficient. But what he said is it's not clear. But where I mean it's clear and all the ways that I pointed out Jesus said to the religious leaders, "Have you never read?" Isn't that assuming scriptures clear? Jesus said, "Uh, if you had read the scriptures, you'd believe all this presupposes scriptures clarity." So in conclusion, I I think that uh you know there's a lot of issues of course that are outstanding things that need to be further discussed. Things like the canon of scripture, which is a huge topic, but none of that undermines the clear teaching of the word of God. I mean, consider it this way. If scripture says that it's sufficient, and somebody can raise a question to you undermining that claim, what would you believe? the text of scripture telling you it's sufficient or the fact that you don't know the answer to that particular question. I submit to you that you should believe God who speaks with ultimate authority and say, "Well, it must be that I'm there's something inadequate about me in my understanding, not the text of scripture. God's word is the ultimate authority." Now, uh, one of the things that I mentioned and I'll I'll leave you with this tonight as a particularly relevant text to solos scriptor. Paul at the end of his ministry as it's recorded for us in the book of Acts said explicitly, I have not said anything. In fact, he says, I've said nothing than can be proven from the scriptures. Nothing. Even the apostolic preaching is what was found in scripture. And I submit to you, you should believe nothing but what is found in scripture. And in believing nothing but what's found in scripture, guess what? You'll have not nothing. You'll have life, salvation, life, everything you need for life and godliness. And I'll conclude with that.

All right, now we have Trent Horn for a seven-minute closing.

>> All right. All right. I really want to thank everyone for being here tonight to discuss this foundational issue regarding Christian unity. I will ask also that you set aside all of the references to Catholicism that have been made tonight because that's not what's on trial here. I'm happy to defend Catholicism in a hostile venue. I've done that before. I'm willing to do that again. But that things about indulgences or the Catholic faith, that doesn't answer the question that is being debated tonight. Because a Christian, a sincere Christian could ask the questions of Anthony. Yes, he he reads scholarship that says the letter to the Hebrews is anonymous. We don't even know if an apostle wrote it, so why should I trust that? Or uh I've seen Christians believe, oh, the the passage about the woman caught in adultery is not in the earliest manuscripts of John or Luke. Should I think that's not scripture? I've seen Protestant apologists say that it's not. Who should I listen to? Who should I go to? Where can I go? How do I go to scripture if scripture is the thing that I have questions about in the first place? So tonight I show that the Bible is not the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. That means solo scriptor is false. We've had a lot of switching around here with the term word of God. Obviously the word of God is our highest authority. But the debate was about whether the word of God is confined to the written word alone and it certainly is not. And remember, I presented three arguments to show that this is not true. That scripture, the word of God, is in the written word alone and that it's fully sufficient to teach you the whole council of God, all things faith and life, and that it's perspicuous and clear. And that was amply demonstrated in my arguments. The first argument I gave was the problem of defining scripture. Uh, and I think it's very clear. That's why many Protestant apologists are very surprised. They'll say, "Well, yeah, the the canon comes from the church, but you know, the church doesn't have to be infallible to give us the canon." So the church kind of got lucky when they got it right. Instead, Anthony proposed, "Oh well, yes, even the canon of scripture itself is found in scripture because scripture reveals the qualities that only scripture will have and that's how we can use it." What are those qualities? Not enough time to tell you tonight. Ah, what a shame. What a shame. So, I think that uh this really shows that this is an infallible truth. If you're going to believe in solo scriptor, you have to know what the scriptor is and be able to tell anyone who says some parts of the scriptura are not scripture, you are not just wrong, you're damnably wrong to say that it isn't. The other argument I gave was the absence of soloulless scriptor in scripture. We heard a lot of talk about uh the word of God being able to inform and build people up and I completely agree with that. I agree with that 100%. But once again, the word of God is not confined to the written word alone. We saw that scripture never says. We saw that solos script Torah was not true in the Old Testament because prophets could continue to give revelation. It was not true in the New Testament. You couldn't just say, "Sorry, Paul. I can't have second Corinthians. You already gave me first Corinthians. I'm not going to go beyond what is written." The people of God were waiting for revelation. But if you were to read scripture, it never says that revel public revelation would eventually come to an end. That's not in there. Even though if scripture has a whole council of God, it should be there. We have nothing. We heard a lot about sufficiency. But in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, you know what is called sufficient? Not scripture. The man of God is called sufficient. Scripture is called aphelamos, helpful, useful, profitable, and it absolutely is helpful and useful. But in the wrong hands, scripture can lead to a person's destruction. And it doesn't take much if even only.1% of scripture is unclear on these important matters. It can lead millions to spiritual destruction. And I've seen it. Anony's worried saying, "Oh, if you just have the Bible and prospicuous scripture, you'll be okay." I've seen Protestants fall into the free grace heresy, thinking that what the Bible says about we're saved by faith alone, that that means, "Oh, I'm saved as long as I believe in Jesus no matter what I do in the future. Even if I become an apostate serial killer, I will still go to heaven. And there's not an insignificant number of Christians who believe that. I've seen others look at the scriptures and say, "Oh, well, we can have uh female pastors or same-sex weddings. I know there's injunctions here in scripture, but that changes just like the injunctions on slavery, for example." And people get put in a bind in understanding how scripture from 2,000 years ago is to be applied today. Just as the injunctions on sla there are some injunctions that are not applied today like those on slavery for example. Slaves don't have to be kind to their masters. They can run away. They're allowed to do that. But in that particular time and place when this was the dominant uh part of the economy, Paul was preaching peace for people and peace in Christ. But social teaching and moral teaching you'll have people those words were taken out of context 150 years ago that Christians primarily in the south used it to say oh we can have slavery in perpetuity and they tried to they priest wrote a book called the Bible defense of slavery. So the words of scripture uh they are the word of God but the problem is when they are placed in the hands of men uh they can easily go astray. I think that that abundantly shows that the doctrines of the perspu of scripture uh are false. That uh scripture is all the church. This is not what God only gave the church. Because what did God give us? He didn't just give he didn't give us a book. He didn't give us writings. He didn't even give us writings that tell us here are the writings that you were to follow. He gave us a church, a universal church. Not this church and that church, but one church. One holy Catholic and apostolic church. You might not like the word Catholic, but at least go with what's in the nyine creed, which doesn't mention scripture. It says, "I believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church." That that is what kept you in the bosom of doctrine and right practice. Setting theological guard rails so that people are not led astray by false teachers. But if one operates under solos scriptor, what do we have instead? A cacophony of voices claiming, "Well, Anthony said the pope doesn't need to tell you this. You're not saved by a pope. You don't need this pope or that pope. Pope just means father. 1 Corinthians 4:15 St. Paul says, "You have had many guides uh but not many fathers. I became your father in Christ Jesus." Who are our spiritual fathers? Hebrews 13 says that we should submit to our elders. They've been placed in authority over us. Which ones? Free grace ones, five point Calvinist ones, uh PCUSA, a female pastor married to another lady with sparkle uh sermon talking about abortion. Who determines? Scripture didn't give us that answer. But Christ gave us a church that tells us this is scripture and guides us into salvation in Christ through the word of God proclaimed in sacred scripture and sacred tradition given to us for the salvation of all. So, thank you so much for having me here tonight.

All right, so that concludes our final debate. Good stuff, guys. Good stuff. Thank you guys so much.

>> Appreciate you.

>> Thank you.

>> You guys did fantastic. I just want to thank Hey, hey, dang. Can I say salutations?

>> Sheesh.

>> I did say get up out of here, didn't I? All right. Now, go ahead. Sit down for a minute there. Y'all got time. Hold on. Hold on.

>> I did tell y'all to get over by. But I did want to say uh thank you to everyone u for coming out. those who stuck around for throughout the whole conference. I really do appreciate you guys. Um, I did want to bring my family up if you guys want to come up real quick.

>> And um I'm a firm believer that with family uh everything is done with your family, man. um ministry. Any ministry you do should involve your family. Um my wife has been um immeasurable of her efforts in helping get this together. Um she has been a vital part and so I don't want this thing to be over without giving her credit for the things that she's doing. Uh cuz we homeschool our kids. So, she's tackling the kids and doing a lot of stuff. The badges you guys are wearing around your neck. My wife did all of that. And a lot of the things that that that go unseen, she's doing. And so, I just want to give her honor and respect for that. And so, I just want to say goodbye. And maybe we'll do this again soon.

>> We'll see. We'll see. But I I definitely Yeah, it's um we'll see what happens. See what God does. But I just want to thank you once again for coming out and enjoying your time at TGT Conference 2026. And um you know, be blessed. Uh if you have yet to subscribe to the Gospel Truth, uh we're on YouTube. Um hit that subscribe button. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and on Tik Tok. I ain't much I am not on Tik Tok that much, honestly, but you know, we're on Tik Tok. So uh go ahead, subscribe, follow and do that. And once again, I appreciate everyone for joining us.

Get Our Mobile App

Anthony Rogers@Ousias1 Vs Trent Horn@TheCounselofTrent: Is Sola Scriptura True?

Transcription