The Protestant Achilles' Heel

According to ancient Greek legend, the great warrior, Achilles, was invulnerable against attack, except for one area of weakness—his heel. That weakness would be exploited near the end of the Trojan War by Paris. As the story goes, he shot Achilles in the heel with an arrow, killing his seemingly undefeatable foe.

Okay, so referring to Sola Scriptura as the Protestant Achilles's Heel is not a perfect analogy. There are many weak spots in Protestant theology. But the use of the image of "Achilles's Heel" in prose today is employed not only to accentuate a singular weakness in an otherwise impenetrable person or institution, but a particularly acute weakness. It is in that sense that I think the analogy fits.

Sola Scriptura was the central doctrine and foundation for all I believed when I was Protestant. On a popular level, it simply meant, “If a teaching isn’t explicit in the Bible, then we don’t accept it as doctrine!” And it seemed so simple. Unassailable. And yet, I do not recall ever hearing a detailed teaching explicating it. It was always a given. Unchallenged. Diving deeper into its meaning, especially when I was challenged to defend my Protestant faith against Catholicism, I found there to be no book specifically on the topic and no uniform understanding of this teaching among Protestant pastors.

Once I got past the superficial, I had to try to answer real questions like, what role does tradition play? How explicit does a doctrine have to be in Scripture before it can be called doctrine? How many times does it have to be mentioned in Scripture before it would be dogmatic? Where does Scripture tell us what is absolutely essential for us to believe as Christians? How do we know what the canon of Scripture is using the principle of sola scriptura? Who is authorized to write Scripture in the first place? When was the canon closed? Or, the best question of all: where is sola scriptura taught in the Bible? These questions and more were left virtually unanswered or left to the varying opinions of various Bible teachers.

In answer to this last question, “Where is sola scriptura taught in the Bible?” most Protestants will immediately respond as I did, by simply citing II Tm. 3:16:

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

“How can it get any plainer than that? Doesn’t that say the Bible is all we need?” Question answered.

The fact is: II Timothy 3—or any other text of Scripture—does not even hint at sola scriptura. It says Scripture is inspired and necessary to equip “the man of God,” but never does it say Scripture alone is all anyone needs. We’ll come back to this text in particular later. But in my experience as a Protestant, it was my attempt to defend this bedrock teaching of Protestantism that led me to conclude: sola scriptura is 1) unreasonable 2) unbiblical and 3) unworkable.

When defending sola scriptura, the Protestant will predictably appeal to his sole authority—Scripture. This is a textbook example of the logical fallacy of circular reasoning which betrays an essential problem with the doctrine itself. One cannot prove the inspiration of a text from the text itself. The Book of Mormon, the Hindu Vedas, writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the Koran, and other books claim inspiration. This does not make them inspired. One must prove the point outside of the text itself to avoid the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Thus, the question remains: how do we know the various books of the Bible are inspired and therefore canonical? And remember: the Protestant must use the principle of sola scriptura in the process.

II Tim. 3:16 is not a valid response to the question. The problems are manifold. Beyond the fact of circular reasoning, for example, I would point out the fact that this verse says all Scripture is inspired tells us nothing of what the canon consists. Just recently, I was speaking with a Protestant inquirer about this issue and he saw my point. He then said words to the effect of, “I believe the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth as Jesus said in Jn. 16:13. The Holy Spirit guided the early Christians and helped them to gather the canon of Scripture and declare it to be the inspired word of God. God would not leave us without his word to guide us.”

That answer is much more Catholic than Protestant! Yes, Jn. 16:13 does say the Spirit will lead the apostles—and by allusion, the Church—into all truth. But this verse has nothing to say about sola scriptura. Nor does it say a word about the nature or number of books in the canon. Catholics certainly agree that the Holy Spirit guided the early Christians to canonize the Scriptures because the Catholic Church teaches that there is an authoritative Church guided by the Holy Spirit. The obvious problem is my Protestant friend did not use sola scriptura as his guiding principle to arrive at his conclusion. How does, for example, Jn. 16:13 tell us that Hebrews was written by an apostolic writer and that it is inspired of God? We would ultimately have to rely on the infallibility of whoever “the Holy Spirit” is guiding to canonize the Bible so that they could not mishear what the Spirit was saying about which books of the Bible are truly inspired.

In order to put this argument of my friend into perspective, can you imagine if a Catholic made a similar claim to demonstrate, say, Mary to be the Mother of God? “We believe the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth and guided the early Christians to declare this truth.” I can almost hear the response. “Show me in the Bible where Mary is the Mother of God! I don’t want to hear about God guiding the Church!” Wouldn’t the same question remain for the Protestant concerning the canon? “Show me in the Bible where the canon of Scripture is, what the criterion for the canon is, who can and cannot write Scripture, etc.”

The Protestant response at this point is often an attempt to use the same argument against the Catholic. “How do you know the Scriptures are inspired? Your reasoning is just as circular because you say the Church is infallible because the inspired Scriptures say so and then say the Scriptures are inspired and infallible because the Church says so!”

The Catholic Church’s position on inspiration is not circular. We do not say “the Church is infallible because the inspired Scriptures say so, and the Scriptures are inspired because the infallible Church says so.” That would be a kind of circular reasoning. The Church was established historically and functioned as the infallible spokesperson for the Lord decades before the New Testament was written. The Church is infallible because Jesus said so.

Having said that, it is true that we know the Scriptures to be inspired because the Church has told us so. That is also an historical fact. However, this is not circular reasoning. When the Catholic approaches Scripture, he or she begins with the Bible as an historical document, not as inspired. As any reputable historian will tell you, the New Testament is the most accurate and verifiable historical document in all of ancient history. To deny the substance of the historical documents recorded therein would be absurd. However, one cannot deduce from this that they are inspired. There are many accurate historical documents that are not inspired. However, the Scriptures do give us accurate historical information whether one holds to their inspiration or not. Further, this testimony of the Bible is backed up by hundreds of works by early Christians and non-Christian writers like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, and more. It is on this basis that we can say it is an historical fact that Jesus lived, died, and was reported to be resurrected from the dead by over 500 eyewitnesses. Many of these eyewitnesses went to their deaths testifying to the veracity of the Christ-event (see Lk. 1:1-4, Jn. 21:18-19, 24-25, Acts 1:1-11, I Cr. 15:1-8).

Now, what do we find when we examine the historical record? Jesus Christ—as a matter of history–established a Church, not a book, to be the foundation of the Christian Faith (see Mt. 16:15-18; 18:15-18. Cf. Eph. 2:20; 3:10,20-21; 4:11-15; I Tm. 3:15; Hb. 13:7,17, etc.). He said of his Church, “He who hears you hears me and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Lk. 10:16). The many books that comprise what we call the Bible never tell us crucial truths such as the fact that they are inspired, who can and cannot be the human authors of them, who authored them at all, or, as I said before, what the canon of Scripture is in the first place. And this is just to name a few examples. What is very clear historically is that Jesus established a kingdom with a hierarchy and authority to speak for him (see Lk. 20:29-32, Mt. 10:40, 28:18-20). It was members of this Kingdom—the Church—that would write the Scripture, preserve its many texts and eventually canonize it. The Scriptures cannot write or canonize themselves. To put it simply, reason clearly rejects sola scriptura as a self-refuting principle because one cannot determine what the “scriptura” is using the principle of sola scriptura.

Let us now consider the most common text used by Protestants to “prove” sola scriptura, II Tm. 3:16, which I quoted above:

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

The problem with using this text as such is threefold: 1. Strictly speaking, it does not speak of the New Testament at all. 2. It does not claim Scripture to be the sole rule of faith for Christians. 3. The Bible teaches oral Tradition to be on a par with and just as necessary as the written Tradition, or Scripture.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood (italics added) you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

In context, this passage does not refer to the New Testament at all. None of the New Testament books had been written when St. Timothy was a child! To claim this verse in order to authenticate a book, say, the book of Revelation, when it had most likely not even been written yet, is more than a stretch. That is going far beyond what the text actually claims.

As a Protestant, I was guilty of seeing more than one sola in Scripture that simply did not exist. The Bible clearly teaches justification by faith. And we Catholics believe it. However, we do not believe in justification by faith alone because, among many other reasons, the Bible says, we are “justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24, emphasis added). Analogously, when the Bible says Scripture is inspired and profitable for “the man of God,” to be “equipped for every good work,” we Catholics believe it. However, the text of II Tim. 3:16 never says Scripture alone. There is no sola to be found here either! Even if we granted II Tm. 3:16 was talking about all of Scripture, it never claims Scripture to be the sole rule of faith. A rule of faith, to be sure! But not the sole rule of faith.

James 1:4 illustrates clearly the problem with Protestant exegesis of II Tim. 3:16:

And let steadfastness (patience) have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

If we apply the same principle of exegesis to this text that the Protestant does to II Tm. 3:16 we would have to say that all we need is patience to be perfected. We don’t need faith, hope, charity, the Church, baptism, etc.

Of course, any Christian would immediately say this is absurd. And of course it is. But James’s emphasis on the central importance of patience is even stronger than St. Paul’s emphasis on Scripture. The key is to see that there is not a sola to be found in either text. Sola patientia would be just as much an error as is sola scriptura.

Not only is the Bible silent when it comes to sola scriptura, but Scripture is remarkably plain in teaching oral Tradition to be just as much the word of God as is Scripture. In what most scholars believe was the first book written in the New Testament, St. Paul said:

And we also thank God… that 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… (I Thess. 2:13)

So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions you have been taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.

According to St. Paul, the spoken word from the apostles was just as much the word of God as was the later written word.

When it comes to the tradition of Protestantism—sola scriptura—the silence of the text of Scripture is deafening. When it comes to the true authority of Scripture and Tradition, the Scriptures are clear. And when it comes to the teaching and governing authority of the Church, the biblical text is equally as clear:

If your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone … But if he does not listen, take one or two others with you … If he refuses to listen … tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Mt. 18:15-17)

According to Scripture, the Church—not the Bible alone—is the final court of appeal for the people of God in matters of faith and discipline. But isn’t it also telling that since the Reformation of just ca. 480 years ago—a reformation claiming sola scriptura as its formal principle—there are now over 33,000 denominations that have derived from it?

For 1,500 years, Christianity saw just a few enduring schisms (the Monophysites, Nestorians, the Orthodox, and a very few others). Now in just 480 years we have this? I hardly think that when Jesus prophesied there would be “one shepherd and one fold” in Jn. 10:16, this is what he had in mind. It seems quite clear to me that not only is sola scriptura unreasonable and unbiblical, but it is unworkable. The proof is in the puddin’!

If you liked this post and you would like to dive deeper into this topic and more, click here.

with a inviting title like that you know this is all offered in a spirit of love.

can we just top posting articles that merely serve to be a springboard into backhanded insults at other denominations?

bdcause you aren’t gonna have anything but fights with an article that starts out with a title like that.

I feel sorry for Tim. He’s a failed Protestant who has to attack his former faith in order to justify his leaving it. That he imagines attacking the authority of the Word of God in favor of a fallible, human institution that has and will continue to make errors only shows that desperation. It’s not missed that Staple presumptuously makes the sacred Scriptures subject to the authority of men rather than how God intended His word that He sent forth. It WILL accomplish all that He intends no matter how much deluded men throw it its path. The gates of hell truly cannot prevail against the truth - it will penetrate the thickest walls of human and demonic deceit and free those whose hearts are diligently seeking God.

Whether unintentional or not, he doesn’t get “sola scriptura.”

And it’s not surprising, either, that Tim Staples apparently doesn’t believe in the literal history of Genesis 1-11 - the Creation account, the fall of Adam and Eve, and the account of the Flood and Noah’s Ark.

http://www.biofides.eu/is-genesis-to-be-understood-figuratively/?lang=en

I was only able to listen to the first 2+ minutes of the five, but from that he seems in the evolution camp. He clearly says, though, that he doesn’t take Genesis 1-11 literally. And I would be surprised if most of those Christians who convert to Catholicism weren’t also. I’ve rarely been able to find what these converts have to say about Genesis and Creation versus evolution, though, and have to wonder if the oversight, if it’s proven out, isn’t intentional. It would be one of the last things they would want to bring up to Bible-believing Christians.

For example, I had about six different Protestants respond to the following question with rants. But not one of them responded with a “yes” or a “no.”

Is the following a formally valid syllogism or a formally invalid syllogism?

Emily is the mother of Sam.
Sam is a fireman.
Emily is the mother of a fireman.

LOL! I seem to recall we dealt with this a while ago. Your syllogism is fine if you don't try to import complex ontologies into the terms. Sam being a firemen is one thing, and Jesus being God is quite another. The category of "fireman" does not describe a divine trinity of persons. The formal correctness of the syllogism assumes a proper analogy of terms. Put in colloquial terms, comparing apples to oranges is fruitless. :)

As for yes and no answers, they're fine, if and only if they are answerable that way. How about, when did you stop beating your wife? Not so easy to give a yes or no response, is it? That's called a loaded question. The question makes an assumption of facts not in evidence. If the responder simply says "yes" without qualification, they're admitting a fact that isn't true. Unhelpful, if truth is the objective.

I'm an attorney. In preparing a client for deposition or courtroom testimony, I tell them to watch out for false dilemmas, false "either/or" scenarios. If they need to qualify the answer, then they get to qualify the answer. If the other attorney tries to force them to admit something they really don't think is true, if I spot it first, I'll object, "the question assumes facts not in evidence." If the client spots the problem, they should ask for clarifications, or otherwise present an answer that best represents the truth, but should never allow themselves to be bullied into a false simplicity. Whatever works best for getting at the truth. Wouldn't you agree that is a worthy objective? A simple yes or no answer will do.

Peace,

SR

Here's a post written specifically for you and Staples...

This Staples is a Pentecostal Catholic..He couldn't figure out the scriptures before he was a Catholic and he certainly hasn't improved...

Whether unintentional or not, he doesn’t get “sola scriptura.”

Likely, he has never gotten a clear definition of Sola Scriptura. I don't blame him; I have never either. For example whenever the Assumption of Our Lady comes up, adherents to Sola Scriptura demand that Catholics demonstrate where it is in Scripture. If the adherents to SS want a passage that says "Mary, Mother of Jesus, is in heaven body and soul" no such passage exists. However, we frequently point to Rev. 12. In this passage, a woman in heaven is described as giving birth to a male child destined to rule all nations. The male child is clearly Jesus; the woman is his mother. It is logical to ask if this woman is Mary (the woman who gave birth to Jesus). However, the response I have gotten goes like this, "You're wrong. That woman is Israel. You need to understand the role that Israel will play in Salvation." I have yet to see a clear explanation for how that woman cannot be Mary. There are some difficulties raised by viewing the woman of Rev. 12 as Mary, they are addressed here.

Because of the above, and similar examples, I have a very hard time seeing Sola Scriptura as anything other than "My hatred for Catholicism and my own opinions wrapped in Scripture". If the response concerning the Assumption of Our Lady were "I disagree that the woman is Mary", I would have a much easier time seeing Sola Scriptura a reasonable interpretation of Scripture. I have other reasons for disagreeing with it; however, the above attitude makes it harder to view it as a reasonable interpretation.

The non-circular evidence for the authenticity of the Catholic Church is primarily historical, both as to its hierarchical continuity with the early Church, its doctrinal continuity with the New Testament and the early Church, the miracles of healing and other gifts with which it has been accompanied through the centuries, and the extraordinary holiness of many saints.

Doctrinal continuity with the New Testament...Surely you jest...Assumption of Mary??? Sinlessness of Mary??? Calling clergy father??? The bible condemns your religion...There is no doctrinal continuity...

Those who propagandize against the Catholic Church therefore concoct accusations of forgeries and frauds, attempt to demonstrate that various Catholic beliefs are absent from the New Testament and/or incompatible with it, and studiously ignore the miracles of healing, and miracles of holiness that have accompanied the Church through history.

Sorry Charlie...Those forgeries are proven and a matter of history...

Your religion or no church has ever healed anyone...Ever...

There’s another characteristic I’m noted among propagandized Protestants: a refusal to answer yes-or-no questions, even when the question is exceedingly simple and totally transparent.

Here's the answer to your question then::: NO...

The category of "fireman" does not describe a divine trinity of persons.

Neither does "God" in "Mother of God."

Sure it does. Without adding the full range of confessional qualifiers to the statement, every time it is made, any trinitarian listener is going to understand the term as comprehensive. It's automatic. That's why you make an unqualified statement, to import the whole thing.

Furthermore, when Emily begets Sam, she is his mother in the generative sense. She and the father are both necessary causes for Sam to exist. But for Emily, Sam would not exist. The statement, "But for Mary, God would not exist," is patently false. If you cannot rearrange the terms in both syllogisms in the same way and get the exact same result, the analogy is defective. This comparison between two syllogisms breaks down because the terms are not describing the same category of being.

Peace,

SR

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