Audio only:
Joe reviews Christopher Cloos’ new argument in favor of Sola Scriptura, the Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT).
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and many of you know I recently debated Doug Wilson on Sola Scriptura. If you haven’t seen that debate, you can check it out in the description below. But the debate prompted a lot of good conversations from both sides and one person in particular caught my attention because he offers a brand new argument for Solo Scriptura and for the 66th book Protestant Bible. That person is the Protestant philosopher, Dr. Christopher Klus. Now, Klus honestly recognizes that existing Protestant arguments for solo scriptura and for the canon have a logical gap. They tend to jump from saying that scripture is God breathed, inspired. That’s a point that’s taught by scripture, Calics and Protestants agree upon that. But they jump from that to, therefore, scripture alone is our ultimate norm. Scripture doesn’t appear to teach that, at least not plainly. Catholics and Protestants don’t agree upon that.
Inclusive words.
CLIP:
Gavin Ortland, Keith Mathison, Michael Krueger, Herman Bavnik, and on and on and on. I love all these theologians and I’ve learned a ton from them, but none of them have filled this gap. The inference from scripture is God breathed to scripture alone is the ultimate norm, is asserted over and over again, but it’s never fully explained. Today, that changes. Now,
Joe:
When Kluth says today that changes, what he means is that he is an argument that he thinks is going to finally fill that gap. It’s going to actually prove solo scriptura true. Now, his argument isn’t something from the Bible, that is he’s not claiming to have found a biblical passage that teaches soul scriptura or anything like that. Instead, his argument is that there are certain things which must be true given certain attributes of God’s nature. So he calls this the attribute and scripturation thesis or AIT, but despite that technical sounding name, the basic claim he’s making is pretty simple. Since God is the author of scripture, then scripture will necessarily reflect certain divine attributes. And we agree. As Moses said, the rock, his work is perfect for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just in right is he. A just God is going to command justly.
In fact, we can go further than Klues does and say with Moses that all his ways are just, not just his communicative acts. Klues says that God is the efficient cause and the exemplary cause of the biblical writings, which is true. And he supports this by citing to St. Thomas Aquinas. But if you read the sections that he cites, you’ll notice Thomas isn’t actually talking about the Bible. Thomas is saying that God is the efficient and exemplary and final cause of all things. This, after all, is what it means to say that the heavens are telling the glory of God. Not that the stars are talking about God, but that the goodness and the majesty of creation reveals something about the goodness and the majesty of the creator. As St. Paul says when he’s describing how God has revealed himself through creation, even to the pagans, what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. But the fact that the Bible or indeed any part of creation reflects divine attributes, reveals them. That’s not the same as saying that the created things possess those divine attributes. If you think about it this way, a sculpture reveals something about the genius, the intelligence of the sculptor, but that doesn’t mean that the sculpture is itself self-aware and intelligent. And that distinction is basic, but it’s going to be really important to bear in mind as we take a closer look at Klus’ case because Christopher Klus is going to go from those basic agreed upon facts. There are certain divine qualities, they’re revealed in God’s work, all of his work, including scripture. And he’s going to conclude from this that those facts alone are enough to prove not only that solo scriptura is true, but that it must be true.
And that might sound like a leap, and I think we’ll see it is a leap, but I want to let him explain what I believe is the crux of his argument.
CLIP:
The text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates just that. The text will be clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose. The text will carry ultimate authority because a sovereign being speech carries the normative weight of sovereignty. The text will be self-authenticating because as self-existent beings, communication doesn’t depend on external validation for its standing. None of these are mysterious transfers. Every single one is a logical entailment of what it means for a being with those attributes to communicate.
Joe:
I want you to notice that he doesn’t just say that the Bible is sufficient, clear, self-authenticating, and the ultimate authority. He says that it will be. That’s because his argument is that his theory works not only in the real world, with the Bible that God has actually given us. He claims this would be true in all possible worlds in which God chooses to communicate.
CLIP:
This matters a lot. If God’s communicative perfections are essential, then the entailments from divine attributes to textural properties are necessary. They hold in every possible world where God communicates.
Joe:
Now you’ll notice he’s assuming that God communicates in all possible worlds that he communicates with the Bible and with the Bible alone, that is begging the question. But I want to take a closer look at each of the four claims that he’s making, that his theory shows that the Bible is and in fact must be sufficient, clear, self-authenticating, and the ultimate authority. Now, if you find these kind of videos helpful, I’d invite you to support this channel over at shamelessjo.com. I know whenever I ask, I’ve found you all have been wonderful in stepping up to support, and it really does make a difference. So with that said, let’s turn to the first of Clues’s argument. This idea that scripture must have everything that we need for salvation. This is what is sometimes called the formal sufficiency of scripture. And Clues claims that if God is wise, he is required to make scripture be formally sufficient.
CLIP:
The text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates just that.
Joe:
Over on his Substack, Clues goes further. He claims that the sufficiency of scripture is also required by God’s love. In his words, the text gives you everything you need for salvation because a loving God wouldn’t withhold it. So to put his argument bluntly, Clues is saying that either scripture alone has everything in it you need for salvation or else God is not wives and loving. And he’s insisting on this being true in all possible worlds in which God communicates. But if you think for a moment about the real world and about the actual Bible, you’ll see this is not true and that his reasoning doesn’t actually get him to his conclusion. Now, in one of the defenses he makes of this position, Clues brings up two Timothy 3:15, popular verse raised by many Protestants in which St. Paul reminds Saint Timothy about how from childhood you’ve been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Now, Protestants will sometimes argue from this verse that since God gave us the scriptures for our salvation, therefore they’re all that we need for our salvation or else God failed. But that’s like saying since God gave us beats for our nutrition, therefore we should be able to live on a diet of beats alone or else God failed. That conclusion doesn’t logically follow at all. Second, notice that Paul is talking about the Old Testament, right? These are the writings that Timothy knew from childhood. And we know from history and from scripture itself that God revealed himself progressively that the Old Testament was incomplete on his own and was never intended to stand apart from the preaching of the prophets and then later the New Testament and the apostles preaching. The epistle to the Hebrews opens by telling us that in many and various ways, God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son whom he appointed the heir of all things through whom also he created the world.
In those two verses, Hebrews has told us three important things. First, God doesn’t reveal everything we need all at once. Remember that each of the books that makes up our modern Bible was originally a standalone book or letter, a unique act of divine communication. Second, God doesn’t reveal everything in the same way, for instance, all by writing. Rather, he reveals himself in many and various ways. The greatest Old Testament prophet, Elijah, never wrote a word of scripture. And third, the full revelation of God isn’t a book. It’s not even a collection of books. It’s a person, Jesus Christ, the true word of God. So I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re a Roman living in Judea in the middle of the first century. For our example, you speak Hebrew, but you know very little about Judaism and you know nothing about Christianity.
It’s this weird new movement, calling itself the way, claiming to follow some Messiah from Galilee. And remember at this point, Christianity is still being preached orally alone. The New Testament hasn’t been written down. So at some point you’re wanderings around Judea, you discover a scroll containing the book of Deuteronomy. Now I want to apply Clusis test here. Is God the efficient and exemplary cause of Deuteronomy? Yes. Is Deuteronomy written to help its readers to salvation? Also, yes. Each of the Old Testament writings are written for our salvation, as St. Paul says. Does it follow from that? That you can just rely on Deuteronomy alone, that it has everything you need to be saved and you can ignore the rest of the Old Testament and ignore those Christian preachers orally proclaiming the gospel. Absolutely not and obviously not. But this creates a problem because remember, according to Clues.
The
CLIP:
Text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates just that. So
Joe:
This is a predicament that Clues has posed. Deuteronomy is a text inspired by God. And so if Clues is right about what God’s communication has to be like, Deuteronomy must be sufficient for our salvation or else Clues claims God is unwise and unloving. Now, if you want to know why this argument went wrong, hopefully you can see there’s a kind of unintentional, I think, bait and switch involving the word sufficient. The question should be sufficient for whose purposes. Christopher Clues wants certain things out of the Bible. He wants him to have everything that he needs for salvation. And so he assumes that this is what God wants too, but God never tells us that this is what he wants from scripture. Now it’s true that a wise communicator does know exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates just sad. But a wise communicator doesn’t often communicate everything all at once or even everything in writing alone.
We don’t hand kindergartners a book with everything they’re going to need to graduate college and leave it at that. That’s not wise communication. Well, similarly at The Last Supper, Jesus tells his apostles, “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” So notice he’s explicitly telling them there’s more information he wants to share. He’s going to do it by telling them, not writing it to them, and he’s not going to do it now because they’re not ready. So are the biblical texts sufficient? Well, they’re exactly what God wanted them to be. So in that sense, they’re more than sufficient. But if you’re going to insist on them being something other than what God made them to be, you may not find them sufficient for your purposes. If you insist that Deuteronomy has to have every important doctrine or that any of the books with the Bible or all of the books of the Bible have to have every important doctrine in them, you’re demanding something from the biblical books God didn’t promise you and something that God gives no indication that he intended the books to do.
So the books are sufficient for God’s purposes, they may not be sufficient for your purposes. So let’s move from sufficiency to clarity.
CLIP:
The text will be clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose.
Joe:
Here again, once we go from imagining what the Bible must be like to actually reading the Bible, Clusis theory falls apart. Consider how St. Peter describes the writings of St. Paul in two Peter three. He tells us that Paul’s writings have some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. Now notice he’s told us two different things. Number one, that ignorant people and unstable people misinterpret the text in a way that leads to their own destruction, but don’t miss the other thing he told us that Paul’s writings are actually hard to understand or consider Jesus’s own teaching. Rather than state doctrines plainly, he typically prefers to teach in parables, a choice that confused the disciples enough that they approached him privately to ask about it. And Jesus explained his behavior with a cryptic reply.
“To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything is in parables so that they may indeed see but not perceive and may indeed hear but not understand less they should turn again and be forgiven.” Even the disciples were confused by the parables, even the disciples don’t understand, which is why Jesus then adds, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?” That doesn’t sound like someone who’s committed to communicative clarity in everything that he says and does. You can almost hear the relief in the disciples’ voices at the Last Supper when they say to Jesus, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly not in any figure.” And that doesn’t even touch on the prophetic writings from Isaiah to Daniel to the book of Revelation. These books are filled with rich spiritual imagery that have confused many a reader.
In Acts eight, when Saint Philip asks the Ethiopian eunuch if he understands the scroll of Isaiah that he’s reading, he doesn’t reply, “Of course I do. The text is clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose. He instead answers accurately and humbly. How can I unless someone guides me? ” That line to me is the key. Modern Protestants often assume that the Bible is meant for an individual to pick up on their own, read it for themselves, and then come away knowing everything God wishes to communicate and reveal. But what if that individualistic assumption is the thing that’s wrong? What if God wants you to turn to other people to make sense of the meaning of the text? What if he wants you to turn to the church, the pillar and foundation of truth? Does that really prove that God is not good as clues claims?
I mean, remember, Jesus doesn’t enlighten the crowds listening to the parables. He enlightens the disciples. The Holy Spirit doesn’t fill the Ethiopian’s mind with a perfect individual understanding of Isaiah. He sends him Saint Philip to explain it to him and to baptize him. For Clues’ AIT to work, he’d have to show that Jesus cannot desire this in any possible world because it would be somehow contrary to divine goodness. Let’s turn to the third ultimate authority.
CLIP:
The text will carry ultimate authority because a sovereign being speech carries the normative weight of sovereignty.
Joe:
But the dispute between Catholics and Protestants about solo scriptura isn’t on the scriptura, scripture part, really. It’s on the sola, the alone part. It’s all well and good to say that scripture carries the normative weight of sovereignty. We can agree on that. It doesn’t follow from that that therefore only scripture has this authority that is simply begging the question. In fact, Clues’s argument, if anything, works better against the Protestant position. The church is created by our sovereign by Jesus Christ the King. Jesus is the one who says, “I will build my church.” And Jesus is the one who does so. Creating a church that St. Paul calls the household of God and the pillar and foundation of truth. Why isn’t that enough to bestow the normative weight of sovereignty upon the church built by Christ? The final of the four attributes then is this idea of self-authentication.
Here, I think some context may be helpful. Catholics and Protestants agree that the inspiration of scripture comes from God. It does not come from the church. The church doesn’t turn ordinary writings into divine scripture. Vatican one explicitly points this out. And so on the Catholic side, we’re very clear about this as our Protestants. But where we differ is this. As Catholics regularly point out, one of the glaring problems with solo scriptura is that you can’t use scripture alone to know which books belong in the Bible. It is neither explicitly nor implicitly taught anywhere in scripture. And so the Protestant reformers invented this doctrine of self-authentication to try to explain why we don’t need tradition or we don’t need the church to know which books belong in the Bible and which books don’t. Now, Clues attempts to defend this theory is somehow coming from God by saying that.
CLIP:
The text will be self-authenticating because as self-existent beings, communication doesn’t depend on external validation for its standing.
Joe:
Clues is arguing here from what is sometimes called God’s asaiti. It just means God is uncreated. He’s non-contingent. In philosophical terms, he is necessary, and he’s the explanation for his own existence. But Clues reasons that since God is uncreated, therefore his creation will reflect this by not needing external validation for its standing. But you can’t get from the fact that God is uncreated to, therefore, his creation is uncreated. That doesn’t make any sense. The Bible is contingent and created. There was a time when the Bible didn’t exist and now it does. Remember the statue example where I warned that just because the sculpture possesses intelligence, that doesn’t mean his creation will. Remember as well that all of creation is created by the uncreated God, and that God is the exemplar and efficient cause of all things. Of scripture, yes, but also of a turnup. So if you believe Clues’s arguments, they seem to prove too much.
You’d have to say not only that the Bible must be self-authenticating, but also that a turnip must be. Now, Clusis description of self-authentication is also ambiguous here because you’ll notice he says scripture doesn’t depend on external validation for its standing. Now, if by standing, he just means that the texts are inspired, whether or not anyone ever realizes it, that’s true. That’s what’s sometimes called the ontological authority of scripture. The texts are breathed out by God, whether you recognize it or not. If God inspired a prophet to write a book, but then to bury it for 1,400 years, those texts would still be inspired the whole time, even if nobody alive on earth realized they even existed. But obviously, in such a case, those books wouldn’t be part of any believer’s canon of scripture because no believer would’ve known about them. So to have a canon of scripture, we need more than the ontological inspiration of scripture.
We also need some way to know which books are and are not inspired by God. We need to know that we have all of the books that God wants us to have and that we have only the books that God wants us to have. And there’s nothing within any of the books of the Bible that is going to answer those questions for us. And there’s nothing implicit in the idea of God’s assaility that suggests that there would be. If you’re at all familiar with the history of how we got the Bible or about the ongoing disputes between Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants, about which books belong in the Bible or about the historic disputes between various church fathers or indeed between various Protestant reformers about which books belong in the Bible, then you should know that this idea of the books of the Bible are somehow self-attesting to believers, simply untrue.
There is some need for an external source to tell us which books are the right one because we don’t have that within the text of scripture and believers have never been able to reliably just look at the books and figure it out for themselves. But Clues and Sis, he can prove self-attestation using his theory. So in the early church, there are disputes about whether books like Tobet and 1st and 2nd Macabees belong in the Bible, but there are also disputes about New Testament books, like whether Hebrews or Revelation belonged in the Bible. Now, Klus claims his theory can show us why the Old Testament books that were disputed don’t belong and why the New Testament books that were disputed do belong. And he looks specifically at Tobit and at Hebrews. I’m not going to go exhaustively through his argument. I’m going to just point out a few of the more glaring problems with it.
For instance, he acknowledges that there were disputes about Hebrews, but he says, “Yet notice what nobody questioned.” Nobody questioned whether Hebrews sounded like God. Nobody said that theology was deficient, the Christology confused, or the argument unworthy of divine inspiration. The dispute was about who held the pen, not about whether the content bore marks of divine origin. But I want you to compare that with Martin Luther’s description of Hebrews from his 1522 translation of the Bible. Luther claimed that chapters six and 10 of Hebrews flatly denies and forbids to sinners repentance after baptism. And he said the text appears to be against all the gospels and St. Paul’s epistles. Luther’s own assessment that the epistle that we have today was a compilation of various documents of varying quality, and he concluded that we cannot put it on the same level with the apostolic epistles. So I don’t really know what clues means in saying that nobody questions, whether the theology was deficient or whether its arguments were unworthy of divine inspiration because Martin Luther questioned exactly those things.
Similarly, when Clues claimed that nobody in the patristic or medieval period denied Hebrew’s doctrinal authority, I simply don’t know what he means by that because he’s already conceded that Hebrews wasn’t on many of the early lists of canonical books. Clues also tries to show the superiority of Hebrews to Tobin by saying that Hebrews exhibits no counter testimony against its own divine origin. It doesn’t apologize for its quality. It doesn’t say prophets have ceased. It doesn’t identify itself as a human digest of prior research. But if identifying itself as a human digest of prior research is a countertestimony to divine inspiration, what does that say for the gospel of Luke, which begins with Luke announcing that in as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, that Luke himself will offer his own orderly account since he’s followed all things closely for some time past.
That sounds like the very human digest that Kluth thinks indicates a book isn’t inspired scripture. But I would just say this, as far as I can tell, rather than offering any kind of coherent case flowing from divine attributes, Klus’s arguments for which books do and don’t belong in the Bible appears largely ad hoc. He likes how Hebrews reads, he doesn’t like how Tobet reads. He’s troubled by surface level contradictions in Tobit. He’s not troubled by surface level contradictions in the books of the Bible he accepts. Whatever you think of that, those aren’t convincing or principled reasons by which someone can know which books belong in the Bible, and they certainly don’t flow from necessity from God’s asaety or goodness or any other divine property. Now I want to be clear to those of you watching, God could have created a text like the one that Dr. Klus imagines.
My point is simply that nothing in God’s nature requires that he do so and nothing in history or in the Bible itself leads me to believe that he did do so. But this is also why I’m not impressed with what Clues calls his diagnostic principle, a kind of emotional appeal that he suggests his viewers use against Catholics. I’m
CLIP:
Going to introduce the diagnostic principle, the question, which divine attribute failed that you can press against every Catholic denial of a textual property.
Joe:
But this argument is only convincing if you beg the question. If you start out by assuming that God reveals himself only by writing and by scripture alone is how he wants everything to be governed, God wants solo scriptura, so either soul scriptura is true or else somehow God seems to have failed. So maybe he’s not good enough or powerful enough to get what he wants. For instance, Klus claims, “When the Catholic argues that the canon requires an infallible church to identify it, they’re implicitly asserting that divine asaiti was insufficient to produce a self-authenticating communication. The text on their account can’t make itself known without institutional certification.” That’s simply false. The Catholic belief is not that God could not make a self-authenticating Bible. He clearly could have. He could have given us a divinely inspired table of contents. He could have given us texts which radiate divine light whenever we read them, so it’s very easy to tell which are inspired or uninspired texts.
God could do that. The Catholic argument is that he didn’t do that, not that he couldn’t. So acting as if our argument is that God couldn’t have created solo scriptura or couldn’t have created a self-authenticating canon, that’s not a steel man of the Catholic view. It’s a straw man. And for that reason, this diagnostic question appears manipulative and unserious, like asking someone, “When did you stop beating your wife?” It’d be like me saying to a Protestant, “Well, an essential attribute of God is that he is all true. We agree on that. He cannot air.” So logically, my claim, anyone he calls to lead his people must be infallible, flows from divine attributes. So why do you deny the truthfulness of God? Why do you think he wasn’t powerful enough to make your pastor infallible? Look, that’s not a serious diagnostic. That’s an emotional ploy. The question isn’t about what God can do.
The question is about what God has done. Catholics will freely concede that God could have created a world which solo scripture is true, but if Clues is right, God can’t create a world in which he gives us a Bible, but not solo scriptura. And I think that alone should reveal which of us is imposing upon God certain manmade in arbitrary restrictions. And I think that alone should reveal his arguments to be false. After all, the real world in the late 1st century AD is a world in which God has given us the biblical texts, but there are also living apostles preaching, binding doctrine orally, and sola scriptura is not true during those times, as is overwhelmingly agreed upon by Catholics and Protestants alike. So while I applaud Dr. Klus for his honesty and admitting the holes and Protestant theories about Solascriptora, but the canon of scripture, I don’t think that his theory get Protestants any closer to filling those holes.
And it’s not all that surprising because the argument has been fiercely fought about for about 500 years. There have been many versions and frameworks proposed to prove sola scriptura, many various definitions given, and we’ve found many attempts to justify the 66 book canon of scripture. Theologians and apologists, people like Wes Huff have attacked the issue of the canon. And oddly enough, Wes kind of makes an argument from tradition to justify there being only 66 books. So if you want more on this topic, you can watch my breakdown of Wes’ defense of the canon of scripture and how while it seems to make sense on the surface, his argument doesn’t hold up on closer examination. For shamous popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.