Is Sola Scriptura True? :: Protestants vs Roman Catholics

All right, all right, thank you for joining me on this episode of The Gospel Truth. I'm your host, Marlon Wilson, and we have another fantastic debate today.

You know, I love two -on -two debates, and this is another one for you, and I'm excited for this one.

Solo Scriptura, Solo Scriptura True, that's what we're going to be debating today, but before I bring

Peter, Joe, Merrick, and Jeremiah in to introduce themselves, I do want to go ahead and encourage you to like and subscribe to The Gospel Truth, hit that notification bell, make sure you do that so you can stay in the loop with what

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Also, we have a whole bunch of shows here coming up here in the future that I want you guys to be aware of, all right?

I have Trey Fisher, Travis Thomas. Trey Fisher is with Cultish.

He does a podcast, Cultish. They're associated with Apologeist Church, and he is going to be jumping on debating

Travis Thomas, who is with the Church of Christ, and as you can see, the title had the topic is two topics there, but we're only going to be dealing with one of those, and that's going to be at what point is one justified, so we're going to be debating that, and Trey Fisher is actually a good friend of Jeremiah Nortera, who is actually joining us today, so I'm excited for this debate.

I've been talking to Trey, and Trey is super -duper excited. He is amped up for this debate, so I'm looking forward to this one.

After that is Christian Tradition Infallible. I have Craig Truglia. I can't pronounce his name, man.

I'm terrible with names. If you don't know that by now, I am absolutely terrible with names, like Joe, one of the apologists that's debating today, his last name,

Joe, I'm just letting you get your hands up, Joe. I might tear it up, man. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry. I don't mean to harm it, but anyway, so we've got this debate coming up.

This is Paul Fassie and Craig. They're going to be jumping on. It's Church Tradition Infallible.

After that, we have a first hell debate on the gospel truth. I have Chris Gate, truth to fan, the great hell debate.

The premise is obviously more worded and more nuanced, and we'll get into the premise once the day of the debate, but nonetheless, this debate is going down, and it's coming up here within the next several weeks, so be on the lookout for that.

After that, I have Daniel Allgood and Luke Betts is the physical nation of Israel, still

God's special chosen people. That's coming up here. It should be a fun debate, and I'm looking forward to it.

Once again, if you have yet to do so, make sure you are subscribing and hitting that notification bell so you don't miss out on anything.

Please do it. Hit the notification bell because you don't want to miss out on any of these debates, and that's a special thing about seeing these debates live, that you're able to actually interact with the live audience as they're in the live chat right now, so make sure you are in it to win it and don't miss out on any of this stuff, all right?

That said, I do have my guest here, and they are as excited as I am for this debate.

This is going to be a fun, fun debate, and if you guys remember Jeremiah, Jeremiah actually participated in the

God's Truth First in -person debate. We flew out to Arkansas, me and my wife, and we had a grand time and met some of the church family that they have and met their pastor,

Nathan, and we had a glorious, wonderful time at this debate, and I am so thankful for Jeremiah for stepping in and doing this debate.

I think it turned out very well. If you have yet to check it out, make sure that you jump on God's Truth, it's on there, and Jeremiah, his

YouTube page, Watchdog Apologetics, the Dog Apologetics, should I say, and he has debate on his channel as well, so make sure that you are flown over there to check that out, and I have

Merrick Kaiser, his partner, Merrick Kaiser, I call Merrick Kaiser the young phenom, you know, because he's a young guy, man, but boy, he's a formidable opponent, man, and he's won the

God's Truth a couple times, man, and he's done very well, and I think him and Jeremiah are going to tag team very well together, and I also have

Peter and Joe. Peter, if you don't know Peter, man, y 'all need to go check out his debate he did with Dr.

James White on this very same subject matter, Sola Scriptura, you need to go check him out, man, because I think it turned out very well, and from what

I understand, Peter's one of the best, man, one of the best RC apologists out there, so make sure that you are checking him out, and you got

Joe, and I think he's with Catholic Answers, I believe it is, Catholic Answers, I think I said that right,

I probably got it backwards or anything, but he is one of the best apologists out there for the RC camp as well, so these guys are rearing up and ready, and let me bring these guys up so I can tell you a little bit more,

I gave a full -blown introduction myself, I don't know what else you guys have to tell these folks out there, but I gave pretty much a good introduction, but I'm going to allow you guys to introduce yourself, first I want to say, how's everyone doing, and are you guys ready to do this?

Let's go, baby! Yeah, great, yes! Cool, man, so I want to give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves to the audience, tell them a little bit more than what

I told you, and just tell them what you do, where they can come follow you, your YouTube page, blogs, whatever you do, tell them where they can come find you, all right?

So I'll start with Peter and Joel, go ahead and give a quick introduction yourself. Okay, well, yeah, sure,

I'm happy to, hello, my name is Peter Williams, I am British, as you can tell, hello from the future, by the way,

I'm a few hours ahead of you all, and I do many things, I am

Media Communications Manager for the Anscombe Biophysics Centre in Oxford in England, I am a research consultant, a political consultant, a

Borough Council candidate in the upcoming elections, and I moonlight as a Catholic apologist, which is why

I'm here, so yes, you can find me on social media, just look up Peter D. Williams, the

D stands for danger, no it doesn't, but yes, just search for me on that and you'll find various things.

And I'm Joe Heschmeier, as you can see from my description, I am negative, that's just a general personality trait, but also the position

I've got on this debate, now I'm an apologist for Catholic Answers, I used to be a seminarian for the

Roman Catholic Church, before that I was an attorney, and these days I write articles and books,

I've got four books, Who Do You Say That I Am? Finding Your Identity in Christ, A Man Named Joseph, which is, as you might imagine, about St.

Joseph, Pope Peter, which is on the papacy, and my most recent book is called The Early Church Was a

Catholic Church, I do a lot of stuff at Catholic .com, I also have a blog called

Shameless Potpourri, and I'm in the process, a very slow process, of starting a podcast, also to be called

Shameless Potpourri. Alright, cool, thank you guys so much for the introductions, alright,

Merrick and Jeremiah, you guys are up next, and why don't you guys go ahead and give a quick introduction of yourselves.

Alright, I guess I'll go first, well my name is Jeremiah Nortier, I've been so blessed to be able to not only meet

Marlon, but Merrick here as well, I've had the honor of being on The Gospel Truth a number of times, I believe that this is my fifth time, and so just a little bit more about me, is

I serve as a pastor and elder at 12 -5 Church, now I just want to tell you a little bit about this church, this is a church plant in Jonesboro, Arkansas, this is northeast

Arkansas, and so if you're a viewer that's tuning in and you're somewhere in the area, please look us up online, we'd love to have you come visit and just experience the loving family that we have at 12 -5

Church, and so I serve there, I also have a heart and desire for apologetics, and so I've had a soft launch for the apologetic dog, which you can kind of see the smoking logo behind me, it's so tempting to just want to hold the apologetic dog as we talk, so a little bit about that is, it's kind of like a guard dog mentality, we want to guard the truthfulness of the gospel that's been entrusted to us, we want to avoid pagan philosophy, we want to avoid contradictions of what are falsely called knowledge, and so that's a lot of my heart and desire, and I just have so much support from my church family, and my wife, she is definitely my better half, her name is

Allie Nortier, and so she is with my church right now, viewing live, and so Merrick, I just want to kick it over to you, man.

Sure, thanks, well, I'm Merrick, I'm a kid from Indiana, I don't have much content out there, but if you want to contact me,

I'm on Facebook, so. Alright, good stuff, guys. Very short and quick,

Merrick, very short and quick, there it is, man, it's all good though, man. Alright, so we're going to jump into this debate once again, the topic of this debate is, is

Sola Scriptura true? Alright, Merrick, you're arguing the affirmative, Peter and Joe, you're arguing the negative, so the format is, it's going to be a total of 30 minutes per team, 15 minutes per person, open statement, then we're going to jump right into open discussion, where both parties will get 20 minutes each to lead with questions, and that cross -examination is to be interactive, it means everybody should be involved in the discussion, so for example, if Peter asks

Jeremiah a question, Merrick has the ability to jump in as well, so we can have a real full -fledged cross -examination portion.

Finally, we're going to jump right into, I believe, closing statements, I think there's like 10 minutes, 10 minutes each, I believe it is, if I remember correctly, and then we're going to have some

Q &A from the audience, sounds good? Alright, so the affirmative team is up first for their opening statement, and so who's going first,

Merrick or Jeremiah? Me. Alright, alright

Jeremiah, let me know, I'll start your time when you begin to speak. Awesome, well thank you so much

Marlon, Merrick, Joe, and Peter, we are discussing is Sola Scriptura true, and we are taking the affirmative,

Merrick and I say yes wholeheartedly, and so when you hear the question, is Sola Scriptura true, this assumes a theory about truth, and so this assumes also an ultimate standard by which we must judge everything to be true or false in light of that ultimate standard, and so Sola Scriptura is a worldview and must be judged in light of that basis, and so I'd like to encourage all the viewers to evaluate and listen carefully, which side is being more consistent with their ultimate foundations and presuppositions, and so Sola Scriptura has been historically defined as Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice, and so we have four major points this evening, where you can understand this in an acronym of CANS, so Scripture is

C, clear, Scripture is A, authoritative, Scripture is N, necessary, and Scripture is

S, sufficient, and so these four points presuppose a transcendental framework for truth itself and its truth -bearing value within Scripture, and so what

I mean by the Sola Scriptura is that God actually has a sufficient word that is clearly communicated.

It's actually necessary for our human existence, and so this Scripture, by its very nature of God, is self -attesting to its own authority by its very nature, and so Scripture declares itself to be

God -breathed, it declares to be truth, and since it's truth, it is therefore cannot be broken.

Scripture is the only infallible rule because that which is infallible is ultimate and must be truth itself.

Truth is that which corresponds to reality as perceived by the sovereign triune

God. You can have councils of men and groups of people gathering together to discuss matters that may be true or false, but it is only the

God of truth that reveals truth to man by His formerly sufficient word.

So when Jesus was praying to our Heavenly Father, He said, Father, Your word is truth.

If Jesus had merely said, Your word is true, it would imply that the word was being judged for its truthfulness by an outside standard, but rather Jesus said,

Your word is truth. Jesus was affirming that that which is God -breathed is the standard of truth and is the measure of all truth claims, and so all of Scripture is

God -breathed and therefore is the only infallible ruling authority that once again is formally sufficient.

Now, that's a very important term that we're going to continue to unpack over the course of this evening because this is a major point that divides the

Protestants and the Roman Catholics. We believe that God's word is formally sufficient, meaning that it has clarity to teach us in matters of truth, knowledge, faith, and practice.

And so it is Scripture that is self -attesting because it reveals a necessary worldview.

God's word must be revealed perspicuously or clearly as the final court of appeal because it is a necessary precondition for human experience.

Truth and knowledge for faith and practice must rest on the solid foundation of God's word clearly revealed to mankind.

Without God's word to guide us in this way, I believe the human experience would be rendered unintelligible.

God's word is the precipium and fount of truth. Therefore, God alone possesses the ability to infallibly interpret

His own word. And so a valuable principle that must be understood in order to gain knowledge of truth is

Scripture interpreting Scripture. Why is that the case? Well, it is because that God in His speaking authority and His word is the only infallible interpreter.

Since sola scriptura is a necessary truth for human intelligibility, this is a claim, once again, to an entire worldview paradigm.

Therefore, all objections must do so by internal critique, attempting to show a logical contradiction, whether you're asking about scriptural sources or extra -biblical sources.

Now, it is my conviction that if there's a failure to do that in this manner, since we're talking about worldviews, I think we're going to be talking past each other, and our

Roman Catholic interlocutors will actually have to borrow from the Protestant worldview of sola scriptura in order to make their case against it.

Now, that's kind of laying the transcendental foundation for our four major points, but I also want to talk about a number of topics that are relevant to this issue of sola scriptura.

So number one, God alone infallibly determines His own word and His own canon of Scripture, which the church receives passably and fallibly.

This really touches on the heart of our disagreement because infallibility belongs to God, and God alone is incapable of error.

And so it is God's infallible word that brings forth guidance to His people in the church.

It is not fallible men gathering together to declare Scripture infallibly.

Those are things that belong to God and Him alone. Rather, we have infallible God using the instruments of fallible men to bring us

His infallible word. And so we'll talk more about that. Number two, prophets.

This is so important for this discussion this evening. Prophets have always been the instrument in which God has given us

Scripture. Many passages, both Old and New Testament, refer to Scripture's prophetic nature.

And so Scripture is written by the pen of a prophet. One of the clearest passages that teach this is 2

Peter 1, where Peter says, We have the prophetic word, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one's own interpretation.

For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul refers to his own writings as the prophetic writings when he wrote

Romans 16. The Apostle John many times refers to his own Scripture in the book of Revelations as prophecy.

And the book of Hebrews begins by telling us it is God that spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

And so one Old Testament verse that says this in Zechariah 7 .12 says, Hear the law and the words of Yahweh of hosts.

He had sent his Spirit through the former prophets. The consistent theme of both Old and New Testament is that the

Holy Spirit inspired prophets to give us Scripture. And some people object and say, What about Luke?

He wasn't an apostle or a prophet. What about Jude and his epistle? The moment that they wrote Scripture, they were functioning as a prophet.

I think that is the only proper way to view that. And so number three, that's the key point here.

Scripture is inspired the moment that it was written by a prophet. Joshua 24 tells us,

Scripture was inspired and authoritative the moment it was written. It wasn't to be waited upon by later ecumenical council or a group at a

Sanhedrin to infallibly define it. The moment that it was written by a prophet, it was immediately the ultimate authority that spoke authoritatively.

So number four, Scripture even gives us these parameters.

Numbers chapter 21 refers to the book of the wars of the Lord. This is a fallible yet very accurate book that contains songs of victories of battles won.

The apostle Paul quotes Greek poets that were fallible men that understood philosophy because they are made in God's image, but they are nonetheless secondary authorities.

And so we even see that the fifth commandment gives parents authorities over their children, yet those parents are not infallible authorities.

And so this is the point that the church can passively receive God's word and to see how this was accomplished through the secondary authorities, such as historical documentation, tradition, not as an ultimate authority, but a fallible one, and also through scholarship.

These are all wonderful secondary authorities. And so number five, I want to slow down for a second.

I really want you to hear this. I hope this really gets deep into more dialogue this evening.

Sola Scriptura is not just practiced by the saints after the completion of the canon, but also during the time of progressive revelation during the time of Old Testament and all the way into the

New Testament. And so I think the number one advocate of Sola Scriptura is Jesus Christ himself. In Matthew 5, he tells us that he did not come to bring a new standard to the law of Moses or speak outside that foundation.

Rather, Jesus came to fulfill what the Old Testament gave to us. And Jesus held men accountable to this.

In Luke 24, he said, Jesus held the

Pharisees accountable and rebuked them. He said, Jesus did not just refer to Scripture as being primary among equal authorities, but it is the standard in which he held all men accountable to.

And I actually think in Acts 15, we have another example of the Jerusalem Council actually appealing to Scripture as the final arbiter.

Scripture was the final court of appeal to prove their case that salvation for Gentiles was by grace through faith, not by doing works of Mosaic law by circumcision and becoming a

Jew outwardly. The Apostle Paul, I think he too was a major advocate of Sola Scriptura.

He never went beyond what was written in the Old Testament. Rather, he spoke orally the gospel deposit that he received from Jesus and was in accordance with the

Old Testament Scriptures. The Apostle Peter teaches us that we have a more sure prophetic word, even more sure than our personal experiences.

And all the saints of old, they said that we are to be careful to do all that is written in Scripture.

And so my final major point, number six here, What this means is

Sola Scriptura is a theological reality, right? We say when God speak, because it's

God, he alone is infallible. Everything finds itself back to what he has revealed. And so this is not a discussion about the extent of the canon.

The church is able to look to secondary authorities and be convinced of how they have received the canon over time.

But I want to say something that hopefully perks up your attention. I do believe that Scripture gives us the parameters of Scripture.

So let me briefly just tell you what that is, and I will be done. Hosea 3 and Amos 8, they give us the context of the exile of Israel and then predict the 400 years of silence where no revelation came from God until the first coming of Messiah.

Now it's interesting because we can look to secondary authorities such as 1 and 2 Maccabees, the second book of Baruch, tells us that there was no prophetic word during this time.

Other secondary authorities like the Talmud taught that prophecy ceased after Malachi. Other secondary authorities like Jewish historians

Philo and Josephus, they rejected the Apocrypha as being the Jewish canon. And so when we go back to Scripture, Jesus affirms the

Tanakh. Jesus said in Matthew 24, you have the law of Moses, the prophets, and the collection of writings.

Elsewhere, Jesus quotes the span of the Tanakh. It's from Genesis to 2 Chronicles. He said, the blood of the righteous

Abel, all the way to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechi. I believe that Jesus is purposely excluding the

Apocrypha books because he did not see them as canonical. And so the Old Testament in Isaiah chapter 8 and Daniel chapter 9 tells us of the utter distress and anguish of Israel during the time of the destruction of the second temple.

This would be a time where there would be no vision of prophecy or prophet. They would be sealed up.

This tells us that God is no longer giving us revelation. And that's why Isaiah declared to hold to the teachings and the testimony.

And if no one speaks according to this word, it is because they have no truth. And so lastly here, winding down, the book of Revelation, I believe, was written just prior to the destruction of the second temple in 70

AD. That prophecy reaches all the way to the eternal state and warns us not to add or take away from the words of this prophecy.

And so I believe the advocates of anti -Sola Scriptura, they actually differ on almost every major doctrine there is.

When it comes to the nature of God, anti -Sola Scriptura, they are anywhere from Unitarians all the way to polytheists.

When it comes to salvation, anti -Sola Scriptura, they say you've got the exclusion of the 144 ,000 only being saved all the way to universalism.

And so I think it's those who actually hold confessionally to Sola Scriptura. There is such strong unity on first -tier gospel issues.

We have confessionally affirmed that God is triune. We believe in the

Trinity. We also have always believed that there is a single person of Jesus who is both human and divine, and that salvation is by faith alone.

Thank you so much. All right, good stuff. Thank you, Jeremiah, for the opening statement.

All right, Jeremiah, Merrick, you want to share your screen? And let me stop your time.

Yeah, I can hear you. Can you expand that screen some to make it full screen? Let's see if I can.

Is that a little better? Yeah, I think that's better. That's much better. Great.

All right, well, grace and peace to all who are listening. I would like to start by saying that this is not at all a vain theoretical debate concerning the relation between the

Scriptures and the church. I want people to consider with utmost honesty this question as the certainty of faith is at stake if eternal life and the promises

God gives concerning it are dependent on human authority. So allow me to elaborate on the acronym that Jeremiah mentioned.

First, the clarity of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, Scripture as this necessary norm of doctrine, and lastly, the sufficiency of Scripture.

So the acronym is CANS. Firstly, the clarity of Scripture. Scripture is perspicuous or clear because it is

God speaking. How can one be saved through faith in the message of Scripture if that message was not clear and efficacious?

God works through the preached message because it is certain and true, dividing bone and marrow, Hebrews 4, with its universally intelligible message.

We believe that Scripture will not, it doesn't only illuminate the one who already understands it, right? But it itself makes wise the simple and is a means unto salvation.

Scripture is a light, a lamp shining in the dark place, and therefore on this basis it enlightens the minds and hearts of men, and therefore it must be clear.

Jeremiah and I will be referencing the latter half of Psalm 19 a lot in this debate. And even if, say, the instruction or the law is just in reference to God's moral commandments, if these truths are perfect and sure, how much more then is the gospel or God's word in its entirety?

So firstly, here's a couple of misconceptions about this doctrine. Holy Scripture itself is divine and authentic, though man in his sin may not acknowledge it, just as the sun itself is light, though if all the men in the world were blind, they couldn't see it.

The world is blinded by sin after all. Paul even says, and even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, 2

Corinthians 4. This question is whether the dogmas of faith, the knowledge of which is necessary for salvation, have been set forth clearly in the

Scripture. Secondly, we're not excluding the pious effort that one may make to application of reading and interpreting and meditating the

Scripture. Thirdly, some things in the Scripture are more clear than others, and things which are said obscurely in one place are explained more clearly in another.

This is known as the analogy of faith, and it's something Irenaeus talks about in regards to the unclear parables and the clear ones.

Fourthly, in regards to those things in the Scripture which are less clear than others, understanding them is not an absolute necessity for salvation or for understanding an article of faith.

Here's a quote I want to read you. You may be familiar with. There comes a heathen and says, I wish to be a

Christian, but I do not know whom to join. There's much fighting and faction among you, much confusion.

Which doctrine am I to choose? How shall we answer him? Each of you, says he, asserts,

I speak the truth. No doubt this is in our favor. For if we told you to be persuaded by arguments, you might well be perplexed.

But if we bid you believe the Scriptures, and these are simple and true, the decision is easy for you.

If any agree with the Scriptures, he is a Christian. If he fight against them, he is far from this rule.

To be in conflict with Scripture's clear teaching is to be wrong. So let's move on to the next thing in Cairns, the authority of Scripture.

Fundamental in Roman Catholic theology is the proposition that Scripture derives its authority from the church. Jesuit Jacob Gretzer, highly esteemed by Pope Clement VIII, and Cardinal Bellarmine, of course, said the following, unless the witness of the church approves the divine revelation of the canonical books and the majesty and authority of the books of the canon would never remain known to us.

Here's another quote. Not another quote, sorry. Just arranged my slides today. Here we must notice that it is not only

Roman Catholics who attempt to downplay the authority of the Scriptures. So modern Enlightenment thought will try to tell us that the authority of Scripture needs to be conditioned on empirical and rationalistic observation, whereas for Catholics, it depends on the authority of the church.

And this is what Jeremiah was saying. All these other worldviews which reject Sola Scriptura are really going along the same teaching.

In both cases, Scripture is not absolute. That is to say, not resting on human authority, specifically of the church, is denied.

Here, Sola Scriptura is an affirmation that faith rests not upon human authority or the church, but on Scripture as the living voice of God.

St. Bonaventure, therefore, states, For the church is founded upon the pronouncements of the

Holy Scriptures. If they are deficient, so is the church's understanding. For since the church is founded upon Holy Scripture, those who do not know

Scripture do not know how to guide the church. Robert Prius exemplifies the relationship between the

Scripture and the church as follows. The duty of the church as against Scripture is to testify concerning it, protect it, preach it, interpret it, and study it.

But all this the church performs as the handmaid of Scripture, not as the Lord over Scripture.

It is to be conceded that the divinity of Scripture may be known a posteriori from the witness and arguments of the church.

But this fact does not imply that the authority of the Scripture depends upon the testimony of the church or upon its authority.

As a witness to the authority of Scripture, the church testifies, this is really important, testifies to a fact already in existence.

The church does not give existence to the fact. Similarly, Johann Gerhard states,

We can see that the church is first witness, second guard, third defender, fourth herald, and fifth interpreter of Holy Scripture.

We deny, however, that because of this, the authority of Scripture either simply or as concerns us even uniquely depends on the church.

Francis Turchin gives a useful analogy. Consider how a law does not derive its authority from the subordinate judges who interpret it or from the heralds who promulgate it, but from its author alone.

Think of how excellent gold and gems are, but notice their excellency doesn't depend on the testimony of the jeweler who inspects them.

Similarly, as Protestants, we confess that the authority of Scripture does not depend on the authority of the church who testifies of it.

Rather, the authority of the Scripture is inherent, divine, and found internally. In conclusion,

St. Augustine states, He, God, produced which is canonical, which has paramount authority, and to which we yield assent in all matters of which we ought not to be ignorant of, and yet cannot know of ourselves.

It must be noted that, of course, our opponents grant that Scripture is divine and that it owes its authority to God, obviously, but Roman Catholic theology only makes this concession on the condition that it is understood as Scripture viewed against itself and in a very absolute sense.

So far as man is concerned, Scripture has no authority except by the church. 1

Thessalonians 2 .13 reads, And we also thank God constantly for this, 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, which is at work in you believers.

Here, Paul gives praise to the Thessalonians for not rejecting him and his companions' preaching, but recognized they accepted it not as the word of men, but as the word of Almighty God, even though it was preached by men.

Who would not shudder at the thought of resisting God? This proves that Scripture has its authority among us from internal standards.

God speaks, and we recognize it. There is an inner effectiveness in Scripture from which God speaks to believers through his

Spirit that simply does not depend on the authority of the church. Jeremiah alluded to John 17, right?

Thy word is truth, that famous verse. But notice contextually, this word, which is truth, it sanctifies

God's people. Full stop, right? This is normative. There's no other criteria or testimonies necessary or needed to convince us that God truly is speaking.

The faith of humans is not placed on a human witness. As Kuyper once said, authority over men cannot arise from men.

So let's move on to the in, in cans. Scripture as the only necessary or norm of doctrine.

Scripture is the only norm, rule, or standard of articles of faith because it itself is intrinsically authoritative.

Going back to that last point, and really all these points are connected. Scripture is the norma normans, literally the ruling rule.

This is different from the norma normata, the ruled rule, a secondary norm that is only relatively necessary in reference to something or someone else, i .e.

the church authority. Here we believe that God obligates his church to go to Scripture alone to settle all controversial issues pertaining to doctrine and life and these important articles of faith we talk of.

Think of how the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah were both catalyzed by a return to the word of God as the only norm of doctrine and life.

Conceptually, think of Galatians 6, right? Paul calls the doctrine he set forth in his epistle a canoni, referring to, quote, a reed or some other object used as a measuring stick.

In a more metaphorical sense, referring to a rule slash principle or a point of reference that may be used as a standard.

Sure, all revelation from God is authoritative and binding. This is a given. Certainly, the oral teaching of God's holy apostles were.

They were authoritative. But because Scripture is the only special revelation we possess today from God, by default, it is the only norm of doctrine for the

Christian. With the completion of the canon, immediate revelation ceased, as Jeremiah said.

Therefore, objective revelation, that is, revelation viewed as that which has been revealed to God's people, is to be sought in Scripture today, not

Scripture alone. Yves Cungar, who our Catholic interlocutors may be familiar with, recognizes this.

This is something we want to draw out. He says, But if Scripture is in need of interpretation, as has always been recognized, how much more is this true of tradition, which is much less fixed and less indefinite, so that it must be sought in a great number of documents of varying value and often doubtful meaning?

There is hardly anything more obscure than tradition. It is absurd to reduce finding the truth of the

Christian Scriptures to a vague, historical search for the right tradition. The origin of traditions are often unknown.

They often contradict each other, and the effects of this are clearly seen in the Roman Church, and really any church which does, in fact, reject

Sola Scriptura. This question of certainty, i .e., how can we find certainty in Scripture versus tradition, this shows that we need

Scripture as the final norm. So, let's move on, lastly, to the sufficiency of Scripture.

God, as the author of Scripture, informs men and women of the nature of His will for their lives. A Scripture which is not sufficient to do these things is contrary to the reason it was written in the first place.

When I ask, as Francis Schaeffer did, how should we then live in an environment where the Christian consensus has deteriorated,

I find that only a strong view of the sufficiency of Scripture can hold back the force of the culture, this culture of death we're living with in, using powerful absolutes that are given in God's Word alone, which is sufficient.

This is not to say that Scripture contains all theological truth. Certainly, there exists a body of theological truth in God which will never be revealed.

In the sufficiency of Scripture, we are referring to a restricted sufficiency in reference to faith in Christ, eternal salvation, articles of faith, etc.,

dogmas. If John's Gospel alone was sufficient for salvation, John 20, 31, these things were written so that you may believe that by believing you may have life in His name, then surely the entirety of Scripture is.

The sufficiency of Scripture also applies to very relevant things such as moral truths. Catholic apologists such as Trent Horne or Robertson Jennings have attempted to point to XYZ moral truths which they don't believe are sufficiently described or mentioned in the

Scriptures. I got a quote here. Abortion, contraception, or even polygamy, and they say, Trent Horne says this, if the

Bible is our only authority we turn to for these moral matters along with theological matters, why does the Bible speak to these moral issues or all the moral issues that affect us in the

Christian life more clearly? I'm thinking I'm going to say why it doesn't. Perhaps that's because God's written Word never aggregates this role for itself to be this kind of only infallible authority.

This also plays into the clearness of Scripture. In contrast to this, what we are presenting tonight, the

Protestant position, we are affirming the following, and this is also the patristic witness. Great is the profit of the divine

Scriptures and all sufficient is the aid which comes from them. For through the holy Scriptures we are trained to action that is pleasing to God and untroubled contemplation.

For in these we find both exhortation to every virtue and dissuasion from every vice.

Every sickness of the soul hath in Scripture its proper remedy. It is the position of Rome, as I've studied, that Scripture is perfect because it directs us to the church, which leads us to salvation.

But this denies the sufficiency of Scripture. Either Scripture is perfect in itself or it is imperfect.

Here's the Latin phrase, Peter might like this, Norma remissua non est norma.

The submissive norm is not the norm. Again, as Jeremiah said, do not confuse sola

Scriptura with either nulla Scriptura or nulla traditio. Scripture is norma normans, the rule that rules, while the creeds and traditions are norma normata, a rule that is ruled.

So, in summary, what is our contention? We contend that no unwritten tradition exists today which sheds light on any art of faith.

Because of this we repudiate the anti -Scriptural, diametrically opposed, and repugnant to the

Word of God traditions of Romanism. Jeremiah and I would like to thank Peter and Joe for this amazing opportunity.

I would like to say thank you for allowing us to engage in this. We hope that this debate is a time of edification where people can come and say, okay,

I want to learn what both sides are saying and I want both sides to be clearly presented. We look forward to engaging you more and we just want to give all the glory to God alone.

Thanks so much. Alright, thank you Jeremiah and Merrick for those opening statements. So now we have

Peter and Joe who are up for the total 30 minute opening statement. And who's going first?

Peter or Joe? I guess Peter because he's getting his PowerPoint ready. Alright, let me let me get you set up.

There we go, that's better. Okay, let me just get the PowerPoint up.

Can you see that? Yes, we can. Excellent.

In that case, I will begin. So thank you very much to Jeremiah and to Merrick and to yourself

Marlon for hosting this. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much indeed. I'll jump straight in. I'm going to argue today to start off with why

Holy Scripture is not the sole, sufficient, infallible ultimate rule of faith for the church.

And in fact, I've just anticipated defining the Protestant position, Sol Scriptura. Obviously, Sol Scriptura means

Scripture alone. We've heard some very good definitions of it so I'll move through this. Alone here functions as an adverb.

Adverbs modify adjectives. So the question is what adjectives are in mind? And we heard some referred to by Jeremiah and Merrick.

So for one, we have sufficient for things necessary for salvation. That's according to the

Anglican 39 articles. And I'm going to be referring to the various different confessions of the

Protestant denominational traditions because I think actually that's important to do to show the historical background here.

The formula of concord which is Lutheran suggests that the scriptures are the sole rule of standard.

So again, that's the Noramundus Domata which we've heard Merrick referred to. That all teachers everything should be estimated and judged by the scriptures alone.

It's the only true standard by which all teachers and doctrines are to be judged. According to the Presbyterian standard, the

Westminster Confession of Faith, second this 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 and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture.

So again, that's a sufficiency point. And this is, of course, repeated within the particular Baptist tradition that the

Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient certain and infallible, rulable, saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.

So here we see actually there's a degree of internal diversity within Protestantism.

You have it is, of course, a denominational tradition. So the criteria differs according to confession.

But there is a core and the core of this idea amongst all the different Protestant traditions is that the

Holy Scriptures constitute the sole, sufficient, ultimate, infallible rule of faith.

And these are distinct concepts. Sufficiency, the idea that scripture is the sufficient source containing all things necessary to salvation of the whole council of God concerning all these different matters, that's one very important concept.

But so is the idea of infallibility, that scripture is the infallible, rulable, saving knowledge, faith, and obedience, and ultimacy, the idea that it's the ultimate standard as well.

It can be condensed into two elements. On the one hand, we have the issue that scripture is the sole source of revelation.

That's where sufficiency comes in. On the other hand, we have this idea that it's the sole rule of faith. That's where infallibility and ultimacy comes in.

In academic presentations, soul scripture is often called the single source theory, the idea that it's the sole source of divine revelation.

But the issue of rule is more extended as it covers magisterial reality. So in this presentation,

I'm going to concentrate on one argument and on one of those elements particularly, that is to say the sufficiency of holy scripture, and an argument that disproves that.

This is foundational because if holy scripture is not sufficient to function as the sole infallible, ultimate rule of faith, then this explodes the entire theory altogether.

And I'm going to argue, just as Jeremiah and Marek have, that actually it's the very nature of holy scripture itself that confesses against the purported sufficiency of holy scripture, and in fact that it cannot be separated from the positive faith, the tradition, and its magisterial custodian, the holy catholic church.

So how do we see this? Well, we see this centrally through the canon of holy scripture, and I don't think anybody is surprised by my raising.

So what do we mean by the canon? Well, canon comes from canon, grating to canon, meaning read, measuring stick, and it was used effectively as a metaphor for a standard by which another thing can be judged, a rule nor more general principle for that purpose.

So when applied to the holy scripture, it means that the authoritative definitive list of texts that are theionistos, the texts that are counted as holy scripture, and actually there are two dimensions to the canon which

James White, Dr. James White, my opponent who has been referred to already, has helpfully called canon 1 and canon 2, the canon 1 being the formal, the ontological canon, what it is, in other words, what is its nature, how it came to be, and canon 2 being the epistemological, or doctrinal canon.

That's to say that signifies our knowledge of what we know and how we know what the canon is as to its content.

In other words, which books are we talking about? So canon 1 refers to the formal ontological canon, signifies what it is, so the question is what is the canon?

Well, canon 1 is the reality of which books are theionistos, God -breathed. This is an artifact, let's say co -product of revelation and that means it came to be, canon 1 came into existence because God inspired certain specific texts, as 2

Peter 1 .21 says, men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. This inspiration and the consequent text created through the instrumentality of the sacred authors constitutes revelation.

These are forms of revelation. God has revealed himself through inspiring these texts. So the canon 1, therefore, the canon in its nature, in its essence, therefore has

God, the Holy Ghost, as its efficient cause, the Holy Spirit, in other words, made it happen, made it, affected it, brought it into being, and the church is its instrumental cause.

That is to say, he is the author of Holy Scripture, and so a canon of text he inspired came about by his act of inspiration through the church.

The canon 2, however, the epistemological or doctrinal canon, signifies what we know and really how we know what books are theionistos.

So in other words, this inspiration happened, but how do we know which books were inspired? Well, canon 2 is an object of revelation.

That is to say, it is a datum of revelation itself because it is a necessary theological truth that needs to be revealed to us.

Why? Because only God knows which books he inspired. We can't know through natural means.

My abstract rationalizing or empirical research, except in so far as I'm historically trying to find out what objective public revelation has happened, cannot bring me to that realization.

God has to reveal his contents of the Holy Scriptures in terms of which Scriptures were inspired to us.

The canon 2 therefore has God, the Holy Ghost, as its primary efficient cause again and the church as its instrumental cause.

He is the revealer of what is Holy Scripture and he has revealed this to and through his church.

So the relevant question is how do we know what is the canon? How do we know canon 2?

Well, somehow, and I say somehow because we simply don't have any historical sources telling us exactly how this happened, but we can surmise, based on what we know, the

Holy Spirit revealed the canon to the apostolic church. After those men who were moved by the

Holy Spirit spoke from God, either they or the church, perhaps through some prophetic charism which was present in the apostolic period of inscripturation, recognized that the

Holy Spirit had inspired those texts. We see this in those cases where St. Paul is recognizing that he is giving a command from God directly, and of course

Peter's recognition that St. Paul has actually written Holy Scripture. The church's knowledge of canon 1, canon 2, therefore, is indeed passive.

It is not active. Just as the church did not create the canon, except instrumentally, the sacred authors were members of the church and the

Holy Spirit used them to write Holy Scripture, so the church did not create canon 2 either.

It had it revealed to her by the Holy Spirit also. This knowledge was then passed down orally and eventually noted down in written form to us today, and there is a word for this, and the word is, or the phrase, rather,

I should say, is unwritten tradition. So by unwritten tradition, in fact, that's not a vague concept at all.

It's a very specific and a very hard concept. We mean a datum of revelation which was received by the apostles for the mouth of Christ himself or from the

Holy Spirit to the apostles themselves, and has come down to the post -apostolic church, including us, transmitted and preserved from hand to hand to the community of faith, the church herself, and in particular her magisterium, her teaching authority, the bishops.

This tradition, canon 2, became obscured, however, as in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries Christians disagreed on what exactly constituted canon 1.

So tradition herself is not sufficient. The books that we have at the back of our

Bibles, Hebrews onwards, excluding 1 Peter and 1 John, all the way to the book of the Apocalypse, are not there because they came chronologically later, but because they were widely disagreed over.

They were called tone antilogomenon, the spoken against by Eusebius of Caesarea in his ecclesiastical history.

And we see in those centuries the Italian uses all the New Testament aside from James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3

John. Origin tells us that Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, and Judah disputed.

St. John Chrysostom seems to exclude the book of the Apocalypse as the sincere of Jerusalem, but St. John Chrysostom also doesn't use the

Catholic epistles, whereas St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Hippolytus, St. Clement of Alexandria, and St.

Cyprian of Carthage, accepted all the book except. So there was disagreement. However, we see authoritative recognition and standardization of the canon throughout the 4th and 5th centuries, ultimately culminating in the

West in the promulgations of the Latin Vulgate. Similarly, the East also settles on the antilogomenon and butyrocanonical texts and centuries from this norm are either minority tolerated theological opinions in the

West or else encysmatic groups in the periphery of Christendom. So I'm thinking, for example, of the

Bushrutha Bible in the Syriac Church, or else the very wide canon of the

Ethiopian Malathosiah Church. So the facts of ecclesiastical history show us that the canon 2 is an unwritten tradition that is effectively eventually authoritative, sterilely recognized in the ordinary magisterium of the

Church. So to summarize that, the canon 2 of Holy Scripture is the knowledge of what texts are indeed theonostos, canonical.

This is a tradition, it's a truth revealed to the Apostolic Church and passed down to us outside of Holy Scripture and as the tradition was obscured it was then magisterially recognized in and by the

Church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost and thus we see authentic Christian teaching proceeds from two sources and is magisterially recognized by the

Church herself. At this point I want to burn some straw men. I've made the artifact -object distinction that Dr.

White uses. I think it's a useful distinction but it's often abused as a false dichotomy. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that the canon is an artifact of revelation but not an object it's quite obviously both those things and I've explained why.

God only knows what text he's inspired and therefore he has to reveal this to us. That's why canon 2 is an object of revelation.

Also, the canon has therefore not been determined as in brought into being by the Church nor does Holy Scripture's innate authority depend on the

Church. The Catholic Church has never claimed that it is either of those two things. Quite the contrary it is magisterially denied this.

The canon has only ever been authoritatively, magisterially recognized by her in her ordinary magisterium that is the consistency of her teaching over time.

The Church is the handmaid indeed as well as the mother, the instrumental source of the Holy Scriptures as of the sacred tradition.

But don't believe me on this point, believe Vatican 1 which says these books of Holy Scripture the Church holds to be sacred and canonical not because she subsequently approved them by her authority but because being written under the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit they have God as their author and were as such committed to the

Church. Also we don't need an exercise of the extraordinary and infallible magisterium by which I mean councils or popes to tell us what the canon is.

Again, the ordinary magisterium suffices for that purpose and indeed the extraordinary and infallible magisterium, in other words councils, only to find the canon to facilitate union with the

Copts in 1442 which was the first time this happened, not indeed 1546. It happened in 1546 for the second time to refute the heretical deletion relegation of the

Deuterocanonical text. So in the last few minutes I just want to give the fundamental canon argument which is the disproof of the sufficiency of Holy Scripture.

Press 1. Scriptural sufficiency entails that Holy Scripture is able to give us all the data of revelation that we need.

I think this is uncontroversial it's granted by the confessions I've cited and indeed by what we heard from Jeremiah and Marek.

2. Holy Scripture is necessary. I won't even go on to that because in fact Jeremiah mentioned the necessity of Scripture in his own speech.

Premise 3. If Holy Scripture is necessary then the knowledge of what is Holy Scripture is also necessary. This is an important point.

If I need the Holy Scriptures then the corollary of this is that I need to know what the Holy Scriptures are. I need to know which books constitute

Holy Scripture. If the church had no earthly idea what they were she wouldn't even have them at all.

And this is true even if we limit scriptural sufficiency to matters relating to salvation as my Anglican friends do.

So if the Holy Scriptures are necessary for those salvific truths then the canon is necessary to access those truths.

If I need to open a safe to get a life -saving medicine it follows I need to know which safe I'm drawn to go to. So the

Holy Scriptures must be sufficient to give us the canon no matter how you limit sufficiency. Conclusion 1 therefore if Holy Scripture is sufficient then it must be able to give us knowledge of what is

Holy Scripture, the canon 2. Premise 4. Holy Scripture cannot give us that knowledge. Holy Scripture is not self -authenticating in the way it defines itself.

There's no inspired contents page. There's no golden index. And for example there is nothing about Esther no matter how historically fitting it might be as an inclusion in the canon that proves that it is inspired.

Neither is that the case also for Titus, Philemon, or Jude. Nothing in these books tells us that they are theonistos.

Even authorship by an apostle is not sufficient because after all there are the lost letters of St. Paul which we do not have.

Holy Scripture is insufficient to give us at least this one necessary datum of revelation. What it itself is.

And this is serious because without that datum we don't really not have infallible certain knowledge of the canon.

We don't even have it at all. Whatever we claim about the content of Holy Writ we don't have canon knowledge unless we've received that revelation from the

Holy Spirit which is nowhere in Holy Writ itself. And therefore Holy Scripture is not sufficient and so Scripture is false.

So I'll just say one or two things before I leave this. It is argued that if the Holy Scriptures are theonistos and there are many things that are theonistos that they alone are infallible and therefore ultimate in authority.

Well firstly Holy Scripture cannot be infallible at all. That's an adjective only rationally and properly attributable to agents.

In other words, persons or personal beings that can actually make choices. What we can say is that the

Holy Scriptures are inerrant and no one should be confused on that point. I absolutely confess the inerrancy of Holy Scripture but what

I will say is that the Holy Scriptures cannot be the only thing that are theonistos because there is a tradition which has been given to us which has the

Holy Spirit as its author and that indeed is the canon of Holy Scripture. As I said if this is a revelation from God then it must have the

Holy Spirit as its author and therefore has an equal authority to the Holy Scriptures.

So not only does the canon explode the sufficiency of Scripture but also the sole infallibility and ultimacy of it too.

And that therefore shows us the true theological epistemology of the Christians, the dual source of Holy Scripture's sacred tradition and the magisterial recognition of both in the

Church Catholic. So when we answer the relevant epistemological question of how we know the canon we find that the answer is that we know it through God revealing it to the apostolic

Church. This datum of revelation being passed down as an oral tradition and the true tradition being canonised, recognised passively by the

Church eventually through time by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The canon is both a demonstration of the truth of the

Catholic formula and a disproof of sole scriptura and the fact that the tradition of the canon is a divine revelation by the

Holy Spirit proves that there is something else which has God as its author and therefore not the sole infallibility or ultimacy.

So therefore for all these reasons, sole scriptura is demonstrably false. And that's where I'll end.

Thank you very much. Alright, thank you so much Peter for your 15 minute opening. Alright, Joe, you're up for your 15 minute opening and I will start your time as soon as you begin to speak.

Alright, well thank you. I guess since I'm going last in the opening statements I might just recap very briefly the case so far.

Jeremiah and Merrick both claim the Catholic position is that Scripture receives its authority because the Church recognizes it, but that's not true.

That straw man is actually explicitly rejected by Vatican I as Peter pointed out. Scripture was God breathed and authoritative of itself before anyone recognized it, but which books are divinely inspired is something that is itself revealed by God and that revelation is not spelled out within Scripture.

We can get into the details of that as we go on, I hope. As Peter points out, we can't know which books are inspired from our own reasoning, from within the text of the

Bible, which requires the tradition which is then explicated by the Church. That's a really important distinction.

Where am I going to go? I'm going to try to do three things in a pretty short amount of time. First, argue that the self -refuting nature of sola scriptura means sola scriptura cannot be true.

That even if the Catholic Church, you don't believe it yet, you can at least say, well, sola scriptura can't be right. Second, that there is another, or you may say an, infallible authority, namely the

Church. And third, that something more than sola scriptura is actually necessary for reliable doctrinal orthodoxy.

So, with that, let's get into it. Was sola scriptura true in the apostolic age is going to be an important part of this question.

So people often say the doctrine of sola scriptura is a circular argument, but it's actually worse than that. A circular argument might be true.

If I say, I believe Smith because Smith says everything he says is true, it's a circular argument. I'm trusting

Smith because I trust Smith. But if Smith is an honest person, the conclusion might still hold, even if I sort of stumbled into the right answer.

A self -refuting argument, on the other hand, is one that literally cannot be true. I believe Mr. Smith because Mr.

Smith says everything that he says is a lie cannot be true. The statement by itself is internally contradictory.

The argument I'm going to put forward is that sola scriptura is self -refuting. So, believing in Scripture alone because Scripture taught it, that'd be circular.

Those who don't believe in the authority of Scripture would reject that as a weak case for the same reason we would reject Smith's testimony about Smith.

But the conclusion might still be true. But believing in Scripture alone when Scripture doesn't teach it requires you to violate sola scriptura in order to try to prove sola scriptura.

So, again, was sola scriptura true when the apostles were alive? James White puts things like this.

He says, you will never find anyone saying during times of inscripturation, that is, when new revelation was being given, sola scriptura was operational.

Protestants do not assert that sola scriptura 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?

One must have an existing rule of faith to say that it is sufficient. It is a canard to point to times of revelation and say, see, sola scriptura doesn't work there.

Of course it doesn't. Who said it did? I would answer that question and say, Jeremiah, in his opening statement. But I point this out to say a lot of Protestants don't affirm the form of sola scriptura that Jeremiah is arguing for, and I think probably both of them are arguing for, but we'll find out.

But in any case, Jeremiah's position is false. Sola scriptura was not true at the time the

New Testament was being written. And we get that from the New Testament itself. In John 20, we just had

Easter, so I'm going to use that as the example. When John gets to the empty tomb, we're told that he reaches the tomb first, went in, and he saw and believed.

For as yet, they did not know the scripture that he must rise from the dead. In other words, there's at least one doctrine that we know explicitly from the

New Testament that the apostles believed not on the basis of scripture, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

The resurrection of the dead, about as central a doctrine as you could possibly get, was not believed in on the basis of sola scriptura by the apostles.

That's John 20. And we can add to that also things like all of Jesus' teaching, none of which had been written down yet.

When Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount, people weren't saying, well, I don't see that in the Old Testament. We can add to it also the oral teaching of the apostles, which we know was inspired.

We are told in Acts 4 that Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, which explicitly says there is inspired, we could say

God breathed, testimony being given by Peter that's oral, and at that point was not written down.

So you cannot hold the position that only the written testimony is inspired or authoritative, or that's all

Christians were required to go off of, because you couldn't believe in the resurrection at that point on that basis, because the

New Testament wasn't there yet. So in the Apostolic Age, there were two infallible authorities, the written

Scripture, that is, the Old Testament and the emerging New Testament, as well as the oral teaching of the apostles. Now, both of those are properly called the

Word of God in the secondary sense. I distinguish that because Jesus Christ is the Word of God in the capital W, like primary sense.

But we know, so in effect, if you heard the opening statements, a lot of their argument for sola scriptura is, well, look at all these references to the

Word of God, and they're assuming their conclusion, that is, they're assuming that Scripture alone is the Word of God, but Scripture doesn't say that.

1 Thessalonians 2 .13, which I think Merrick quoted, said, when you receive the Word of God which you heard from us, that is, it's explicitly

Paul talking about his oral preaching, that you accepted it not as the Word of men, but as it really is the Word of God, which is at work in you believers.

So there it is, just in black and white, but we can go on from there. 2 Thessalonians 2, he says, so then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.

So that two -source theory at the time, that at the time of the New Testament, in the first century, you were bound as a

Christian to believe both what was written, you know, Scripture, but also the unwritten inspired teaching of the apostles.

That's right there. That's a, you know, tradition by word of mouth and tradition by letter. Now, many

Protestants will say that at some point, all of that unwritten epistolic tradition is reduced to written

Scripture. So that now, there are only traditions by letter. But where in Scripture does that claim come from?

It doesn't. It's simply assumed and read into it. The doctrine is based on something

Scripture never says, that at some point 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 will stop being true. We can approach this in one further way by looking at what

I'm going to call the dynamite of God. So in Romans 1 .16, St. Paul talks about the gospel as the power or dynamis of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.

And dynamis is where we the word dynamite. So is St. Paul saying that gospel is God's dynamite?

Well, no, of course he cannot be saying that. Why can't he be saying that? Dynamite's invented in the 19th century by Alfred Nobel, the

Nobel Peace Prize guy. And since it didn't exist at the time, that cannot be the right interpretation.

Now, you can imagine a world in which Paul foretold a future event, the creation of dynamite, but that can't be what's going on in Romans 1 because he's speaking in the present tense.

The same thing is true of Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura, since it wasn't true at the time of the apostles, no

Bible verse written in the present tense could be teaching that doctrine because it'd be teaching something false. Now, it's possible to imagine a world in which the apostles foretold that the doctrine would later become true after the death of John, but no such prophecy actually exists in the

New Testament and they didn't cite to one. So, to sum up that part of the case, Sola Scriptura is a doctrine. It is not taught in Scripture.

And if Sola Scriptura is true, that all doctrines must come from Scripture, that means there's got to be at least one doctrine,

Sola Scriptura itself, not found in Scripture, which is self -refuting. It falsifies. It means Sola Scriptura is false.

Okay, moving on. Another infallible authority, or depending on how you understand the word infallible, the infallible authority,

Dave Varebham talks about it like this, that sacred Scripture is the Word of God, and as much as it's consigned to writing under the inspiration of the

Divine Spirit, sacred tradition takes the Word of God and trusts it by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the apostles and hands it on to their successors in its full purity.

So, that's what we mean. Both are expressions of the Word of God. But then it goes on and says, sacred tradition and sacred

Scripture form one sacred deposit of the Word of God committed to the Church, but the task of authentically interpreting the

Word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, what we call the

Magisterium, which just comes from the Latin word for teacher, magister, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.

And this part's really important to get rid of some straw men. This teaching office is not above the

Word of God, but serves teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with the

Divine commission with the help of the Holy Spirit. It draws from this one deposit of faith, everything which it presents for belief is divinely revealed.

In other words, contrary to what many Protestants will say, and contrary to what I think Merrick sort of suggests, the

Church does not claim the authority to create some new doctrine not found in tradition in Scripture. Now, we could get into another debate, all the things that Protestants claim are additions but aren't, but that's obviously beyond the scope of what we can cover right now.

So the Catholic claim in a nutshell, the faith which is once for all delivered to the saints, Jude 1, 3, is contained in Scripture and tradition.

The role of the Magisterium is not to serve as another source of revelation, we don't have like a three -source theory, but to serve as an infallible interpretive authority.

Actually, Merrick's example that I think he got from, I think it was Francis Turretin, that the role of the Church is that of a judge interpreting the law not as like another lawgiver.

We know the need for this authority exists from Scripture itself. In Acts 8, when Philip encounters the

Ethiopian eunuch, he comes up to him and he sees him reading Isaiah the prophet and asks, do you understand what you're reading? If they were right about the persecutity and all clarity of Scripture, the man should have said, oh yeah, it's so clear, how could it not be clear?

It's the word of God. But instead he says, how can I unless someone guides me? And he invites

Philip to come up and sit with him. Philip then preaches, starting with Scripture, we're told, the last verse.

Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning with the Scripture, he told him the good news of Jesus. Now, telling him the good news of Jesus, he obviously was telling him things that hadn't yet been written down because by the time

Acts 8 is describing, none of the New Testament text had been written down. You can't tell him about Jesus from the

New Testament alone because there is no New Testament. Meaning that he preached the authoritative interpretation of Isaiah based both on Scripture and on what was at that point still unwritten tradition.

We're also told about this need for an infallible authority, I would argue, pretty explicitly at the Last Supper, when Jesus says to the apostles, these things

I've spoken to you while I'm still with you, the Counselor of the Holy Spirit, from whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I've said to you.

That's a promise of ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit, not a promise of a book or a set of 27 books or a set of 66 or 73.

1 Timothy 3 famously says, I hope to come to you soon, but I'm writing these instructions to you so that if I'm delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living

God, the pillar and bulwark of truth. So if the question is, what's the pillar and bulwark of the truth? According to St.

Paul, it's the church. And then of course in Matthew 16, Jesus says to Simon, blessed are you,

Simon Barjona, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven, I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock

I will build my church. The gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

This is a promise of interpretive authority, an interpretive authority that has a correspondence between the actions that the church, here,

Peter, in Matthew 18, the church more broadly, take, that there's going to be a correspondence between the earthly interpretations and declarations of binding and loosening, and the heavenly.

And this is, I would just point out that binding and loosening is a Jewish image that talks about this kind of interpretive authority.

So, finally, we can make this part of the case, I'm not summing up everything, we can make this part of the case logically, since both heresy and schism are explicitly condemned in scripture, we cannot affirm false teaching, we cannot go into schism from one another, that creates a logical catch -22 for Protestants.

If the church can err, it's inevitable that eventually the church will err, that she'll teach something false, and believers will have to choose either heresy or schism, both of which

Christ forbids. I think if you just look at the last 500 years of Protestantism, you see that amply demonstrated, but Ben Witherington, who is a

Methodist theologian, puts it like this, he says, there's always a tension in the church between unity among believers and truth, as it is understood and held by believers.

Protestantism has tended to uphold truth with a capital T, while intoning unity with a lowercase u, with the end result that Protestant churches and denominations have proved endlessly divisive and factious.

On the other hand, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have upheld unity with a capital U, and at least from a Protestant perspective, excuse me, viewpoint, this has been at the expense of truth.

In other words, no part of the church has adequately gotten the balance between truth and unity right, it would seem. End quote.

To this, I would say, truth and unity are not given as a balance where we choose a certain portion of them both, and that all of this turns on the

Protestant viewpoint Witherington talks about being correct. Instead, if Jesus gave us an infallible church, then unity is unity in the truth.

To be close to the truth and to be close to the church are one in the same, and that's much more consistent with the

New Testament description of the church as the bride of Christ, the body of Christ, and as Ephesians 1 put it, the fullness of Christ.

Additionally, Saint Jerome, in his dialogue against the Luciferians, puts it this way, he says, we ought to remain in that church which was founded by the apostles and continues to this day.

If ever you have heard of any that are called Christians, taking their name not from the Lord Jesus Christ but from others, to give some examples, you can be sure that you have not the church of Christ but the synagogue of Antichrist for the fact that they took their rise after the foundation of the church is proof that they are those whose coming the apostle foretold.

And let them not flatter themselves if they think they have scripture authority for their assertions. Since the devil himself quoted scripture, the essence of the scriptures is not the letter but the meaning.

Otherwise, if we follow the letter, we too can concoct a new dogma and assert that such persons as wear shoes and have two coats must not be received into the church.

End quote. That was fast and there's a lot there. Let me unpack it just briefly. The essence of the scriptures is not the letter but the meaning.

That is, a person with an incomplete Bible but doctrinal orthodoxy is in a better position than a person who has a complete

Bible but draws false doctrinal conclusions from their reading of scripture. Well, how do we know this? One way we know this is because if knowledge of the

Bible is all it took, the devil would be saved. He quotes scripture and the temptation of Christ in Luke 4. Second, from the biblical text alone, you can draw a variety of false conclusions.

Patrick Madrid gives the example, I never said you stole the money. You can say, I never said you stole the money. I never said you stole the money.

I never said you stole the money. I never said you stole the money. I never said you stole the money. I never said you stole the money.

All of those are valid interpretations from the text alone. That's six words. Seven words.

If you take the entire Bible, of course, it's going to be open to a multiplicity of interpretations. And then you've got the example

Jerome gives. And then to avoid false interpretations, we need to stay in the church founded by Christ rather than one founded by later religious leaders.

Second Timothy 4 warns against those coming teachers. Final point, I know I've got very little time left.

Where does the Bible, oh yeah, why do we need tradition in the church? And here I would say the reason the

Bible spells out things that are knowable from reason alone, like the existence of God, which St. Paul says is knowable from reason alone in Romans 1.

St. Thomas Aquinas argues that there's three reasons it's still good that the Bible clarifies that. Because otherwise, one, not everyone would get there.

Two, it takes a lot longer working there on your own. And three, even those who get there will make some errors along the way.

I would say there's an analogous argument we can make. Why do we need something beyond Scripture alone?

Well, because otherwise, not all of us would get there. Not everyone's a philosopher or theologian. You wouldn't have universal accessibility.

Martin Luther even said, are you alone wise? Because he realized his theology disagreed with everyone who came before him, everyone around him.

So we need a form of Christianity that is open to everyone, not just theologians. Half of the population, roughly, is below average intelligence.

Christ came for them, too. Second, clarity and ease. It would take forever to try on your own with Scripture alone to get to Orthodox conclusions on every major doctrine.

And third, you'd have no reason to believe that you got all of the doctrines right. Protestants using Scripture have come to a variety of contradictory conclusions.

So it doesn't produce reliable doctrinal orthodoxy. On the other hand, if you have tradition and the church, it clarifies what are disputed possible interpretations.

So with that, I yield my time. All right, good stuff, guys.

That was probably the longest opening statement I've ever had on the gospel truth. It's good stuff, though.

Guys, well done with the opening statements. I appreciate everyone for all the efforts you guys put forth in preparing those opening statements.

So now we're about to jump into the fire round, the cross -examination. So this is the fun part of every debate. Once again, the cross -examination is a total of 40 minutes.

Both parties will get 20 minutes each to lead with questions. And so, once again, this is not just a dialogue between two individuals.

It's a dialogue between four individuals. So I would love to see everyone jumping in, getting some words in.

All right. That said, Merrick and Jeremiah, you are up first for your 20 -minute cross -examination of Joe and Peter.

Awesome. Thank y 'all so much. Man, I tried to take so many notes, but I have so many questions, but I want to kick this off with just something for clarity on my side.

So when y 'all say the pope speaks from the chair, when he speaks ex cathedra, is it right to understand him as being the living voice of God here on Earth?

Peter, you want to take that? He's acting like he's not a prophet, if that's what you mean by that.

Okay. But he is rightly interpreting what's laid down in the deposit of faith. Meaning, actually, you quoted,

I think Merrick quoted Ives Conger, that both tradition and scripture need interpretation. In the same way that if I read the works of Shakespeare, I may not get every part of it, and I might need some kind of guidance to understand what it means.

And I think Protestants get that. There's a reason you have secondary authorities besides just scripture. Because you know scripture is not all clear on itself.

And so, the question is, like, what authority do those interpretations have? Because if I can't trust the authority, it's not ultimately that helpful if I'm really confused on a point.

Yeah. That actually, that brings some good clarity. But that living voice has to speak infallibly in order to interpret scripture, right?

So it's on par with the living voice of God here on earth. Is that fair? No, I'd say twofold.

One, it doesn't have to speak infallibly. Not everything the Pope says is infallible. There are degrees of authority.

But two, the Pope is not saying that his writing has the same properties as God breathed scripture.

We don't believe, you know, so like, even if you take like an ex cathedra infallible statement, we don't put that as scripture in the

Bible or something like that. It's an interpretation. If you want to think about it as like the connection between like the Constitution and a

Supreme Court decision, imagine like a good Supreme Court for this argument to work. Like, imagine a

Supreme Court that understood what the Constitution meant and could actually interpret it. It's still a different kind of thing than a constitutional amendment or another part of the

Constitution. Sure. Can I add to that? I mean, I think it's worth noting that John 16 13 points out...

Can we get a timer also? Yeah, I got you.

I was saying that John 16 13 points out that when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you, plural, he's talking to the

Apostles, into all truth. And the fundamental continued understanding of the

Church is that she is being guided into all truth by the Holy Spirit. So there's a pneumatological foundation here.

That yes, on the one hand, revelation has ceased. Revelation was done with when the last

Apostles died. Revelation is a deposit. It's been passed down to us today. But the

Holy Spirit is the one who continually guides the Church into all truth in several different ways, but most specifically in actually understanding what the truth is, in other words, getting the deposit of faith and maintaining it as a custodian, both in terms of Holy Scripture and sacred tradition, interpreting those things in a way which is true, and also making sure that it is developed properly as well.

So if there are implications, which we all agree there are, in other words, there are means by which, by good and necessary consequence to use

Calvinistic confessional language, truth may be derived from Holy Scripture, even if it's not expressively set down in there.

Irrespective of how you understand that, there is the Holy Spirit guiding the Church into all truth.

So in a very strong and important sense, the Pope is not infallible any more than you and I are. The Church is not infallible any more than you and I as individuals are.

The Holy Spirit is infallible, and the Holy Spirit is the one who guides the Church infallibly into truth, and that's the point.

Okay. I'm going to ask a super loaded question, and then y 'all can have all the necessary time to rip it apart.

But I want to know where the justification is for the implication that when the

Pope speaks from the chair to infallibly interpret, and hopefully I still understand that, like you explained, not being the living voice of God in this ontological sense, but where is the implication or the justification that we can understand

Him perspicuously over against the Scripture that I would argue is the living voice of God today that can't be understood perspicuously, because the implications are, when

I look to these other groups that are anti - Sola Scriptura, they make identical arguments that you make.

They say, look at our tradition. Look at our history. You have to listen to our living prophet.

You have to look to the Watchtower's interpretation to have justified true belief of what the right interpretation is.

That's super loaded, but if you can explain to me, how can I truly adjudicate with certainty between, you know, you've got the

Pope over here speaking infallibly in terms of his interpretation, why the

Scripture, in my understanding, claims to be the living voice of God that I would say seems to be perspicuous in its teaching.

So I know there's a whole lot there, but it's hard for me that affirms Sola Scriptura to have this standard that can adjudicate from all these seemingly identical systems.

So I'll throw it back to you all. As you said, there's a lot of parts. I'm sorry, Peter, go ahead. No, no, please.

Oh, okay. Thank you very much. So I'll just point out and then I'll leave to Joe to finish, if I may.

Firstly, the living point is quite important. Well, the Scriptures are not living. The Scriptures are texts.

Texts do not have life. They are not persons. They don't have agency. Texts are things which have been set down to us.

The point, I suppose, difference with the Magisterium is the Magisterium genuinely is living. So if you want to have a question, answer a question about what does the

Pope mean, you can actually ask him. In a way, you can't really do that with the Holy Scriptures. So there is something rather important about having an infallible

Magisterium, not that I think that we're debating, we're not actually debating Catholic doctrine here.

We're supposed to be debating Sola Scriptura, but nonetheless, to answer your point, because I think it's important to answer, there is something about having an infallible

Magisterium which is, in fact, a living entity, which is, in fact, an agency which we can ask questions of that actually helps there, as opposed to the text of Holy Scripture which does always need to be interpreted.

Now, I agree that the pronouncements of Popes and the councils and tradition also need to be interpreted, but again, there's a living principle that can continually allow for that interpretation.

The only other thing I'll say to that, I've forgotten, so you can come back.

Okay. This isn't necessarily a question, but we would disagree with the nature of Scripture.

I do think it's a living voice. I would look to Hebrews 4 .12. I would look to 2 Peter 3.

This is more than just an inscripturation of ink on a page, but, in light of what you said,

I want to transition into another question. Would you say... Actually, can I finish answering your last question? Let Joe finish.

I was actually going to mention Hebrews 4 .12, because this is a classic example of what I was arguing for, that Protestants arguing for Sola Scriptura conflate three senses of the phrase

Word of God, the first and primary meaning Jesus, and if you read Patristic commentaries on Hebrews 4 .12,

they are unanimous that the Word of God that's living and active is Jesus Christ. It makes no sense to say the book is alive.

Only in a metaphorical sense could you understand it that way. It's only after the printing press and Sola Scriptura and the

Reformation that this conflation about the meaning of Hebrews 4 .12 comes in. I would point you to Patristic commentaries here.

That's just not what Hebrews... Because it also goes on to say that the Word of God will judge us. How does the Bible judge?

But the other thing you had with the perspicuity of Scripture, if I may, just before we get to the...

I know you've got more to say, Jeremiah, but I want to throw that out, because you keep mentioning the all -clarity of Scripture.

I'd say, first, Scripture never makes that claim about itself, which you would expect it to do if it's so clear.

There should be a very clear text that says that. Second, as I point out Acts 8, we see Scripture doesn't work that way. Third, if it was true that Scripture is so clear it doesn't need that kind of interpretation, you'd expect every

Protestant denomination to get along. Merrick, I think, preempts that by sort of suggesting that... Or maybe one of you two did, about agreeing on the big doctrines, but even which questions are the big doctrines is a question

Protestants don't agree on. And fourth, which books are in the Bible, to get back to Peter's question.

So Luther and Calvin, both claim the Scriptures are all clear, but they don't just disagree about the interpretation of Scripture.

They disagree about which books even are Scripture. And neither of their canons agree with either the modern

Protestant canon or the canon used by the early Church. We got more questions, and I want to go ahead and move on.

Would y 'all say that Rome's tripart structure is y 'all's ultimate authority? I mean,

I think God is the ultimate authority. But God speaks through Scripture and tradition, as 2

Thessalonians says, and guides the Holy Spirit, guides the Church in the interpretation of the deposit of faith.

So I think, like, trying to just put it in that kind of simplistic structure doesn't give justice to the new distinction between the role of the

Church and the role of the Scripture in tradition. Actually, it's a very specific question, because while I'm getting at it, hold on,

Joe spoke a lot a second ago, and so I'm going to follow up, and then Peter, I would love to hear your response. You did tell us to go as long as we needed to in response to your question.

True, true. But I'm looking at that timer, I'm like, 10 minutes already has flown by, and I want

Merrick to ask a question right after this. So once again, let me follow up with this. If the tripart structure that Rome teaches is y 'all's ultimate authority,

I think if you would be consistent with that, that means that you cannot fail in your understanding of everything that the

Pope has said ex cathedra from the chair. You can't be wrong with your understanding, and I would say, if you could be wrong, that proves that Rome's tripart structure is not your ultimate authority, and it is your own human reasoning that's the foundation of your worldview, and that is a shaky worldview of sand that cannot account for truth itself.

So engage with that however you want, and then, yeah, I wanted to, does it stand to reason that you could not be wrong about your understanding of the

Pope's clear interpretation that is infallibly correct?

That's my question. Joe, you go on to that, and I'll add something on that. Okay, there's two senses of faith spoken of in Scripture.

One is the faith by which we believe, that's the gift of faith, you know, when St. Paul talks in 1 Corinthians about faith, hope, and charity.

The other is the faith in which we believe, Jude 1, when he talks about the faith delivered once for all to the apostles. Same word, but one is the act of belief, one is the object of belief.

The infallibility and the certainty is in the object of belief, that the deposit of faith is without error.

My faith, my understanding of the faith could be erroneous, just like yours could be. I assume you know that Scripture is infallible or inspired in a way that you're not.

So unless you think your interpretation could not be wrong, in which case you're conflating your own interpretation with the

Word of God itself, then I think we have to say this scriptural distinction between the faith by which we believe and the faith in which we believe, which is right there between 1

Corinthians 11 and Jude 1, is an important and necessary distinction. Thank you all so much.

Can I just add something to that? Real quick. Real quick. Okay, so, the tripartite structure,

I think, is unhelpful because what you have is two sources of revelation, as I pointed out earlier, and then you've got an infallible magisterial recognizer and interpreter of those things.

Those are not the same thing. They have to be distinguished, so it's not a matter of there being this tripartite structure.

That's quite unhelpful. Also, I would say that Protestants can be wrong and frequently are as to their interpretation of Holy Scripture, so it doesn't appear like your single source theory without an infallible magisterium, or indeed really a magisterium at all apart from yourself, is particularly helpful.

Peter, we're going to have to cut you off there, man. I appreciate that. I want Merrick to have time to ask a question. Right. Yeah, so,

I want to go to this concept of tradition. How would you say you know which traditions are apostolic and which ones are false?

What is the distinguisher between, okay, this tradition is, say, heresy and this tradition is apostolic, right?

Would you say the apostles themselves come into the magisterium? Can you just elaborate quickly on that concept?

Sure. So I'll go with that. Tradition is defined as that which has been passed down to us.

That's literally what traditio means. The reason why we know certain traditions are authentic traditions is because they have been received by the church.

So in other words, the bride hears the groom's voice, her groom's voice, and she faithfully receives and canonizes in the passive sense those traditions.

So that's why, when we look at the early church, we do see a critical consensus with regards to the real presence, with regards to baptismal regeneration, with regards to, eventually, the canon, with all sorts of different things.

Now those things, because they are recognized by the church catholic, as in the whole church, or at least a critical majority of the church, that is why we can say those are authentic traditions, as opposed to things that are only believed by one person or two people, or a few people over here in a particular province.

So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, would you say, Joe, you alluded to Matthew 16, is this a source by which you can establish that authority of the church and the infallible teaching position?

A means, not a source. A means, sure. So here's my question now. You would say

Matthew 16 is clear on that point, yes? I think Matthew 16 has been debated.

I don't think it depends what you mean by clear. People have had interpretive disputes about a variety of things in Scripture.

I think the best reading is that the binding and loosening should be understood in its Jewish background. I don't pretend that everyone has always understood all of the texts of Scripture in the same way.

No, yeah, and that's not the claim I'm making with perspicuity. I guess my issue is, the place you go to to prove and establish that the church has this authority magisterially is itself the

Scriptures, and in that you assume that the Scriptures are perspicuous. So I guess my question is going back...

Can I clarify? I did a really bad job of presenting this in my talks. I put it at the end and then kind of ran out of time.

But the point that I was making at the end is some things that are knowable by reason, like that there is a

God, that murder is wrong, are nevertheless also taught in Scripture, even though reason alone is in one sense sufficient to get you there.

And Aquinas gives three reasons why that is. Because by reason alone, not everyone would get there. It would take a long time to get there, and you would probably get there with an admixture of error.

So likewise with Scripture, I'm not saying Scripture is so opaque no one could ever understand it without the church interpreting it.

That's not it at all. Scripture is, for the most part, quite clear. But there are, as any two groups of Protestants will demonstrate, some areas that are less clear.

And there's a need for some determination of, well, if two people, having looked at the total of Scripture, still have not agreed on this, how do we know which side is right and which side is wrong?

Because there are some really big issues. I'm sorry to interrupt you. No, no,

I'm sorry. The question is then, if reason can understand the words of an exegetical papal interpretation, it seems to me there's no reason in principle that it couldn't understand

Scriptural passages. And if that's true, if we then get, so if I drive downtown here and I've got the

E .O. Church and then the Anglican Church and then the Catholic Church on the corner, and I go to each one of them and I say, you know, show me how you could establish this.

And they go to the patristic sources. And they all interpret the patristics differently, right? If we're differing on the interpretation of the

Scripture, how much more so are we going to differ on something which isn't automatically by inspiration given by God, right?

So do you see the kind of... Let's take this cross -examination. I think you're responding to a strawman version, which we're saying

Scripture is totally unclear and that fathers and later church teaching are totally clear.

And that's not what we're saying at all. I'm saying it's like this cross -examination. We both presented our original cases.

There were some things that were left ambiguous that you had questions about, and you needed a living authority to say, here's what we meant, here's what we didn't mean.

And so in theory, we're just explaining what we already said. Likewise, the Magisterium's role isn't to present some new teaching.

It's an ongoing dialogue with believers who say, well, what about this? So if you look at the history of the early church, it was okay, so what's

Jesus? Is he divine? Is he human? Is he both? And then after that, is the Holy Spirit a person? Is he not? Is he divine? And you can see this conversation proceeding through history becoming clearer and clearer.

It's not a 100 % clarity, 0 % clarity kind of situation. It's an ongoing conversation throughout the ages.

If I can add to that, if I may, I would just very quickly say that...

I'll just be very quick. I'd say two things. Firstly, I think both Protestants and Catholics need to recognize that church history is a lot messier than people want it to be on either side, and that it takes much more than just a delineation that way.

The other thing I'll say is, I think we're looking at this the wrong way around. The question is, how did... We all agree that the

Holy Spirit is going to lead us into all truth. The question is, how has he done so? And I think the facts of history show...

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut you off. I don't think this is relevant to the question I asked. So I want to go back to something you said,

Joe. In your time, you can cut me off too. So you mentioned the cross -examination, right?

If God were to say, in a theophany, join, and he gave his word, and then

Marlon comes in and he says, no, I need to be here to interpret it, right? Why...

You just gave the concession, similar to Cungar, Mr. Williams, that traditions are very messy.

And so my question is, how can you, in any sense, say that Scripture is going to be more messy?

And if you're not going to say that, where specifically is the dividing line? So that's exactly what

I was about to say, I think, did answer your question, which is that the question for us really is, how has

God led us into all truth? And the answer to that is, he's given us two sources of revelation, and he's given us a magisterium by which those two sources can be interpreted, recognized to begin with, and interpreted later.

So actually, the messiness is sorted out by virtue of that system. It's not just a matter of, oh, well, we've got this hopeless mess of inspired

Scriptures and patristic writings which contain certain traditions. It's a matter of, those two sources are there, the

Church does have to actually do the work of theology, which is to actually discern where the truth is in this, but it actually has a magisterial principle by which those kind of questions can finally be answered, which you don't have if you just simply have the

Scriptures alone. And that's the key point. Right. So who then interprets these papal declarations?

Who then interprets the magisterium? And what if I disagree? Okay. So how is that different from saying the

Scripture interprets the Scripture? Because the Scripture is not a magisterium, and the magisterium is a magisterium.

The magisterium is an agency. The Scriptures do not have agency at all. They are entirely dependent on your individual magisterium, and that's the thing.

You Protestants make yourselves of the magisterium, because you're the ones who interpret what the Bible says, what it is, and what it does.

We don't have the magisterium to have that. Right. How am I not in? Oh, we're out of time.

Okay. Yep. All right. Peter and Joe, you are now up for a 20 -minute of leading with question cross -semination of Jeremiah and Merrick.

So Peter, do you want to go first, or do you want me to go first? I know my first question is to Peter. I'll go first, because I think he might have frozen.

So to both of you, was Sola Scriptura a true generalization of the Apostles? Jeremiah.

Absolutely. Now, I would make a distinction, and this is where I think Dr. White has done a good job of showing that the inscripturation of that which is

God -breathed is practical for us today, but the more fundamental principle of Sola Scriptura we can find in the

New Testament, we can find in the Old Testament, we even know that that's true before Moses at Sinai.

So I would say yes. Okay, so you're saying even before Moses wrote anything, the written

Word of God was all we had to go on? So when we talk about the written Word, we're talking about the more fundamental principle that Scripture is theanoustos.

So that which is theanoustos has not always been inscripturated. So the inscripturation is contingent on when

God is progressively revealing His Word, rhema, or if it's during a time where He is no longer speaking.

Both have that shared principle that God's Word, that's what Sola Scriptura is referring to, in nature, is the precipitum of truth.

It sounds like you're explicitly conflating the Word of God and the written Word of God. So you're saying even before Moses, you're saying the written

Word of God is all we had to go on? No, I'm talking about the nature of the written Word. Is that the Word of God is passed on both orally and in writing?

And Sola Scriptura, the word Scriptura comes from to write, right? Right, so what's the nature of that writing?

Well, that's, I guess I'm trying to establish. Clearly, the writings are God -breathed. We both agree with that. You seem to be making the argument that only the

Scriptures are God -breathed. And I'm asking, was that true, that only the Scriptures were God -breathed during the time of the

Apostles? You're talking about the nature of God -breathed is the precipitum of truth itself. That can come in inscripturation and that can also come by the voice of God, and He infallibly can speak through fallible men.

That would not be the secondary instrument being infallible, but that would still be God who is the sole infallible interpreter of what

He says. So, to clarify, are you saying that the oral proclamation of the

Apostles was God -breathed? Yes, they were fallible instruments. God was speaking through them, 2

Peter 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one's suggesting that the oral proclamation is God -breathed by men breathing it.

The question is whether Scripture alone is God -breathed, and it sounds like you're saying in the first century the answer was no. I don't think we're on the same page because I'm talking about the nature of Scripture.

I don't think any of the Apostles in the New Testament, they went beyond what is written.

So I'd love to talk about 1 Corinthians 4 -6. I've read y 'all's articles about it, and I disagree. So, okay, when

John believes in the risen Christ, which hasn't yet been written down, is that wrong? No, because the

Word of God told us that that was a guarantee to happen. And so when I read your article in John 20 that he believed not until he saw it, you admitted that he was wrong for not knowing the

Scripture. So our human experience can make fallible truth, not truth, but can be true or false.

But that has to be measured against an ultimate precipium, and that is the living, breathing

Word of God. Just a really quick definition. I would just say, just a quick definition, and you can go back.

In God's general equity, I would say that which is verbally passed down is materially put down in Scripture.

And so, materially, they're the same, but they differ in the form. That's just a working definition, if that helps you at all.

Yeah, but that's after the time of the Apostles, right? Or at the close of the Apostolic Revelation? And I'm asking at the time.

So when Paul says all Scripture is God breathed, it sounds like you all are saying only Scripture is

God breathed. And my question is, was only Scripture God breathed at the time of the

Apostles? I think what we're saying is the nature of Scripture, right? When Paul's talking there, he's referring to that which

Scripture is. He's not referring to just the Old Testament or something. We're talking about whatever the nature of Scripture is, it is

God breathed. Okay. Was only Scripture God breathed? It's a question I'm trying to clear up.

We could... Jeremiah has a good point on this, but I would say you could deduce from the nature of what it means to be

God breathed, that by definition any other source, if it's as authoritative, well, that's

God breathed itself. And therefore, it's the same thing, right? Does that make sense at all?

Well, so go back to like the year 30. You hear the Sermon on the Mount. God literally breathes that.

He says it. But it's not yet written down. It won't be for decades. That's not spelled out clearly in the

Old Testament. There's going to be a Sermon on the Mount. Yeah. I mean, just a clarification. In the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, we're not claiming that the

Bible ceased to be the ultimate authority when Jesus walked the Earth, right? That's not at all a claim we're making.

I'm trying to understand what claim you are making. So take Acts 15, if that's clearer.

On the basis of Scripture alone, people argue you still need to be circumcised to be saved. Peter then responds with his personal experience coupled with Scripture.

Now that personal experience, according to Acts 10, is divinely inspired. But he's not saying from Scripture alone anything.

He's making an argument from Scripture plus. Yeah, Jeremiah. Go ahead. Well, I'll let

Merrick just chime in shortly after this. I promise you, we have different worldviews as we approach Acts 15 because what

I see happening is you have the Judaizers corrupting the Gospel. So you have the Apostles gathering together, not with Peter having supremacy and all that, but they're talking together what the

Scriptures have already declared to be true. They're making a decision in light of what was also true in Acts chapter 2 when we saw the

Gospel preached. And you notice that it is Scripture that is the final say -so with truth.

They quoted Amos to show that the Gentiles did not have to convert to Judaism and be Jews outwardly, but salvation has always been by grace through faith apart from works of law.

And so they did appeal just like Protestants today to sola scriptura, to be the final adjudicator of truth,

Merrick. So you're saying Peter doesn't mention the event not yet recorded in Acts 10, that by his mouth the door of salvation was opened to the

Gentiles? Because it's right there in Acts 15. It sounds like you're saying that verse 7 isn't there, that instead they went with Scripture alone.

And I don't know how you get to that conclusion. We don't see a conflict there. So you mentioned they bring up the interpretation and the

Judaizers are completely wrong with their interpretation. When the devil himself, when you reference the devil, the devil twists the

Scriptures. Jesus doesn't respond by just going to an experience, right?

He goes to the Scriptures themselves to rebuke him. And so we're not excluding whatever this experience is, which

I think is super important. We're simply saying at the end of the day, even the arbiter of the truthfulness or the inferences you can make from that experience needs to be holy

Scripture. And you're saying that's true even during the time of the apostles. Like before they wrote down the

New Testament, they needed to see that it matched up with the Old Testament for them to be able to believe it? I think that's extremely narrow.

Go ahead, Jeremiah. Yeah. We're not on the same page when we say that which is

God -breathed is the precipium of truth. That comes in Scripturation.

That comes in God speaking rhema. That comes in terms of a prophet speaking prophetically.

That's the whole nature and argument of Sola Scripture. It's always going back to the sole infallible interpreter of God able to reveal

Himself. And so when we do look in the New Testament, that is during a time of progressive revelation.

But those apostles never went beyond what is written in the Old Testament. And I think what that means is that they were building on the foundation of the

Old Testament. Where that actually differs with y 'all is we're saying, in order to not go beyond what is written is actually to speak in accordance with Scripture.

They actually believe that the Scripture was declared with clarity. So they could preach this gospel of grace boldly to the

Gentiles, to combat the Judaizers, to help the Ethiopian eunuch, assuming that it's clear enough to be able to explain to somebody else.

And that's why the Jews at Berea were able to go test the preachings of Paul with the Old Testament Scripture.

All of that is a sola scriptura principle. So I think there's an important distinction.

I want to make sure that we're clarifying. Between saying God's Word is all that is God breathed or God's Word is

Scripture. Because we can agree with the first one and not the second one. And so it seems like you're using the two interchangeably and we're debating the second one.

So specifically, are you arguing that the New Testament Revelation doesn't add anything on Old Testament Revelation that doesn't go beyond what's already been written?

So what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 4 -6, he's talking about the mysteries of God and how to correctly steward those.

And I would argue their teaching does not go beyond the foundation that was laid in the

Old Testament. I think that's different than what Roman Catholics are saying, because they are not just simply divinely interpreting the

Old Testament Scripture. They are going to the clarity of what the Old Testament taught. The resurrection was a guarantee to happen.

When you look at Psalm 16, when you look at Psalm 22, when you look at Isaiah 53, this was a guarantee to happen that Jesus, who is that Mashiach, He was going to die and He was going to be resurrected.

We're saying that's the principle of Sola Scriptura, that we go to God's Word as the final interpreter.

And when you say Scripture alone, you're talking about it sounds like the difference here is you're saying that which is ink on a page can't be living and breathing.

And we're saying we disagree with you on the nature of Scripture, because I would simply go back to Hebrews 4 and challenge your understanding of that.

That is actually a truly living and breathing Word. I would say more foundational than us living and breathing having this conversation right now.

Can I chip in with a new direction just because we've got nine minutes left.

So I wanted to go back to the argument that I presented at the very beginning, which regards to sufficiency.

So you saw my premises. Premise one, scriptural sufficiency entails that Holy Scripture is able to give us all the data of revelation that we need.

Premise two, Holy Scripture is itself necessary as you confessed. Premise three, if Holy Scripture is necessary, then the knowledge of what is

Holy Scripture, the canon, canon two, if you like, is necessary. Therefore, if Holy Scripture is sufficient, it must be able to give us knowledge of that which is canon two.

Holy Scripture can't give us that knowledge. Therefore, Holy Scripture is not sufficient. So Scripture is false. Would you like to just problematize the premises there that you think are false that will lead necessarily to the conclusion?

I'm going to be completely honest. Those premises, I would have to see them on paper.

If that's to our loss that we couldn't reference them, I'm really sorry about that. But if I can just speak to the canon objection, like what

I think is the gist of this objection, I would say that, firstly, we've not ignored as Protestants this objection, but I would say not everything in the genus of divine revelation, you mentioned the data of revelation, is an article of faith, right?

It's not an article of faith that Tobit's dog wagged his tail. It's still within the genus of that which faith accepts as revelation, but an article of faith is something that, at a foundational level, it sustains faith and salvation and these core dogmas.

So this is something like the death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord, St. Peter, 1

Corinthians 15, free salvation only through the person of Christ. I don't think the fact that there is a canonical list of Scripture is, so the fact that there is a canonical list, that is an article of faith, yes, absolutely.

It's a dogma. But I don't think the content of that list is an article of faith, if that helps at all.

Well, I mean, it is included within your confessions of faith, so it is something which is considered important in that regard, and it is necessary to have the

Holy Scriptures, because after all, by the way, I've just sent you that set of propositions via Facebook, so you have them in front of you if you want them.

So when it comes to what looks like what you're trying to do is say, okay, well, the knowledge of what is Holy Scripture is not necessary.

It's not something which we would expect to be confessed by Holy Scripture. I would say, surely, if the

Holy Scriptures themselves are necessary, and if the canon, canon 2 if you like, constitutes the knowledge of what is

Scripture, well, if you need something, you need to know what it is. So therefore this is something that should be found within Holy Scripture.

Scripture, if it's to be sufficient for all that you need, then all that is necessary must be within Holy Scripture, and the canon which is necessary is not therein.

So Jeremiah, would you like to respond to that? Sure. Yeah, so this really gets to the heart of the disagreement, because we're saying when

God speaks by necessity, He's the ultimate authority in that, and so I'm sensitive to you kind of making this distinction between ontology and epistemology.

So I'm sensitive to this question. But, Sola Scriptura is basically saying, God's Word, whether that be

Ramah, whether that be in scripturation, that's the ultimate authority, and because God is who He is, man is fallible.

So we look to fallible secondary authorities to be convinced to see how the church has passively received this

Word. Now if you noticed in my oh, this is where I want to see if you have any more questions. I actually want to take a more harder burden to prove that I think

Scripture gives the parameters of Scripture itself. I alluded to Amos, I alluded to Hosea predicting a time of a intertestinal period, and I even went to Isaiah chapter 8 and Daniel 9 telling us that no more revelation would come after 70

AD. When I say revelation, I mean anybody that tries to divinely interpret, and there's going to be a close of the canon.

So that's something that even Dr. White doesn't even argue for. No, I agree. I'll just say one thing here, which is that, look, if the canon is something which we cannot know by our own natural reason, we all agree on that, right?

So the Holy Canon is not something which we could know simply by our own inmental efforts or by looking at the world around us, right?

We can't know that. So therefore God only knows what he has inspired. If God only knows what he has inspired, then if we are to know what he has inspired, he needs to reveal that to us.

So therefore the fact that there is this thing that we call the canon out there, the fact that we would claim to know what is canon means that God has revealed it to us.

God has revealed that canon to us. So therefore, if he has revealed it to us, the only question is how has he revealed it to us, and it must therefore be a tradition because it's certainly not in Holy Scripture.

And so therefore that's why I would say that you have a real problem here, and this is why I'm asking you what happened to this point, because if Holy Scripture does not have the canon, how can it possibly be said to be sufficient given it does not give us all revelation?

The canon is a revelation, it's clearly not in Holy Scripture, therefore it must be a tradition. That is to say, it's revealed by God to the apostles, and the apostles pass it down to us today.

Therefore, there is something outside of Holy Scripture which is A, has God as its author, so it's in other words, theonistos, practically speaking, and B, therefore, is not within Holy Scripture, therefore

Scripture is not sufficient. What is your answer to that specific point? Do you care if I chime in real quick?

No, I would just say quickly, then I'll hand it over to you. I mean, Romans 1, we have an entire book of, an entire, you know, natural revelation, so of course there's stuff outside of the

Scripture which are divinely revealed. If you want to say that's God breathed, sure, we're again referring to a restricted, when we use theonistos,

I think that's a bit of an equivocation, but I'll give it to Jeremiah. Yeah, Peter, so the thing is, we're saying it's impossible for us to have an infallible knowledge of the canon.

That doesn't mean we have a compelling understanding of what the canon is, and how the church has passively received that.

I think Rome makes a huge mistake when they say that the church can infallibly define the canon.

We're saying God alone possesses infallibility by His very nature.

He is the one that cannot make mistakes, and there's a difference. Sorry, Jeremiah, can I just intersect there?

I'm just conscious of time. Absolutely. Firstly, infallibility isn't the issue here. I'm not saying that we need the church to infallibly know the canon.

I'm saying that we need the canon as a tradition, which is what it is. It's a revelation passed down to us.

And without that, we don't know the canon at all, regardless of whether it's fallible or infallible.

We don't have it at all. If we don't have this revelation from God given to us as a tradition within the church, then this book doesn't exist.

It goes into a piff of smoke, because unless you have that knowledge, this doesn't exist.

This doesn't have any purchase. So consequently, it's not about infallibility. And by the way, I'm not making an argument here for a church infallibility either.

I'm simply saying that the church itself has, by the Holy Spirit, which I agree with you, is the only thing that is probably speaking infallible.

Only the Holy Spirit is infallible, and the Holy Spirit guides the church to infallibly recognize that which is the Onustos. That's the canon.

So it isn't about infallibility. It's about knowledge. We have no knowledge of Holy Scripture unless we have the revelation of the canon, and that should be, by Sola Scriptura's light,

Holy Scripture giving us that knowledge, but it isn't. That's the problem. Sure, and yeah, I could easily agree with that model, but alter it a little bit and say it's not so much that we know the canonical books through the common consent of the church, as the

Holy Spirit inspires, but through the internal testimony and the persuasion of the Holy Spirit. And this is just one model that I think is consistent.

Right, and so I'm not necessarily saying that's the only way. Again, we've only got a minute left. With that model, the internal consistency or testimony, how do you know that Esther is a book of Holy Scripture and how do you know that Titus, Philemon, and Jude are books of Holy Scripture?

What is it that makes them Holy Scripture? So Jude, right? You know what? I don't even need an answer to that because it's not an article of faith.

It is not a dogma that Jude is in the Holy Scriptures and therefore it's not under the label of Sola Scriptura.

No, see, and here you're equivocating. You're equivocating between the fact that there is a canonical list that God -inspired

Scripture and what is in that list itself. Yes, well, I'm not equivocating.

I've made that distinction between the ontological and the epistemological very directly. I'm saying we need the epistemological list.

We need to know that which is theionistos. And I don't see how the Scriptures confess themselves to be theionistos.

Hi, Peter. Alright, guys. Good stuff, guys.

Thanks, guys. That was great. And let me get that timer off the screen because it looks weird, very weird.

When are we going to get that intermission? Oh, yes. We'll have that. Yeah, we can have the intermission now.

We'll let you guys take a breather, go do your thing, and when we come back, we will have closing remarks.

It'll be 10 -minute closings for each team and then we'll have some Q &A. So at this time, you guys go ahead and take a break and we'll be back.

Alright, how long is the break? Just so people know when to tune back in. About two minutes, three minutes.

You guys go do your thing. You guys will be alright. Alright, folks.

So now you guys got me in front of you again. So I hope you guys are enjoying the debate.

The conversation is great. And I hope you guys are learning a lot. If there's anything you take away from these conversations, once again, if your position is not changed or if you feel like none of the teams are making really good arguments, at the very least, you are taking away some knowledge.

You're taking away the idea that, okay, I understand these particular positions a little bit better than I did before.

And that's obviously the hope, man. These conversations are really edifying. They're really interesting.

And perhaps this is a subject that you are familiar with, but I'm going to go over some announcements.

I know some late arrivals, people who jumped in pretty late. And so here is some debates that are coming up here soon.

At what point is one justified? Is the debate topic? I know you see two there.

I know you see three. We're going to center our focus on the top one, the first topic there, and Trey Fisher and Travis Thomas.

Travis Thomas has the gospel preacher there, but he is actually a part of the

Church of Christ. And if you remember Trey Fisher, if you follow the

Cultish podcast, yes, the Cultish podcast that's associated with Apology at Church.

He is one of the co -hosts there, and he is going to be jumping into the ring with Travis Thomas.

And I'm sure this is going to be a great, great debate, and I'm excited for this one, and I look forward to it.

I've talked to Trey on the phone and do text messaging and things like that, and Trey is a real cool dude, and I'm looking forward to meeting him and Travis actually on the show when they jump on.

So I'm excited for that one. It's Church Tradition Infallible, and so we have

Greg, Craig should I say, and Paul, and they're going to jump into the ring to be two newcomers to the gospel truth.

And so I'm looking forward to that. It's Church Tradition Infallible, so this will sort of probably lop into some of the conversation we're having today.

And so this should be an interesting debate as well, so I hope you guys are looking forward to that one.

And the Great Hail Debate, these two have actually history prior to this debate that's going to go down here soon.

These guys have had this conversation about 10 years ago. These guys had this conversation, so we're going to bring that conversation to the gospel truth, and I'm looking forward to Turatufan, Chris Date, they both have been on the gospel truth before, and both of these guys are reformed too.

They're both Calvinists, and so it's interesting to have two Calvinists debating about hell, so we should see what is going to happen with this topic, and Chris is an annihilationist,

Eternal Conscious Torment, Turatufan will be representing. So it's going to be a fun debate, fun, fun debate, so hopefully you are looking forward to this one as I am.

And this last one we have here is the physical nation of Israel still God's special chosen people, and so Darrell Allgood has been on before, and I think the last time he was on, he debated a

Unitarian or a Oneness, one of the two, and Luke, this is his first go around jumping into the ring, and so it is a whole bunch of shows that are coming up here in the future.

This is just the next four shows, and there are a couple gaps. I don't have dates on these promotionals.

There are gaps here that I'm going to be filling too, so I'm going to be trying to get some interviews in with some individuals, and perhaps

I will be engaging in sort of not a formal debate, but more of a conversational debate, open discussion, type of conversation with someone

I disagree with, so that may be down the road as well. I know you guys don't see me debating a lot.

That is not because I don't like debating or anything like that. I love having conversations with people that disagree with me in particular.

I like having conversations with people who agree with me. It's a lot easier. You're more relaxed.

You're not so tense, trying to respond to every question, but certainly there is a special place in my heart to discuss things with people who disagree with me, especially considering the world that we live in.

I love discussing things with atheists and those who are not in the faith, because that is the point of the gospel truth, right?

It's great to have conversations and be able to discuss these interesting topics and dive to the nooks and crannies of these topics, but there is a place where the importance of the gospel is key, right?

We should make sure we set the line and focus on that. That's why I like having conversations with atheists and Unitarians and oneness individuals.

I do consider those worldviews to be outside of the Christian orthodoxy. I love having conversations with those guys and discussing those areas of thought.

I'm looking at the guys. I see Merrick is the only one missing so far. I'm trying to hold down the fort until these guys get back.

I don't want to bore everyone in a live chat with my trying to stall time tactics here.

I want to make sure you guys are just staying up to par. I hope you guys are enjoying the debate and you guys are really getting a lot out of it, man.

I do encourage also, you guys watch the live debate. If there's something that you guys really are intrigued by and you guys are really put a lot, go back and listen to the debate again.

I do encourage that. Go back and listen to it again because a lot of times between the live chat and between other stuff you might have going on in your home getting distracted, you miss key points and important points of people arguments.

I do encourage everyone to make sure that they're flowing back and watching this again and diving into it because it's some good stuff.

It's really important stuff. Make sure you're doing that. And I still don't see Merrick. Where's Merrick at?

There he is. And just perfect timing is as if you were there and a transition sort of made you pop in because right when

I transitioned in, you popped in. So good stuff. All right. So now we're going to go ahead and transition to 10 -minute openings. Jeremiah, I know you had a question.

The closing statements will be 10 minutes for each team. So you guys, you have your 10 -minute opening.

Then we're going to have some Q &A after that. So audience, make sure you get your final questions in because once the

Q &A starts, I stop saving questions. So make sure you get those questions in.

That said, Merrick and Jeremiah, you guys are up first for your 10 -minute closing. And I will start your time as soon as you begin to speak.

Thanks. I'll do my five minutes here. Let me start my timer. I just want to respond quickly to a few things that were said, and then

I'm going to let Jeremiah have it. Second Thessalonians 2 .5. Okay. Chris Austin says, all things are clear and plain from the divine scriptures.

Whatever things are necessary are manifest. And so what Paul is saying in the sense that Joe refers to it,

I don't think there's any reason to think that it's in contradiction or going beyond what he's written to this church afterwards, right?

Paul is telling an individual church to hold fast to what he told verbally to them. And this has no bearing on the church today in the sense we're referring to.

As it goes to the eunuch, we do not say that everything is immediately plain and easy in the scriptures so as to be intelligible to everyone.

That's not the claim. We say that those things which are first obscure and difficult are afterwards rendered easy if one is diligent and is reading them with a pure and pious heart.

The devil doesn't have that, right? And so that's where I think Joe's point specifically about the devil doesn't really work at all.

Then we go to this idea of living and active. And I really want to point this out about the nature of tradition and how it's so dangerous, how

Roman Catholics can abuse it. And I'm not referring to any of our interlocutors, but I just want to give an example.

Joe brought up Hebrews 4. He said, all the fathers, maybe I'll have to go back, maybe he said unanimous, interpreted as referring to the person of Jesus Christ.

I'm so sorry if I misquoted that. Here I have a quote from Augustine.

And the scripture says that the word of God is a doubly sharp sword on account of the two edges, the two testaments.

Right. Okay. It's incredibly easy to abuse tradition. And so in this sense, even

Irenaeus talks about this. It's the heretics that use the tradition more than anything because they know in the scriptures they can be understood so perspicuously, clearly in a perspicuous way that you cannot abuse them to the amount that you can abuse the tradition.

So by the very nature of what tradition is, we need something living that is absolute.

Church is living, but even then you have lifespans which are short. We need the firm, solid rock of the scriptures.

And so the question about this canon idea, again, we're not saying the content of scripture is needed to be known in order to receive salvation.

Especially not all of it. Sure, the gospels, but not knowing what

Jude says is not going to delimit our salvation. This comes up with a good question.

How do we know the canon in the first place? Just apply this one layer further. How did the fathers of Trent know what the canon was before it was decreed in the council?

You say supernatural knowledge through the Holy Spirit guiding his people. Protestants can just say that in regards to how we know the content of the canon.

And again, that's the content of the canon as opposed to the fact that there is a canon, this ontology and this epistemology.

Effectively, I do not believe Peter gave a good distinction. He mentioned it, but in terms of the argument he gave,

I don't think he accounts for that. In regards to the Ethiopian eunuch,

I think by this logic really you can't understand anything, which I already got to. This idea of scripture interpreting scripture, we got into, well, use the magisterium to interpret the magisterium.

Again, like I pointed out, if the magisterium can do this, how much surer can

God's word do this, which is absolute and unchanging. Whereas the magisterium is fluid and organic, right?

So really, if I'm on the street evangelizing, I don't want to point to something which is changing.

I want to point to something which is firm and sure. So these are just a couple of considerations.

Again, really appreciate the opportunity to debate. I'm sorry if any toes were stepped on. I've had a lot of feelings going on.

So I'm going to pass it over to my brother Jeremiah. And again, thanks so much for this opportunity. Thank you,

Merrick. And you made so many good points there. And so I think in this discussion, what is perhaps lost is exactly what

Merrick was pointing out when it comes to Hebrews 4 and 2 Timothy 3, verse 16.

When we talk about the inscripturation of Scripture, right, we are talking about its nature.

If that is God -breathed, that is just as authoritative from the saints during the time of the

New Testament in which the apostles, the prophetic offices were still in a play, God's word, whether the rhema or inscripturated, is just as authoritative.

And so, yes, we did talk a little bit about epistemology, but any epistemological claim to knowledge is couched with an entire worldview.

And so I'm a little disappointed that Peter and Joe did not engage with this transcendental framework that God's perspicuous word that's clearly revealed is a necessary reality for human intelligibility.

What I mean by that is positively we read in Scripture, Jesus says, your word is truth.

We are able to understand that God reveals himself clearly in terms of what he wants from us.

And if they come back and say, well, that doesn't tell us faith and practice, well, he begins that verse by saying,

Father, sanctify them in your truth. This is identical to what Paul is saying that God's word is able to equip the saint, the man of God, the woman of God, someone that loves

God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. And so I really do think of the principle of sola scriptura always appealing back to truth, which comes from God, whether it be in Scripture or whether it be from a prophet speaking.

I love what the King David said in Psalm 119, starting in verse 41. Let me share this with you real quick, because this is the battle cry of sola scriptura.

David said, let your steadfast love come to me, O Lord of your salvation, according to your promise.

How would the saints of old understood the promise? It would be from God's law, from God's speaking to his people.

And he says, then I shall have an answer for him who taunts me, for those that want to cast doubt on the clarity of God's word being revealed to his people.

David goes on to say, for I trust in your word, and take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, for my hope is in your rules.

Notice David is doing exactly what Jesus did. When we talk about truth, this assumes an entire world view.

What is truth? Truth is that which corresponds to reality as perceived by the sovereign triune

God. We are dependent on him clearly revealing to us who we are, who he is, and what he wants from us in faith, in practice.

He is looking to Scripture.

I'm sorry. Yeah, lost you for a minute there, Jeremiah. You got it, man. Yes, so the point is

Scripture is truth, that which is God -breathed. We always look to God to reveal to us truth, and the epistemology of that is saying that is a necessary precondition for our human experience to know truth.

You have to look to God. God must be able to speak perspicuously, clearly to the imago

Dei, the image bearers of God. And so David goes on to say, and take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, for my hope is in your rules.

I will keep your law continually forever and ever, and I shall walk in a wide way, for I have sought your precepts.

I will also speak of your testimonies before kings, and shall not be put to shame, for I find my delight in your commandments, which

I love. I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.

That is sola scriptura, folks. We look to God's word for truth, for guidance in everything of life.

And what Roman Catholics seem to have trouble, and a lot of this may be on my side not understanding their side as well, but there's no way around it that these are two different worldviews.

I would actually say that Peter and Joe are not being consistent with their ultimate foundations.

I don't think this three -legged stool is actually equally ultimate. I think underlying this three -legged stool is their own human reason.

Human reason will not give you truth. We have to ask the question, what transcends human reason?

What has existed eternally and absolutely for us to be able to have this conversation? Well, God must be triune.

God must be triune in an eternal relationship with one another to account for everything that goes on in our world.

And so God's word would transcend our time and space. And so we are presupposing that God must speak clearly in this fashion in order for us to justify anything, because we are talking about truth itself.

And so kind of lastly here, Protestants. I either say this to kind of slap our

Protestant brothers around. We don't need to fear the word tradition. Peter or Joe 1 did a great job of defining what tradition is.

It's merely to be passed down, to be handed down, and for the other side to receive it.

Now, we didn't get much into this, but 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 15, I believe tradition there, also found in 1

Corinthians chapter 11 verse 2, that tradition is the tradition of the gospel.

That is the oral teaching that we see the Apostle Paul. He is orally speaking the gospel and also writing that gospel to be handed down to God's people.

Thank you so much. All right. Thank you so much Merrick and Jeremiah for those closing remarks.

And so Peter and Joe, you're up for your 10 minute closing. And let me reset that time.

Who's going first, Peter or you guys? All right. I'll start your time as soon as you begin to speak.

I think you're muted, Joe. There we go.

Let's try that again. A lot of the argument they're making in favor of sola scriptura is built on, I think, three faulty premises.

The first is that the church claims to be equal to or superior to Scripture, even though, as we've already pointed out, Vatican 1 explicitly rejects that.

Vatican 2 and De verbum does as well. And moreover, this three -legged stool,

Peter already explained, that's a bad understanding of the Catholic model. Second, the idea that Catholics believe Scripture cannot be understood at all without interpretation.

That's an utter straw man and not what any Catholic believes. But third, it's built on a lot of conflation of phrases like the

Word of God. As I pointed out, the Word of God is used in Scripture phrase to refer to Jesus, to refer to the written

Scriptures, to refer to the oral proclamation of the Gospel, to include to prophetic revelation, whether written or oral.

And so when, you know, as you just heard in Jeremiah's closing, these references to that, which is

God breathes, to, you know, according to your promise, he said, well, that would have been understood to be the Scriptures. And the answer is, no, no, it wasn't true.

So the Scripture wasn't true at the time. There was a living prophet, the prophet Nathan. There were other prophets who were alive, or had recently died, whose writings were not written down.

And so Sola Scriptura was not true while the Bible was being written. It was not true in the Old Testament. It was not true in the New Testament.

And the reason that matters is, that means to believe in Sola Scriptura, you have to believe in a premise that after the death of the

Apostles, everything in Scripture, everything proclaimed by the Apostles had already been written down, and, or, all orally proclaimed tradition was lost somehow.

And neither of those claims are found anywhere in Scripture. So you have to believe on, as far as I can tell, an entirely extra -scriptural, historical, or superstitious kind of argument in Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura, it cannot be proved from Scripture alone. Moreover, as we saw from Peter's argument,

I'm sure he's going to do a better job. And Merrick's response was very telling. There are entire books of the

Bible you could throw out using their premises, because you wouldn't know whether they are or aren't part of the Bible. He thinks the important ones are left in, but I would say, on what basis?

Like, because these were the ones clearly accepted by the first and second century Christians, that's an appeal to tradition.

And so, all of this, with Sola Scriptura, with Scripture alone, you don't get Scripture, and you don't get the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

Those are really big points. There were a couple minor points I wanted to just briefly address. One is this question of the meaning of Hebrews 4 .12.

And I'm indebted, and that's a good call, Merrick, that Augustine does point that out. He is very much in the minority on this point.

I would refer you here to James Swetnim's, I think, 1981 biblical article, where he says Jesus is

Logos in Hebrews 4 .12. He looks at Origen, Hilary of Poitiers, Justin Martyr, and so on. I'd say, also, you could look at the context of Hebrews 4.

It says the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two -edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

And before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.

That seems, in context, to be clearly talking about the Word of God, Jesus, not the Word of God, Scripture.

But, moreover, even if you say, oh, Scripture is living and active in some sense, that doesn't prove

Scripture alone is authoritative or infallible. I know Jeremiah was really excited about this idea that there was 400 years of divine silence prophesied in Scripture.

That's not true. I think he's basing this off of Philip Kaiser's book, where he takes a presuppositional case for sola scriptura.

And I've answered that before in an article called, Did Prophecy End in 400 B .C.?

Over at my blog, Seamus Popery. Because that argument doesn't actually prove sola scriptura at all. I'm going to just ignore it, other than to make one point.

He brings up as a proof that Jesus affirmed the Protestant canon that he used the phrase from Abel to Zechariah in Matthew 23 -35, but he refers to Zechariah the son of Berechiah.

Now, why does that matter? Because Jeremiah's interpretation assumes that Jesus is going from Genesis to 2

Chronicles when Zechariah is killed. That's the wrong Zechariah. 2 Chronicles 24 -20. The Zechariah killed there is

Zechariah the son of Jehodiah. The Zechariah Jesus is referring to is the prophet Zechariah after whom the book is named.

Look at Zechariah 1 -1, where he identifies himself as Zechariah the son of Berechiah. That whole argument is based on the idea that it's just conflating to Zechariah's.

Why does that matter? Because what Jesus is actually doing is citing an unwritten tradition, which was attested to in the

Targum and Lamentations, where it says that this Zechariah was killed in the temple. Jesus is referring to data not found in the

Old Testament. And there are plenty of similar circumstances. For instance, in John 10,

Jesus celebrates Hanukkah. And that's either coming from 2

Maccabees, in which case that's an argument for the Deuterocanon, or as an unwritten tradition, in which case it's an argument against Sola Scriptura.

Either way is a total defeater for the idea that everything relevant is found in Scripture alone. Finally, the way they kind of get out of this issue on the clarity of Scripture is saying, well, the big stuff.

But again, the big stuff according to whose principles, according to whose standard. And if the nature is like God's word of itself is just so clear, then why is it only clear on the big stuff?

If you're making an argument that, in essay, God's stuff is so clear, that should be true of the big stuff and the little stuff.

So I might actually win it like 10 seconds over. I'm sorry about that, Peter, but I'll kick it over to you. Thank you very much,

Jay, for that, and for making the Zechariah point, because I don't have to. I just want to remind everyone that the debate here is about, is

Sola Scriptura true? Sola Scriptura, as we've defined, is the idea that Scripture is the soul -sufficient, infallible, ultimate rule of faith.

Now, I don't see that anything has established the soul -sufficient, infallible, ultimate rule of faith beyond the statement that Scripture is the only source.

Now, as we've seen, there has to be a canon tradition in order to know what is Holy Scripture, and that has to be revealed to us, because only

God knows what he has inspired, and therefore only God can reveal that to us. His revealing it to us is therefore something which is equivalent to that which is the

Onestos, because it has God as its author, and that is, as we've described, an historical tradition.

It's something which was passed down to us. So the only thing that is going to establish the soul -sufficient, infallible, or ultimate rule of faith has basically been disproven by that.

Now, I think we did engage, actually, with Jeremiah's transcendental point, in the sense that the rooting of the

Onestos nature of Holy Scripture therefore has been dealt with. Now, you can abuse Holy Tradition as well, as was said by Maric, but who is more disagreement between them?

The Catholics and the Eastern non -Catholic churches, who all accept tradition and, in fact, agree on what the tradition is, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, or the various Protestant denominations?

Well, I would say that all of us, whether Catholic, Eastern, Heterodox, or Protestant, actually agree on the basics that Maric would refer to, although that's begging the question, because you're begging the question as to what is basic and what is not.

But in so far as it's didactic, the stuff that is the teaching, and all of teaching matters, actually,

I'd say there's much more uniformity between those of us who have tradition and Scripture than those who have Scripture alone.

And actually, those opposing the Magisterium, by the way, Jeremiah said that people who oppose Holy Scripture use the same arguments.

Well, those opposing the Magisterium and the Tradition make the same arguments as well. I don't think that proves very much.

Maric mentioned Irenaeus' going against the use of sacred tradition. I would point out that actually what

Irenaeus is doing is he's actually responding to the Gnostics, who claimed that they had this secret tradition that only they had about certain mysteries.

And what actually Irenaeus does is he counters that claim by noting that the Church can trace a carefully guarded interpretive tradition from the

Apostles to the Church leaders of his own time. He enumerates the lineage of the exemplary Roman Church Episcopate, proves the connection of present

Catholic doctrine with the Apostles and our Lord himself, and notes that quote, even if the

Apostles had known of hidden mysteries, Gnostic hidden mysteries, which they taught to the perfect secretly and apart from others, they would have handed them down especially to those to whom they were entrusting the

Churches themselves. Since the true Apostolic oral tradition was passed on our Lord and the

Apostles to the contemporary Church leaders, the Gnostics, he's saying, have no claim to a different secret oral tradition.

They're cast back, effectively, onto their own authority, not the authority of the

Church, which is what he's appealing to along with a public tradition. Now, the last thing

I'll simply say to this is the idea that, oh, well, the Church didn't know the canon until 1546.

Well, I mean, again, Marek, you need to listen to the presentation I provided. I was going quite fast, to be fair.

But I did point out that actually it was a century earlier that the Magisterium defines in an extraordinary sense the canon.

And I also pointed out that, in fact, we don't need an exercise of the extraordinary infallible Magisterium of the

Church to know what is canon. The Church has never claimed that we do. And, of course, we actually pointed out at Vatican I that it's explicitly denied by the

Magisterium when we said that. The recognition of the authentic canon tradition by the ordinary infallible

Magisterium, that is to say, the Magisterium as it taught consistently through time, was perfectly sufficient for Christians to know the canon just as it was for us to know the rest of the positive faith prior to other doctrines being defined by an ecumenical council or pope.

In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity, which was a tradition as well as within Holy Scripture, was known very well by Christians prior to it being defined in an ecumenical council.

So the same is true of baptismal regeneration, the same is true of the real presence of the Eucharist, the same is true of all the different doctrines that constitute

Catholic Christianity. So the fact that the extraordinary infallible

Magisterium only defined the canon to facilitate unity with the Copts in 1442 at the Council of Florence and to refute the

Protestant heretical deletion and relegation due to chronicle texts in 1546 tells me nothing about whether we know the canon.

We know the canon is a tradition which was safeguarded consistently by the Church over time and not by Scripture alone.

All right, thank you all for a great and fantastic debate.

Exciting stuff, good stuff. So now we're going to transition to our Q &A and so we're going to jump into it now.

We've got a whole bunch of super chats here and so we're going to deal with some of these super chats.

All right, the first one is from Cosmic Watermelon. Some of you guys'

YouTube names are absolutely hilarious. Okay, so Cosmic Watermelon, thank you for the super chat,

I appreciate it. Joe, Constitutional Textualism versus Sola Scriptura. Okay, I'm not 100 % sure

I know what they're asking. I think I can maybe guess that if you look at the six more traditional

Supreme Court Justices of the nine, all but one of them are Catholic and I think that's not a coincidence because if you interpret the

Constitution in the way that Catholics suggest you interpret Scripture, you end up with something faithful to what the

Founders, or in the case of Scripture, the Apostles said. Because you're looking at two things. You're looking at what does the text say and second, how was the text understood when it was written?

Because the idea is that meaning doesn't change over time. It's the liberal argument that meaning does change over time.

Protestants are unwittingly falling into this same trap by interpreting Scripture according to the 21st century milieu without any kind of awareness of how it was understood in the 21st century, you end up whether intentionally or unintentionally accepting premises that would be totally foreign to the original reader's description.

Alright. Anyone else have anything to chime in on that one? What you got

Jeremiah? Uh, nevermind. Alright.

I can't say, I don't want to just respond to what Joe said. I want to turn to the next question.

I'm not sure exactly I understand what it means. I got a sign right here that says the Supreme Court is dead wrong.

I don't know if that has anything to do with it. Five of the nine justices that decided Roe were

Catholic. Sorry, I don't have more to add. Five that decided Roe were Catholic? That's not true.

That were on the court. Not that... I don't think so.

There was a Protestant majority in the court until fairly recently. You might be right. I shouldn't speak when I don't know. I could be wrong too.

I didn't get a source. Anyway, sorry. What you got Jeremiah?

So, how we're going to do this? They have up to two minutes to respond and then we have two minutes?

Yep. Okay, I just want to make sure I got my timer ready. Okay, sounds good.

Alright, so we have another super chat here and Cameron Brinkman has been hooking the ministry up.

I believe that Merrick knows Cameron as well. I think we all know Cameron. We all know Cameron. Alright, so...

He fleshed out how Psalms 19 teaches the words clarity. Yeah, clarity.

And then, I'm not sure if it's a two -part because the way he phrases the question is sort of confusing here. And then he says, sola scriptura and contraception, abortion, etc.

You guys following the question there? I can make a stab at what it might mean. Because one of you guys mentioned

Trent Horn talking about how contraception, abortion, and the like aren't taught unambiguously in scripture.

And so, usually the case for it doesn't go on scripture alone. I think that's what it might be about. Okay. Anybody else have...

Because we don't need to, we have general revelation. Sure, yeah, and I would completely agree with the general revelation.

But I think... I'm trying to think how to phrase this here. Psalm 19,

I think, very clearly teaches the perspicuity of the scriptures. Our interlocutors are going to disagree with that.

I encourage everyone watching to go read it. But the question is if you interpret it one way and then someone else says,

I disagree with that interpretation, and the Catholics object to this, again, how is that different from one person disagreeing with another person's interpretation of, say, a papal declaration?

Are you saying you disagree with what it means or disagree with the actual conclusion? I don't know if I can engage you.

Maybe I should get... Oh, I'm sorry. It's supposed to be one minute each, no cross

X on this one. So, Jeremiah, go ahead. Yeah, so I want to speak to the perspicuity principle.

If it's transcendentally true, it's a necessary precondition for our experience. And so I'm saying for us to justify truth, it must be found in God clearly revealing

Himself to guide us in all aspects of life when we look for truth. So I could be wrong about varying degrees of interpretation, but that's predicated on the principle of the sure foundation that God can speak with clarity.

And that's something I've not... In my opinion, Peter, which I have a ton of respect for you, I don't think y 'all have touched a transcendental argument because that is true for human experience.

I'm saying that when you look to John 17, 17, he says, Thy word is truth.

That's the precipium for everything. And then he even talks about that that truth is able to sanctify us.

That assumes diversity, but that we can grow in holiness in the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ. So, of course, there's going to be diversity, like in Protestantism, but it assumes that we are growing in our knowledge, but it assumes a necessary foundation, and that has to be an entire worldview.

Right. I mean, I'll just pick up this, if I may, which is to simply say that, again, the debate here is whether or not soul scripture is true.

I don't see how anything that you've just said, Jeremiah, justifies the sufficiency, infallibility, or ultimacy of Holy Scripture.

Even if I wanted to grant everything you've just said with regards to God establishing truth, etc.,

etc., all of that, that does not tell me how God establishes truth. It doesn't tell me how he brings it to all truth.

Yes, God has spoken clearly, but the question is, how has he done so? And I'm saying it's not through Holy Scripture alone, very evidently, for all the reasons that I brought up, which have not yet been refuted.

I would say that, in fact, no, it's clearly Holy Scripture, it's clearly Sacred Tradition, as sources, both of which the

Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of his Church and her Magisterium, thereby brings us into all truth.

That's the way it happened. That's the way that's, I think, the history of Christianity confesses, and not by Scripture alone.

So even if I accept everything you've just said, I really don't see how it relates to the topic of the discussion we're having, really.

Peter, I love you, man. I wish we could hash it out more. I'm sure we will, by the way.

I hope this is not going to be our last... Sure. And can

I say something? I just want to clarify, I wasn't trying to bear false witness. Thinking about it,

I think the five justices are in reference to our current Supreme Court, and I wasn't in any way trying to slander the moral integrity of Catholic justices.

The six good justices are all, or sorry, five of the six good justices, we'll say, on abortion are Catholic. One of the bad justices was baptized

Catholic, but does not attend Mass. So being Catholic correlates positively with being good on constitutional textualism, for reasons

I think are not coincidental. But that's a much different, super interesting, much different kind of discussion about how...

And I'm going to entirely ignore that discussion, because I don't believe in Supreme Court and different constitutions.

All right, guys, we're going to transition to the next question here. Another super chat. Thank you, Kane and Danny, appreciate the super chat.

All right, this is from Merrick and Jeremiah. How can Scripture be true if it took centuries to choose to have a closed canon?

The early church did not have the 66 books of the Bible canon. What do you guys have on that one?

You can take it. I would say... Sorry, I can't read the text. Again, I think the church can function without a 66 book canon, because I don't think having every single book is necessary unto salvation.

So we bring up this idea of the big concepts. And so the question our opponents raised is, well, how do you know what the big concepts are?

Or a question is, you know, if we apply the analogy of faith, well, then how do we know which ones are the seat of doctrine texts?

And I would say, from within the text itself, John tells us why he wrote his gospel, and very clearly,

I think he says it's sufficient unto salvation. Luke tells us why, and I think the beginning of Luke is very clear on this.

So if John's gospel is sufficient, John 20 38 -31, is sufficient to bring about salvation, then, and that's just one gospel, then

I think we don't need, again, going back to Tobit's dog, it's not an article of faith that it wagged its tail.

And I think that very clearly makes sense of the data on this issue. I'll hand it over to Jeremiah.

Yeah, well, it's pretty easy for sola scriptura to account for the canon. We just say we don't have an infallible account of the canon.

We have a passive infallible one to convince us, wow, God has actually spoke in time and place to give us

His infallible word. Does it mean that I have infallible knowledge equivocally with God?

So this is another question I would have loved to throw their way is, are they claiming to have equivocal knowledge of the canon the same way

God does? If we flesh that out, I think that's absurd and can't be demonstrated. And when

I talk about a transcendental argument for the perspicuity of God's word, either being inscripturated or rhema,

I'm saying that's necessary for a workable worldview for truth. One way to demonstrate that is by the impossibility of the contrary.

If we assume that an imperspicuous worldview, I'm saying that's going to reduce to absurdity because you're starting off with God not being able to clearly give us guidance in terms of faith and practice.

The reason why you have diversity is for one, the nature of man hates the things of God.

So naturally, you're going to have pride. You're going to have inconsistencies. And number two, there must be growth within knowledge of doctrine.

That's what 2 Peter 3 goes on to say that we are to grow in the grace and knowledge. We're talking about epistemology.

What we can't be wrong is the foundational level of God speaking perspicuously about what faith looks like and to grow in that faith.

I could say so much more, and I'll stop there. I don't remember how this works.

Yeah, please. I'll just pick up on that. I mean, I'm actually not that much interested in the perspicuity point, if I'm honest.

I'm happy, let's say if I was willing to grant that scripture is objectively perspicuous, let's say in of itself, it's perfectly clear that still wouldn't remove the problem that human beings, as you rightly pointed out, are not able necessarily to read perspicuous documents with complete perspicuity.

Now, on the one hand, that's a problem for the man who's in sin. And I think we would all agree with that. The man who is in sin is darkened in his intellect et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Even however, amongst Christians, people you would accept as Christians, they disagree amongst themselves on this point.

And you might say, well, that's because they're not grown enough and because they are still uncertain of the grounds of sin. Well, in that case, what good is it to have a perspicuous document that the people who are supposed to be, who are saved and enlightened can't read perspicuously?

So in other words, the problem there is within man, it's not within the document itself. And the document itself can be as perspicuous as it likes, but it still won't solve the problem.

And just with regards to what Marek said, look, I pointed this out before, but if I need the

Holy Scriptures, right, we've agreed that Scripture is necessary. That was something which Jeremiah very explicitly brought up in his presentation.

The corollary of that is that I need to know what the Holy Scriptures are. If I don't, if I have no earthly idea what books of Holy Scripture, I could not functionally have them at all.

And actually, this is a matter of knowing at all. This is a matter of knowing infallibly or with certainty. Certainty is utterly unimportant here.

I think we need to just junk this idea that we need to know certainly. What we need is to know at all.

And you don't know at all unless God has revealed it to you. And if the soul of Scripture is true, then the soul of Scripture is the means by which he reveals that to us, because we need to know what

Holy Scripture is. If you don't know what Holy Scripture is, it can't function as Holy Scripture. This disappears into a puff of smoke.

So therefore, the problem that you have here is you have a necessary daism of revelation, which by soul

Scripture's own logic must be provided by Scripture, but it's not. It is in fact something which

God revealed, and then it was passed down as a tradition outside of Holy Scripture. That's the dilemma with which you have not yet dealt.

So I want to build on that and respond to two things. One, the question's on perspicuity.

And I would say, the fact you're going to Psalm 19, and even the people in the comments are like, we don't know why you're interpreting it that way, points to the fact that Scripture does not clearly teach that Scripture is clear, which it should if the clarity of Scripture is true.

Second, I would say the reasons you give for why good -faith Protestants disagree are twofold.

You say hatred of God and diversity but growth in knowledge. But the number of Protestant denominations would be shrinking if your second reason was right.

Because if everyone's growing towards greater knowledge, we should be growing towards one another, at least all people of goodwill who love

God and serve Him. So all you're left with is Protestants hate God, which I don't think is a position you want to defend.

But third, to kind of build on Peter's point, the whole fallible set of infallible books is just not his argument.

He's saying you don't have any books. He's saying if you want to know why are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the

Bible at all, it's insane to say, well, because they say they're inspired. Because one, they don't.

And two, plenty of uninspired books say they are. If you want to know why they're in the Bible, the first testimony to them unambiguously is

Irenaeus of Lyon in 180, who also explicitly affirms in Book 3, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, that sola scriptura is false, that we go in scripture and tradition.

And then he gives a concrete example of tradition and apostolic succession, which he says all churches founded by apostles practice.

So if you reject him as not Christian because he believes in the sacrifice of the mass, because he believes in all these things that you reject, what is your basis for having even one of the books of the

New Testament? Not, how do you have an infallible canon? How do you have any of the New Testament? That's the question that's been just totally misunderstood this whole debate.

Alright, guys. Next question. Let's make sure we try to keep our minds with the idea of two minutes for each team.

I think we went over that a little bit. So let's make sure we keep that in mind. I thought it was two minutes per person. Yeah, two minutes per team.

So we're trying to smash through these questions as fast as we can, because a lot of we have a lot of questions here.

Let me send that again. Alright, so it doesn't want to open all the way. Let me pull that up a little better for you guys.

Alright, so this is another super shout out from Kane Danny. Thank you, Merrick. This question is directly to you. Merrick said that Jude in a canon is not necessary as doctrine, but he criticized

Marcion for only having Luke and Paul's epistles as his canon. Yeah, I would criticize him, but I wouldn't say he couldn't be saved or come to a knowledge of XYZ articles of faith on the basis of those scriptures, right?

Yes, I would absolutely criticize that, but that's for other reasons, and I don't think that's applicable at all to this idea of if there's any articles of faith in that sense.

Jeremiah? Yeah, we're sticking to the two -minute rule. Something that I think

I can't remember exactly if it's Peter and Joe along with this question is how would we get any books at all?

Well, since we don't have to infallibly know the books, then we can have good reasons by looking to secondary authorities like tradition.

We actually look to tradition in church history as wonderful secondary authorities, and so it sounds like if you're not pushing hard for an infallible canon, well, that sounds very

Protestant -like, and so you're speaking our language by looking at all these traditions and things, and so we have good reason to believe why

Jude should be in the canon, right? When we look at church history, we see that the church had unity on what was scripture.

Now, I would say not infallible equivocal knowledge the same way that God is. Now, Peter said that's not even what we're arguing.

I'm like, wow, y 'all sound very Protestant. Everything that I've looked at is that there is an infallible declaration at the

Council of Trent of what the canon is, and I'm saying, wow, it sounds like they are trying to have God knowledge, and Peter, I'm trying,

I will say that I could be wrong on a lot of that, and I am trying to continue to better learn y 'all's position, so just know my heart in that, but I would, with 24 seconds,

I just want to repeat the fact that we would probably sound very similar in looking to church history and tradition as fallible authorities to see how the church has passively received

God's Word. I mean, I'll respond to that by just saying

I don't think if you've been reading stuff which is concentrated on infallibility, I think you've been reading more

Protestant apologetics than Catholic doctrine, because Catholic doctrine doesn't go on infallibility all that much with regards to the canon.

It goes on to the tradition, the canon as a tradition, and actually you sound more Catholic, because the wonderful thing about this, you know,

Guy, the thing I always marvel at, as soon as you step outside the

Holy Scriptures to find your canon, as soon as you appeal to tradition and magisterium, you have abandoned soul scriptura, and therefore the debate is over.

We've done it. We've won. It's great, because as soon as you say you can find that revelation, which it is a revelation which

God has given us, because only God can reveal to us what he has inspired, as soon as you say that revelation is not in one source, which is

Holy Scripture, which is what Holy Scripture says, but rather that it is outside of Holy Scripture and tradition, then you're admitting that there are two sources of revelation, you've accepted the dual source theory, and you've accepted that the

Church has canonised that, passively recognised, as we say, passively recognised that, irrespective of whether you think that that's an infallible recognition or not, you have accepted two sources of revelation, you've accepted the

Church passively recognises it, congratulations, you've become a Catholic, well done. And so, therefore, soul scriptura is over, there we are.

Soul scriptura has to say, has to say that it is the sole source of revelation that is sufficient to give you everything that you need, of which the canon is one of those things.

It's not just stuff relating to salvation, it's stuff that relates to all the things the Church needs per se, and that's why because we've disproved that, we can say soul scriptura is false.

So there we are. Yeah, I just want to build on that. I actually started the clock a little late, so I don't know exactly how much time

I have, so sorry. If you're basing your belief in the Gospels on tradition, and then everything else on your belief in the

Gospels, you still have a necessary foundation of tradition as well as Scripture. Because if that's wrong, then you're going to throw on Gospels.

I mean, imagine, not just Marcion, who has Luke and the Apollyon Epistles, imagine someone who rejects all four

Gospels, but accepts the canonicity of the Gospels, like the Gnostic Gospels. By soul scriptura principles, you have no rebuttal to that, other than that they're not the books you happen to settle on.

You haven't done anything to show, so in other words, to answer someone who is faithfully following false

Scriptures, like a Gnostic, you have to appeal both to the true Scriptures and to the tradition that affirms that these are the true

Scriptures and the Gnostic ones are the false ones, and that's explicitly what Irenaeus does against the

Gnostics in Book 2, Chapter 2. Alright, and here is another question from Cameron Brinkman, and this is for directly towards Joe.

How does Joe's Jerome quote refute soul scriptura? Yeah, so Jerome's quote is that the essence of Scripture is not in the letter, but the meaning.

It doesn't matter if you've got two people who both say they believe the Bible. Oneness Pentecostals will go with the

Bible alone, but they reject the Trinity. So if I want to know if the Trinity is true or false, it's not enough to say, well, do you believe in the

Bible? Because both do. One of them just misunderstands what they're reading, and so I need to appeal to the essence, which is preserved by the interpretive function of the

Church, and so you know, Jerome is responding to people like the Montanists, who had the same canon of Scripture, but misunderstood the books.

That's generally true of the heresies. Most heretics aren't like Marcion. Most heretics don't reinvent the canon.

Luther accepted. Calvin accepted. But you know, for the most part, the differences are not over which books are in the

Bible. The differences are over what is the meaning of those books. That's how

I'd answer. Thanks. I would say quoting the

Bible without interpreting it correctly is, I think, and I would need to see that quote again, but I think that's exactly what

Jerome is railing against. I think this I'm trying to think how to formulate this.

Jeremiah, do you have anything to add, and maybe I can come back in our two minutes here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a comment about the

Pentecostals. For one, I'm not aware that they have a robust, good understanding of what sola scriptura means, because sola scriptura is about the nature of Scripture, and so if they're affirming the right canon, then what we ought to do, since we have the proper foundation, which by the way,

Roman Catholics agree with the 66 books, they just add more, then we would say let's demonstrate by logic and the grammatical historical method of Scripture interpreting

Scripture. It's easy to debunk oneness Pentecostalism, right, because they're inconsistently looking at God the

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that they are all three persons distinct from one another. It's so easy to show that in Scripture, and I think it was

Joe earlier that just said the Trinity was a tradition. Well, it all depends on how we're defining tradition, because I'm saying that's clearly taught in Scripture, right?

It's engaged with exegesis to see what's going to win out at the end of the day in terms of consistency, and I would argue the grammatical historical method is a transcendental hermeneutic.

Every time that we use words, it's always in the context in which we mean them, so that's why we do things like say, what did the original author mean when they said what they said, and how would the original author meant it?

So if we have these necessary principles in play, then the Trinity is going, you're going to arrive at the doctrine of the

Trinity not by tradition per se. Now, I'm not against tradition by looking at it as a secondary authority, but you're going to get the doctrine of the

Trinity when you let Scripture interpret itself, and I would appeal to the total, the totality of Scripture, which has been handed to the church, and that's how we arrive at the doctrine of the

Trinity, which were a few, one is Pentecostalism. All right. So I'll pick up on that if I may, just very briefly, just to say that I think it was me, because I think it was me who brought up the

Trinity in the first place. I would say that the Trinity is both in Holy Scripture and in Sacred Tradition, because I think that Sacred Tradition and the

Holy Scriptures are a Venn diagram. It's not that they are entirely separate, it's that they intersect. There are some things that are entirely in Tradition, like the

Canon, there are some things that are entirely in Holy Scripture, and well, actually, I think that the vast majority of things intersect in that Venn diagram.

All I would point out, however, is that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which I think that Marek and Jeremiah both have, is something which is a development, just as it is with us, because, after all, a lot of the language we use, with regards to, for example,

Hupustasis, with regards to Ussia, all of that kind of stuff, that is Greek philosophical language, which is appropriated by the

Christians, in fact, some of it has actually been used, but was used by the Gnostics, but it was appropriated by the Christians and effectively baptised so that you have this synthesis, this exosynthetic synthesis of the truths of Revelation with the truths of human reason.

That's actually something which Protestants and Catholics both accept, but actually a Catholic who accepts the reality of development has a much better basis for accepting that than someone who would say, actually,

I'm going to go by Holy Scripture alone, and would actually exclude quote -unquote pagan philosophy and reason, because actually what the

Church has always done is appropriate those things. So that's the only contribution I'd make on that, because I think that helps clarify what we mean when we talk about the relationship between Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

Was that part of it? We're going to have to move on, guys.

I know everybody wants to say something. We're going to have to move on to the next question, guys. All right, we have another Super Chat here from Cameron again.

Which premise of Peter's do Merrick and Jeremiah disagree with?

And it's on the Facebook Chat, guys, or I can put it up again if you like. Yeah, see, I'm dyslexic,

Jeremiah's dyslexic, so this is kind of funny. Yeah, I think it's quite ambiguous.

P1 in its description of that we need, I think it needs to be more specific.

P2 is obviously clear, again, depending how you define necessary, but I don't want to be too nitpicky.

If Holy Scripture is necessary, then the knowledge of what is Scripture, the canon, is necessary. I think we would just flat out deny

P3 if it's in reference to an exhaustive knowledge of the content of the canon, which is, again, the same point that we've been making, which obviously you'll give the same response to.

And the conclusions do follow P4. The Holy Scripture cannot give us that knowledge. And again, P4, we would distinguish if we're referring to an exhaustive knowledge, no, but we do think in terms of general equity and right and proper inference, as Protestants' Confessions say, we can, in fact, learn knowledge that can be very applicable when it comes to learning the canon.

And again, I don't think if we just refer to all revelation, like earlier Peter said, if we add another source of revelation, we agree that there's two sources of revelation.

We agree with the natural and special revelation. That's not at all touching on what we're debating here. Alright, I might have started that a little later.

I have 50 seconds, Marlon. I want to touch on where Peter talked about you got the ontological canon and the epistemological canon.

I think I understood that. I was trying my best to have that. And I've heard

Dr. White speak to this. And what I want to cycle back to is the only way to have an epistemology is to also assume a metaphysic.

Right? This is all, no matter what you say about the canon, this assumes a type of worldview.

And my argument from the very get -go is a necessary worldview for us to even be able to talk about truth assumes that God perspicuously has revealed

His Word. Now, I'm saying that that's true. I could be wrong on so many different things. And when Sola Scriptura is not necessarily a conversation about the canon per se.

I know that's the Roman Catholic slam dunk argument. We're saying we have a consistent account of how we get the canon.

It's just not an infallible one. So, there we go. Alright, Peter and Joe? So, I mean, yeah,

I'll come back on that. I don't see how anyone can disagree with P3.

If you don't know what Holy Scripture is, then you don't have Holy Scripture. So, Scripture is necessary. You need it.

God, it's got all the things you need to know how to be saved, for example. Then you need to know what it is.

Otherwise, functionally, it doesn't exist for you. Again, it disappears in a puff of smoke. So, I think P3 is fairly sound.

I'm more interested in why you would believe that Holy Scripture can, and it's an interesting point.

I seem to, if I understand you correctly, Murug, what you seem to be saying is that Holy Scripture gives you a certain amount of canon -related knowledge which, by some degree of inference, you can build upon to find all the other kind of books of Holy Scripture.

I don't think that's been really fleshed out. It's very difficult to see how you could infer that accurately, the full exhaustive list of Holy Scripture.

You seem to think you don't need the exhaustive list because you've got this basic information which will allow you to get you to the exhaustive list eventually.

But it's not obvious to me what in Holy Scripture implicitly would say that, yes, Esther is definitely a book of Holy Scripture, or that Jude is, or that Titus is, or that any number of other books are.

Actually, that's not really the way that Christians ever accepted Holy Scripture, the books of Holy Scripture.

They accepted it as something which they received, which is a canonical tradition. So, I simply don't think that the responses to those points are reasonable refutations of the argument thus far.

It's an interesting point, but I don't think it's one which has been particularly fleshed out, and I don't see how it works. I just want to build on that.

I don't think you understand what a defeater this is. Because if you say God did not reveal which things he revealed, which is what your argument is, that we don't know from Revelation which things are and aren't in Revelation, not just exhaustively.

We don't even know if the four Gospels are the right ones. We have to look to non - infallible tradition to even get the four

Gospels. And that's not divinely revealed. It's not inspired. You're trying to argue for the all clarity of God and, without seemingly aware of the contradiction, say

God has not even made it clear which things he said and which things he didn't say. All right.

And we have a couple more Super Chats here, and then we'll go shut it down.

All right. So we've got Canadian Catholic. Thank you so much for the support. Does anything in the

Bible teach that second Peter is God -breathed? Jeremiah and Merrick, you guys want to tackle those one first?

I would say, just quickly, I think this is just a big equivocation. There's an intersection of the sciences going on here.

I'm obviously not talking about rocks. I think history, testimony, give us this material.

The Holy Spirit, just as you believe there's some special sort of revelation given to the fathers before Trent was declared.

And again, I'm sorry if I messed up any specific nuanced historical thing. Theology is an enterprise which studies the principium.

The nature of what God is real. And so even in when Peter is giving his premises, he's saying,

I'm trying to see here, knowing what it is. I think he's clearly equivocating between knowing what it is, i .e.

its nature, and knowing what it is, i .e. what constitutes it. I'll give it over to you, Jeremiah, with exactly one minute left.

One minute. Yeah. So something Peter keeps saying is that you've got to definitely know what

Scripture is, and I'm saying what is your definition of definitely know? Because I don't think you want to carry the burden of proof of infallibility.

I think you've already made that clear. So whatever you're going to say in terms of definitely know, we're saying as long as that's not infallible, we are very close.

Now, I would disagree that Protestants are sounding like Catholics at that point because what

Protestants are pointing out is that which is Scripture is ultimate in its authority for truth, and so when we ask questions about faith or ruling in faith and practice, we're saying what is the ultimate standard?

We're talking about something that is infallible. Okay? So it's helpful to look and see how the church has looked at that.

That's awesome. It's not infallible. You agree. We're saying, okay, everything that we read in tradition, we have to measure it in what is infallible.

And what we're left with here, and obviously we disagree a little bit, I think I've been informed to know that we sound very similar, but we have to go back to the

Word of God because that is infallible. Okay, so I'll respond to that.

I'll just respond to that by saying, well, obviously Scripture is not infallible. It is inerrant. Again, I don't want to scandalize anyone here.

It is absolutely inerrant, but it is not infallible because something could only be infallible if it has agency.

It comes from the Latin fellere, which means to fail. But to fail is an active verb. Books can't fail.

They can err, or rather their authors can fail in their errant books, but books cannot err.

And now we're back to the whole discussion about whether or not the Word is living, etc., etc., etc., which

I think Joe has finally dealt with. All I'll point out lastly on that is if Scripture is sufficient, and that is the fundamental point, it must give us all that we need.

We need the canon, and I'm afraid it doesn't give us the canon. There is no equivocation here, Marek. I distinguish between C1 and C2 as James White does.

Canon 1 is what it is in terms of its nature, the canon. C2, canon 2, is what constitutes it, and I'm saying that canon 1 is, the knowledge of canon 1 is canon 2, and canon 2 therefore must be, as the epistemological principle revealed to us, in Holy Scripture.

Holy Scripture must give us that point. And as long as you are saying, no, no, no, Scripture is not sufficient for that,

I'm going to go on history, I'm going to go on tradition, I'm going to go on all of those things, then what you're actually doing, guys, is you're borrowing from our worldview in order to establish the foundation of your own.

I thought you'd like that, Jeremiah. I did. I appreciate it. I've got like 30 seconds, so let me just say another way of formulating this is to say, anything not found in Scripture, on the principles of the

Torah, Christians are free to agree or disagree on. And if you say, every book of the

Bible's inspiration canonicity is not found in Scripture, someone could be a Christian and freely reject the entire

New Testament. And that seems like an absurd conclusion to come to. You have to say these extra -scriptural traditions about the canon are binding and trustworthy, we might even say infallible.

Alright, alright. I love the timers, guys. You guys are really on it, man. We're getting better.

We're working on it. Marlon, it feels like we're on the Brady Bunch. I was trying to look at Joe like, did you just say that?

Alright, we got this super chat, and we got one more, and then that's a wrap. Alright, so this is for Merrick and Jeremiah.

When in church history do you think that the truth of Sola Sospitura was lost? Can you point to a specific century writing that evinces this corruption becoming the majority view?

Do you want to go first? No, I would just say I don't think

Sola Sospitura was ever lost. I mean, even Aquinas' view is nuanced, which I think our interlocutors would agree with, perhaps not.

Notice, I even quoted from Bonaventure in my opening statement. So, I think there's places at time where maybe it was hanging on by, you know, a strand of thought.

But I don't think it was ever lost. I certainly don't want to hold to anything like that. And if perhaps it was lost, that's something

I'd love to debate again. This is something I want to keep learning about. I want to study tradition more. So, yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean you said it perfectly, Merrick, that I don't believe Sola Sospitura ever was lost.

And to say the majority view is arbitrary, right? I mean, even Apostle Paul understood, let God be true and every man a liar.

When Athanasius stood against the world, he stood on God's word in order to prove the Trinity. So, I do want to speak to Peter's point of borrowing from worldviews because it's an interesting point because we're saying, as a necessary precondition, or at least

I am, is God sufficiently speaking word perspicuously? That's transcendental to our human experience.

That undergirds human reason itself. I've never heard a Roman Catholic actually make that type of transcendental argument because that is embedded in Sola Scripteria.

And something that's lost, and the reason why I truly don't think, Peter, we're borrowing from Roman Catholicism, is that when we affirm that there are secondary authorities, then, yeah, we do share a lot of things, but that's not predicated as human reason as its ultimate authority.

And so what we're saying is there's something even more fundamental that cannot fail to be true, and that's embedded in God's ability to alone speak infallibly.

So if anybody else wants to say that there's another infallible source, I'm saying it can't be done. Well, I mean, you could use a transcendental,

I think you could probably use a transcendental argument to establish Catholic premises just as much, because the question is not, has

God spoken? The question is, how has He spoken? And does He speak through Scripture alone or does

He speak through Scripture? He also speaks through tradition, and I think we've proved that, so therefore that's fundamental.

And then I would also say that, yes, in John 16, 13, the Holy Spirit speaks and guides

His Church into all truth. So you have three means, two sources and one magisterium by which

God speaks, and that is the fundamental foundation, if you want, for that kind of argument.

I mean, I don't think that the transcendent argument is part of self -scripture because, after all, it postdates self -scripture by about five centuries.

You know, Van Til doesn't come along until the 1920s with this sort of thing or thereabouts. It's not part of something which

Luther or Calvin thought. Anyway, can I just say I want to honour both Marik and...

I want to honour both Marik and Jeremiah's commitment to truth, which has become very clear in this debate, and I really want to honour that.

All I'll say is that I think that what you'll find... It is very odd to me, though, that when you say that self -scripture was never lost,

I mean, I thought the whole point of the Reformation was that the Gospel had to be recovered from having been lost, and that included the idea of self -scripture.

That's the way it's always been presented to me, so I'm very happy to see Protestants... And actually, I think there are other

Protestants who would say actually that wasn't what really happened, that it was just a serious amount of error that had crept in or something along those lines.

The last thing I'll simply say is Aquinas did not believe at all in self -scripture.

He was not screaming on this point. He actually does say at one point, sola canonica scriptura es regula fide, that canonical scriptures are the rule of faith, and that has frequently been misinterpreted.

What he's actually saying in the context is, it is only those canonical scriptures that function as a rule of faith, not the non -canonical scriptures.

He's making a point about what is canonical versus what is non -canonical. He's not saying that scripture alone is the sole rule of faith, because apart from anything else, if you read his

Summa Theologiae, you'll find, in fact, he refers to tradition as a source of revelation, too. I think

Peter was... Hey, Joe, if you want to say something, Joe, you got it, man. I think Peter went on a tangent there, man.

Go ahead, Joe. You got it, man. It was a very good tangent. I would say only, I would watch out for like Keith Matheson's Shape of Sola Scriptura and other books that really proof text the church fathers and go back and read them.

And you'll find that for every church father who allegedly believes in sola scriptura, you can find with a little bit of work, other places where they affirm the infallible or binding nature of tradition as well.

If you take... And the reason is really simple, because none of them are responding to sola scriptura because no one believed it at the time.

So they say things that Protestants later can appropriate because they're not on guard for that misunderstanding because no one believes that at the time.

If you go back, again, Irenaeus explicitly teaches the dual authority of scripture and tradition in 180, the same year he proclaims that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the four gospels, a year before the word

Trinity is ever used to describe the Godhead. If Christians have already gotten off base by then, we're in big trouble, guys.

Because if you're going to base your four gospels off Irenaeus, who doesn't agree with your principles, doesn't agree with your metaphysical foundation,

I don't know. That just looks like trouble to me. All right. And here's the last question.

This is for Peter. And obviously, everyone wants to chime in as well. Peter, do y 'all hold to law of non -contradiction?

If so, contradiction of what? Yes, I think it's fair to say that I do hold to the law of non -contradiction.

And the whole point of the law of non -contradiction is that you have to have internal consistency for something to be a true argument.

And that is an axiomatic truth. It is what's called an analytical truth. It's true by definition.

It can't not be true, in other words. Otherwise, you would end up with a contradiction. So, when you have axioms like that, yes, they have to be something which you respect.

There is nothing more fundamental that undergirds that, which is why I don't think I certainly don't agree with the

Vantillian view of things. So, yeah, I'd be very happy to have that debate at some other point, as well as a debate on the

Jisho Chronicle text and any number of other things which we've raised here and sort of touched upon. But irrespective, none of that has anything to do with whether or not

Sol Scriptura is right or wrong, true or false. You don't have to hold to the transcendental argument in order to make a case for Sol Scriptura.

And you could hold to a transcendental argument and totally disagree with Sol Scriptura, holding to, in other words, the two -source theory that I hold to plus the magisterium of the

Church. So, I don't think it's material to the discussion that we're having, as interesting as it is.

Alright. Yeah, likewise, I think the canonical issue has an obvious interrelation with Sol Scriptura.

Meaning, if Sol Scriptura cannot get you a reliable knowledge of which books belong in the

Bible, it can't get you a reliable knowledge of which things are biblical doctrines. But, you could take the 66 or 73 book canon and still affirm or reject

Sol Scriptura. I don't think that's been maybe fleshed out as it could be. Alright, Merrick and Jeremiah.

Go ahead. Okay, Merrick, I'll try to only take one minute. So, this is a really good question because it's really getting to the heart of what

I'm trying to show. It doesn't matter what Van Til said later. If he said something that was right, it was true before then. I think there is even proto -people that contended for a necessary worldview way before Van Til.

And so, the logic can't simply be axiomatic. You may be very convinced that logic is axiomatic, but you do not have a universal experience to know if that truly holds.

You may just say, well, it's just so self -evident. It just seems to be. Well, that's begging the question.

That is why John 17, 17 I think grounds Sol Scriptura undefeatably because thy word is truth.

That assumes a certain theory of truth itself. God must be the precipient of truth and reveal that to us.

That bypasses human reason as being the foundation for our human experience. There has to be something more fundamental and it is that which is

God breathed and the Imago Dei can clearly understand what is being revealed.

So the question, 40 seconds on reason here, I agree with it.

But I think this might be referencing the premises of Peter's argument. Maybe I'm sorry if it's not.

I would just say I don't think a contradiction was demonstrated. Even premise one, like wouldn't go against the idea that say

God revealed himself to Enoch once. And obviously, I don't think the scriptures need to say that. So I don't think it cuts against our definition in the four points that we laid out.

Again, I think this is the last question. So thanks again, guys. I really appreciate it.

Had a blast, guys. All right. It is indeed the last question.

You guys are great, man. Like I said, I love two -on -two debates because I'm able to just really sit back and listen to everybody's point.

It creates a great environment of teamwork. It requires that amount of focus.

So I appreciate you guys for coming on, and you guys did great. And yeah, I look forward to perhaps doing this again.

Perhaps not you four all together, but perhaps mixing it up a little bit and diving a little more into this.

I appreciate you guys. Any final words before I let you guys go? You guys were really wonderful.

I'm really grateful for being let to kind of sub in. For those who don't know, Swan Sona was originally going to do this.

He had some scheduling conflicts. So I'm kind of the Matthias to, I guess. Maybe not the best analogy, but you know.

We'll find out very quickly if Swan's watching this or not. But no, it's really an honor to get to be part of this, and I look forward to interacting with you guys in the future.

Even though we disagree on a lot of big stuff, I hope we came to a deeper knowledge of each other's positions and a deeper mutual respect.

Absolutely. I can only echo that, and I just want to thank you all as well.

It's been a great pleasure to have this discussion. Really interesting points raised. I look forward to kind of thinking over them some more.

And yeah, otherwise it was just, like I said, I just want to repeat what I said earlier on. I really honor Marek and Jeremiah's commitment to truth.

Of course, Joe's as well, and Marlon's. But yeah, no, it's been a real pleasure. You're all thorough gentlemen, and I think we've given, hopefully, a good example to people of how you can engage in these kind of controversies with grace and mutual respect and love.

So I think that's rather wonderful. God bless you all, and thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Yep. Thanks.

Alright. You said controversy. I love that. We say it wrong as far as I'm concerned.

That's right. We say it wrong. Say aluminum next. Oh, no. Aluminum. You say research as well.

And Bernard. Hey, Peter, it's been an honor to engage with both of y 'all, but Peter, being able to talk with you, somebody that's engaged with Dr.

Y, I consider this an honor. And Joe, I've read a lot of your articles on shameless potpourri.

Am I saying that right? Honestly, those are really well -written articles, and I'm slowly starting to understand the

Roman Catholic paradigm more. So thank y 'all so much for being charitable, kind, and loving, and I hope this is just a good platform for other people to learn.

Certainly. And by the way, Joe has another blog about scented flowers called Shameless Potpourri. Alright.

I was going to say thanks for moderating, Marlon, but I... Good stuff, guys.

We'll be debating tourism next. Good stuff, guys.

I'm going to let you guys go. We have to close this thing out. Once again, you guys are great, and everyone out there, if you're interested,

I will be posting a link to everyone's page and content in the description of this YouTube debate.

So make sure you go check these guys out, plug into them, and look forward to more content they're putting out.

That said, I'm going to let you guys go. Everyone on there, take care, and God bless. Alright, guys.

Another fantastic debate in the books, as I always say. Excellent discussion. Once again, you may see this debate and say, well,

I'm not convinced. Their positions, they didn't argue this well, that point, that point, that point, right?

If there's anything you take away from this, outside of being totally convinced that your position is wrong, if there's anything you take away from this, is that you understand the positions better.

Because what we see a lot of times is a lot of straw men, a lot of false accusations, a lot of misrepresentation, and a part of the goal, obviously, with the gospel truth is not only to preach the gospel and proclaim the gospel through debate and discussion, but also that people have a better understanding.

You know, I think if people have a better understanding of positions, then we're able to interact with that position in a more satisfying manner.

And so it brings an appreciation, if you will, to the different positions, if we're able to understand them much better, alright?

So I thank everyone out there, and I know everyone had a lot of questions, and I want to say, fortunately, the

Super Chats killed, and obviously the Super Chats get priority over all the other questions, so I thank everyone out there who did support the ministry with a

Super Chat, and I thank everyone out there who supported the ministry, who want to subscribe or follow, and make sure that you guys stay in tune, stay in tuned, stay locked in, because we do have a whole bunch of debates that are coming up here in the future on The Gospel Truth, a whole bunch of discussions as well, so I do look forward to them, and I hope that you are looking forward to them as well.

So make sure that you are not missing out on anything, alright? I think the next debate we have is

Trey Fisher and Travis Thomas, talking about how's one justified, right?

So we are going to have fun with that discussion. Nonetheless, make sure that you are staying in tune, hit that subscribe button, and hit that notification bell, because you don't want to miss out on anything coming up here on The Gospel Truth, so make sure you are doing that, and don't miss out on anything, alright?

That said, I'm outta here. Thank you once again for viewing this episode of The Gospel Truth. Take care, and God bless.