Rome's Denial of the Sufficiency of Scripture Exposed

Roman Catholic Claims That Scripture Cannot Refute Arianism

I have been watching with some interest, not a lot of focus as far as making sure every day that I read comments and things like that, but especially because of the chat channel and because of what has been posted on my own blog, I have been following with some interest discussions taking place over on the Called to Communion blog with a Brian Cross.

Now, my understanding is that this gentleman is a graduate of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, somewhere, as far as we can tell, somewhere around 1998 to 2000, somewhere in that area with a master's degree.

He, a few years later, went Anglican and then finally has become a Roman Catholic. And evidently the purpose of the blog is to attempt to bring other Reformed people over toward Rome. And it is in that context that we, I think, really begin to see what the real issues are.

And when we see what the real issues are, we see how far Rome will go to promulgate its teachings. One of the recent blog articles raised the issue of the Council of Nicaea and the Deity of Christ. Over the years, in fact, it's interesting, the very first debate that I did was on the subject of Sola Scriptura, at least formal debate, with a man who is no longer an Orthodox Roman Catholic, Gerry Matytix.

He would obviously argue that he's probably the most Orthodox Roman Catholic, even more Orthodox than the Pope himself, from what we can tell. But be that as it may, it was obvious to me from the very beginning that the ultimate authority of Scripture and its status as revelation from God is at stake when we talk about Roman Catholicism.

It seems to me that the only other option beyond Sola Scriptura, or against Sola Scriptura, is Sola Ecclesia, the Church, and the Church alone as the final authority in all things. And it seems to me that once you buy into that, once you accept this idea that there has to be an authority beyond Scripture to define Scripture, to interpret Scripture, that once you have put that authority in place, that in essence, the actual function and role of Scripture diminishes to the point of really becoming irrelevant.

In fact, in some old-time writings, I recall, I believe it was O 'Brien who had talked about the danger of the Bible, because people can misinterpret it when they read it outside of what the Church says it means.

And it just strikes me that some of the most, to me, offensive and blasphemous comments that come from Roman Catholic apologists are when they basically say, well, you know, you can't really prove so much of the heart of the Christian faith from the Bible.

I mean, you can't prove the Trinity, you can't prove the Holy Spirit is a person and is divine, you're dependent upon the Church for all these things. See, and you Protestants just don't realize you depend upon us.

You think you can find these things in the Bible. It may explain why it is that I get emails from Catholics that appreciate what I do, except when I talk about Catholicism, because there aren't a lot of Roman Catholics that do what we do here in the way we do it.

What's more than that, they, you know, the little old ladies sitting in the front row of my debate with Hamzah Abdul-Malik back in 1999, they wish Roman Catholics would do that, but because of their view of Scripture, they really can't.

Maybe that's where a lot of that comes from, is that it's really just one authoritarian system versus another is how it works. Anyway, I saw some comments and I wanted to bring them to your attention.

I have wanted for a few days to write this up as a blog article, but life gets in the way at times, and I simply was not able to do so. So I thought of the program today, well, if we do it this way, I can put the video up eventually.

It takes me a long time to convert the video format, but we'll get it up there eventually. And we'll put this up on the blog and that way we can sort of respond to it and we won't have to type as much.

Anyway, the first comment, and by the way, if you go to our website, you will see that I asked the Turretin fan to post one of the articles he wrote in response to Brian Cross and a comment that he made.

And this was just a few days ago, let me see here very quickly, or as quickly as my little machine here can get it to me. There's my long article on inerrancy and preservation, there's old Brit Hume, and there we go.

Arminianism is consistent with scripture. This was from January 4th, Turretin fan put this up. It is a very long article, it has some great citations in it, and I hope you will take time to read it. There is a fundamental difference in how, as we'll see, how we approach the use of the early church writings and how they are used by others.

But anyway, the specific quote that got my attention was this one. Here's what Brian Cross had written, the term refute means shown an argument to be unsound. The bishops did not refute Arianism, they condemned it by defying the faith by way of an extra-biblical term, homoousius.

They were unable by scripture alone to refute Arianism. The Arians could affirm every single verse of scripture, that's precisely why the bishops had to require affirmation of the term homoousius. So if the bishops had no authority by way of apostolic succession, then their requirement of affirming homoousius would have had no more authority than its denial by the Arians.

Scripture alone was insufficient to resolve the dispute, precisely because both sides could affirm every verse of scripture. And since sola scriptura denies the transfer of authority by way of apostolic succession, therefore the council of Nicaea and the creed given sola scriptura only have authority if you agree with its interpretation of scripture.

So twice we were told, scripture is insufficient, it can't do it. You cannot refute Arianism just with the Bible. So in essence, Brian Cross must, when he deals with Jehovah's Witnesses, have the situation where he doesn't go to scripture with them.

Why do that? Because scripture is insufficient. What you do is you say, my ultimate authority, the Pope says you're wrong. Now I've met with a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses and I'm going to tell you something, saying to Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pope says you're wrong, isn't going to get you very far, especially because a large portion of them are former Roman Catholics.

They don't buy the Pope thing, okay? And so if scripture is insufficient, where are you going to go? How are you going to handle this? Now it has been pointed out rather boldly and fully by terrorism fan and others that this is just simply historically naive at best and deceptive at worst.

In the article posted on the blog, you will find numerous citations from Athanasius and others that demonstrate just the opposite of this conclusion, that they did refute Arianism and they did not refute it by saying, well, the Pope says so.

Where does Athanasius say, well, the Bishop of Rome says you're wrong, therefore you're wrong? He didn't do that. He couldn't do that, especially after the Council of Nicaea, where he was just a deacon, he was not a bishop there, by the way.

For decades on end, he alone stood against the flood of Arianism. So he couldn't say, well, the bishop over here says this or the bishop over there says that, because they'd all become Arians. So it was obvious that the early church did not see and did not possess the viewpoint of quote-unquote ecumenical councils that is to be had today.

And of course, all the Arian bishops likewise claimed to possess apostolic authority and apostolic succession. And so if you want to say, well, you have to have apostolic succession to handle the situation, to resolve the situation.

It resolved nothing. Historically, it did nothing. The Council of Nicaea had to fight for acceptance. On what basis? On apostolic authority? No. When you look at Athanasius' defense of the Council of Nicaea, does he base it simply upon an appeal to the Bishop of Rome?

Well, he couldn't, because even the Bishop of Rome signed the Arianized Sermium Creed. So he argues from scripture. And he believed that scripture refuted Arianism, because it does. Unless you are going to just blatantly attack the idea that there is a consistent message of scripture, the Bible condemns and refutes Arianism, saying, well, they could affirm any scripture verse is not the same as they could interpret the Bible consistently with itself.

They couldn't. That was Athanasius' point. That was Augustine's point, as was demonstrated in the article on the blog. While they could affirm many words to describe biblical teaching, you see what Brian Cross has done here, is he has confused the mechanism by which you would identify an Arian with the basis upon which you refuted the Arian.

Homoousius was a term used by Nicaea because the Arians simply couldn't affirm it. It had a meaning they could not accept. But as was pointed out in the article, the very term itself only has authority because it comes from scripture.

In fact, just a couple of the citations, just to add these in here in case you haven't read them, Alexander of Alexandria said, the religious perspicuity of the ancient scriptures caused them no shame, nor did the consentient doctrine of our colleagues concerning Christ keep in check their audacity against him.

The perspicuity of the ancient scriptures. He didn't seem to have Brian Cross' view of things along those lines. We go down a little bit farther to some of the, well, I can't read all of these, but they are very, very interesting.

But David King provided some of the Greek citations in regards to, for example, the perspicuity of the scriptures, things like that, that had been posted at the bottom. Since this was a long article, it used a little click here to read the rest of it.

If you didn't do that, I would highly recommend that you do so. But Fabatius, who died in 392, said, quote, knowing therefore this unity of substance in the Father and the Son on the authority not only of the prophets, but also of the Gospels, how canst thou say that homoousion is not found in scripture?

Oops. You see, my experience has been that when you bring out this kind of material, for example, when I debated Gerry Manitics, and I quoted early church fathers, he would just simply dismiss them, either, well, that wasn't an early church father, or that was just a, he was just speaking as a private theologian there.

When the Roman Catholic cites these sources, well, this is tradition. This is the very mechanism by which tradition is encapsulated and embodied and transferred. The stuff that doesn't agree with us isn't, but the stuff that does agree with us is.

Sola Ecclesia again. When you get to define what scripture is and what it means, and what tradition is and what it means, you are the ultimate authority. You're not under the control or the correction of scripture and tradition when you define the extent of both and the meaning of both.

It's not possible. It becomes a game, and that's what is going on here. The Arians could affirm every single verse of scripture, but they could not interpret every single verse of scripture in concert with, harmony with, everything else the scripture said.

And so, the use of homoousius is not an addition to scripture. It's not a further revelation. It is a means of detecting these individuals and excluding them from the fellowship of the church. Now, it didn't really work very well, historically speaking.

And the basis upon which the Nicene symbol is authoritative is to the extent that it represents God's revelation. But it is not the Anustos. Now, I didn't read the, I don't know how many hundreds of comments there were.

I just don't have time to keep up with that stuff. There's only so many hours in a day, but I wonder if anyone asked the simple question of Brian Cross, are these traditions the Anustos? Are they God-breathed?

I'd like to know. I found most Roman Catholic apologists, most, not all, but most, to be rather hesitant to make that kind of an affirmation. Now, a question was asked by Turretinfan of Mr. Cross, and I asked Turretinfan in the channel, had he responded to this, and he said that he had not.

Here's the challenge, quote, but here's the challenge to Mr. Cross. Find even one Christian, non-Aryan, if Roman Catholics are calling Aryans Christians these days, from Arius' birth until 100 years after Nicaea that says that the Aryans, quote, could affirm every single verse of scripture, end quote, or couldn't be refuted for scripture alone.

More positively, and this is the challenge I'd like to see, the challenge is to find someone in that time period who appealed to apostolic succession as such to refute the Aryans, who said that the Orthodox clergy had apostolic succession that the Aryan clergy did not.

I think Mr. Cross would be hard-pressed to meet such a challenge. When you hear this kind of argument, it is an argument that is based upon a kind of Pyrrhonic skepticism that sounds so very strangely like what we hear from atheists.

The Bible's not enough. You can't know what was originally written. You can't know what it originally means. The atheist says you should just give up the faith because of that. The Catholic says you need my bishop.

You need the Pope in Rome. Now the Pope in Rome can't answer those questions. No person can read what is being put out by the magisterium of the church today, go back only 150 years, the papal syllabus of errors, go back another 150 years before that, put all that stuff together and go, oh, look at the harmony.

It's not harmonious. There have been major changes. Gerrimatics is not all wrong here. There have been major changes that have been going on. And as I said at the end of my debate with Mitch Packwood, when I got out that book bag, I started piling up the Code of Canon Law and the documents of Vatican II and the Cans of Decrees of the Council of Trent, and I put this huge pile of books there, and I say, what you're telling me is that I need this to clarify Romans 5 .1, therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This clarifies that. Without this, Romans 5 .1 could lead me astray. Well, I'm sorry, but there is absolutely positively no means of arguing against the fact that that pile of books does not in any way, shape, or form clarify Romans 5 .1 or anything else in the scriptures.

So when Mr. Cross says scripture alone was insufficient to resolve the dispute, is he saying the Roman Magisterium is? Upon what basis? What's the basis for saying that the Roman Magisterium, just simply because Nicaea is now just a generally accepted thing?

How did this work while Athanasius was standing against the world? How did this work if you lived in Sirmium, Ariminum, in the decades after Nicaea? How does this authority system function in those situations?

As I've brought it many times in regards to papal infallibility, there have been times where for years and years on end, if you followed the advice, the Bishop of Rome would have been a heretic. And they have ways to try to dig themselves out from that now, but the historical reality is what the historical reality is.

And it's real nice from a long distance away to go, oh, well, you know, doesn't this sound wonderful? This creates all this harmony. What harmony? The harmony that has Boston College and Notre Dame doing the things they're doing in regards to, you know, just rejecting what the current Magisterium teaches about abortion and stuff like that.

Is that the harmony that it produces? I mean, let's face it. You go to a lot of Roman Catholic institutions today, and you're going to be told that the virgin birth and all the dogmas of Rome regarding Mary are just myths.

They're symbols of things. But Rome doesn't kick those people out. Why not? Again, I say to all these Roman Catholics, say, oh, come to where there's all this unity. When you folks start getting serious about disciplining people who are heretics from your own perspective, then at least that's not one strike against you.

But the fact of the matter is, you don't do that. And so it seems mighty insincere to me to say, oh, we have apostolic succession. Well, what's it gotten you? A lot of change. You've got the Council of Constance saying one thing and Vatican II saying another.

Where's the apostolic succession? The only meaningful apostolic succession is an apostolic succession of truth, saying and teaching the same things that the apostles taught and said. And it is absolutely disgusting to me to see that when the Roman Catholic apologist is consistent with himself, he has to attack the sufficiency of Scripture.

He has to attack in the very same way that the enemies of the faith attack the Scriptures, their perspicuity and their ability to communicate divine truth. So it's not overly surprising that shortly after Brian Cross says this, Frank Beckwith chimes in.

Frank Beckwith on the Arian Reading of Scripture and Nominalist Epistemology

And he says, what Brian is saying is really uncontroversial. The Arian reading of Scripture is not obviously irrational. It is, of course, heretical. But that does not mean that a fully informed person of goodwill with knowledge of the languages could not have come up with the Arian reading of Scripture.

There you go. There's Dr. Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Saying, well, you know what, the Bible, you know, people of goodwill, knowledge of the Scriptures, knowledge of the languages.

Yeah, you could read the Bible that way. But aren't we glad we have Rome to tell us what the truth is? Except that's not actually Rome that told us what the truth was. But anyway, in fact, Rome didn't have anything to do with it, come to think of it.

But as it may, there's Frank Beckwith. It's probably really better, to be honest with you, that he's on that side of the rather than paddling around the middle. Because if he was running around this side with the confusion that he has admitted in his book that he had on Sola Scriptura, and this kind of view of Scripture, I'm really glad that at least he's clearly identified now.

Because it's the people that haven't gotten back over there that have this sub-biblical view of the Bible that are teaching in many of our seminaries and causing so much problems in the first place. So I'm sort of glad he is where he is.

The Arian reading of Scripture is not obviously irrational. What does that mean? Does that mean that you can read the text consistently? You can do sound exegesis? You can look at all of Scripture, Tota Scriptura, and come up with the Arian reading?

Is that what Dr. Beckwith is saying? I can't read it any other way. He's dead wrong if that is what he's saying. But again, it doesn't really matter to him for the simple reason that he has an authority above Scripture.

Now, he says, that does not mean that a fully informed person of goodwill... What is a fully informed person of goodwill who's an Arian? Well, there again comes out the non-reformed view of man that is part and parcel.

He went on to say, what is being played out here on this blog is the legacy of nominalism and enlightenment epistemology, both of which focus on the thinking self as the locus and meaning of my encounter with the world, assuming there is one.

Thus, short of a pure, clear, and distinct idea, i .e., a solo scriptura untouched by man or church, it could all very well be a ruse of Descartes' evil demon. This is why, by the way, various versions of the Cartesian circle keep popping up in the comm box.

The Protestant wants his indubitable starting point, but he's trapped in an appalling loop if he appeals to solo scriptura that requires a book consisting of over five dozen books. But the book appears in time, and not all at once, but incrementally.

And this requires someone to sift through the competing text to determine which of them belongs in the book, since the book itself does not yet exist as a whole, though its parts are found here and there in the Christian world.

And if it did, the whole does not contain in any of its parts the list of what books should be in the book. So, he thinks that by establishing an authority outside of scripture that you can avoid the recognition that God is the author of scripture, and that God is the one that determines the canon of scripture via inspiration.

No, it's us. Well, historically, again, that causes all sorts of problems, which I just haven't seen any evidence that he's even bothered to think through, and like many of those before him, he's just happily going along with the Roman answers, rather than actually dealing with such questions as, well, Dr. Beckwith, exactly how did the believing person, the believing Jew, 50 years before Christ, know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were scripture?

I'd like to know how that works. We've been down this road many, many times. It's sad to see a, you know, the repetition of the same old, tired arguments that have been refuted over and over again, but again, it's all Rome has.

I mean, when Patrick Madrid can post an article just yesterday on Calvinists, and the two articles that he quotes are from 1993, nothing more than that. Nothing new, nothing up to date, nothing fresh.

It's just, you know, rehash the same old things over and over again. And don't get me wrong. It's one thing to be consistent in what you're focused upon, as far as its truth goes. It's another thing to keep up with what the other side's saying, and to respond to them, and to provide fresh and meaningful and insightful refutations of their current versions of their arguments.

That's what the Roman apologist just refused to do. Of course, in the same article, he referred folks to Dave Armstrong's attempted interaction with John Calvin, and I'm sorry, but like I said, Dave Armstrong is the perfect example of why the older forms of canon law prohibited laymen from being involved in religious disputation.

It's just a sad thing to watch him attempting to interact with stuff that's just so obviously so far beyond his pale that he doesn't even understand what he's doing. And, but hey, if the big boys, the big pop apologists, that seems to be one of Patrick Madrid's favorite terms, are going to refer to these things and say, hey, this is ably done.

Well, okay, then we'll make reference to it. The fact is, folks, the dividing line, the dividing line will always be on whether you believe that God has spoken in such a way that we can be held accountable to what he's said.

And all the religions of men will do everything in their power to substitute for God's revelation their own authority and their own revelations. Some of them do it by putting an authority above the Bible, say, oh, we believe the Bible, we believe in Jesus and all the rest of that stuff, and then they'll create this external authority system that allows them to believe in the Bible what they want to believe and then remove other things.

Or they come up with their own new revelations, or they'll just attack the whole idea of revelation and, you know, be a secular materialist. It doesn't matter. It's always an attack that goes back to the garden, yea, hath God said, yea, hath God said, and over and over and over again, you will find that to be the theme of the religious, the secular.

It does not matter. They go after the word of God. And the same is true of the Romanists. The Romanists go after the word of God just as verily as anyone else does. They may be more subtle, and they may get away with it because, well, we'll talk about early church fathers.

And the fact of the matter is a lot of folks don't know anything about it. They couldn't put Irenaeus in the right century if they tried. And that makes it, that gives it an air of authority. Well, you know what?

Some of us a long time ago decided to start looking at those claims and found out that, you know, by cherry picking those writings, you can come up with anything you want to. But there's just so much there that allows us to go toe to toe.

How Roman Catholic Appeals to Church History Distort the Fathers

And let me mention one other thing before we, I've got a bunch of mailbag stuff that I can get to today. And so it's going to take me a long time. So we'll probably just even skip the break. But let me mention one thing about church history.

These individuals who go to church history and they say, well, Augustine said this and Augustine said that. How many times? But I'm going to mention again because we have new folks that tune in. One side can allow the early church writers to be the early church writers.

The other side has to turn them into a reflection of their own image. You will see Augustine being cited over and over again. And I can look at Augustine and I can cite him in defense of many of my beliefs.

But so can the Roman Catholic. And I've done entire seminars on why that is. The Donatus controversy, the Plagian controversy, how these things impacted his views of the church and grace. And I've repeated many times Warfield's statement that the Reformation inwardly considered is nothing more than the victory of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.

We can allow the early church fathers to be what they were. They were not debating all the same issues that we are. And to import into their words all of our concerns is to abuse them. But I submit to you that the vast majority of the abuse of the early church fathers is done by Roman Catholic apologists.

There's no question of that. They think that these writers belong to them and they will anachronistically read into them every kind of modern Roman Catholic belief imaginable, even when there is no reason to think that the original writer was thinking about anything like that.

They will abuse them up one side and down the other in the service of Mother Rome. And that's what drives them nuts. About series of books like the Holy Scripture by Webster and King. Oh, we've refuted that.

Oh, we don't need to look at that. I mean, you can just see the fear. Oh, don't look at that. Oh, those are just Protestants. You can just tell that they don't want people looking at that and going, I didn't know that.

How come we don't mention these things? Why don't we mention these quotes? Why is it there that Augustine really wouldn't have been a sound dogmatic Roman Catholic I mean, in fact, he denied certain beliefs that we now consider to be dogma.

And yet we quote him for all these other things. Why is that? You see, I can look at that and I can accept the places where Augustine disagreed with me and I can take him to the scriptures. And I know there are Protestants.

Oh, man, look at look at how Dave Hunt just destroys the early church fathers in a different way. He does have prejudice. The Catholics do it out of dogmatic demand by their own communion. Their own communion has told them, oh, this has always been what's believed.

Remember back when the Pope died for days on end, every Catholic apologist around got his 15 minutes of fame on Fox News. And what was the constant thing? Well, this has been the church for 2000 years.

Everyone's always believed this baloney. It's ridiculously easy to demonstrate that that's not the case. Roman Catholic scholarship knows that Roman Catholic apologists discreetly ignore that. And so when you see somebody quoting an early church writer, don't don't be overwhelmed.

Look it up. Look it up, not in their quote books, not in jurgens, these little snippets, but look up the context for yourself. And most of the time you'll find out that anachronism, reading into something, meaning the original author would never have understood, it's not a part of their context, is to blame for what's going on.