Conclusion of Response to Trent Horn, A Little Rosaria Butterfield

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line.

We are back here in the regular studio, and boy, the next trip's coming up pretty quick. I'm wearing my World War II fighter aircraft shirt today. But Rich got chined recently, and that's when you buy something online that looks...

They make it look just great. This pad right here, I got chined big time. Oh, did I get chined? I mean, the video presenting this made it look like it was the coolest thing ever. And you get it, and it's a cheap piece of garbage.

And there's a huge difference between what you saw and what you get. And I didn't even realize until last week, honestly, I was looking at this thing, you know, because it at least has worth nothing. The vast majority of the words on this, well, not the vast majority, what?

They can't see it. No, they can't see it, stop that. The vast majority of words on this are misspelled. So engineering, E-N-G-I-N-N-E-E-R-I-N-G. Casualties, causalties, yeah, it's Engrich. And so Rich got chined, I got chined, and I don't know if I got chined on this shirt.

It fits nicely, it's nice and cool, that's the important part. But I thought for sure when I ordered this thing that prominently on it was my favorite World War II fighter. And it's nowhere to be found on it once I got it.

Now it's not that there aren't some good planes on it. There's a P -51 down there, I won't bother pointing these things out, but there's a P -51 down lower on the shirt. That of course was the best fighter we produced, propeller driven fighter we produced in World.

War II.

It actually has the Messerschmitt 262, the jet fighter, that did see action, so it qualifies. But it also has, I think one of the most beautiful of the World War II fighters was the P -38 Lightning. I mean that thing was just...

And our top ace in the entire war, with 42 confirmed kills, had all those in a P -38. So that was an amazing plane. I mean when it first came out, it killed pilots right and left because it had... Talk about rushing stuff into production.

You basically learned from how many people it killed. But the one that I wanted that's nowhere on it, and I used to have one in here, I think it's now in my office, was of course the Vought F4U Corsair.

The Screaming Death is what the Japanese called it. Because not only was it an excellent air-to-air fighter, as Pappy Boyington demonstrated in the South Pacific, but it was also a tough, rugged plane that could be equipped with rocket sleds and bombs, and the Marines just depended on it for close air support, like on Iwo Jima.

And when it would dive, it would make this screaming noise, and it was so accurate they called it Screaming Death. But it's a beautiful plane. It had the gull wings, you know the ones I'm talking about?

And I thought for sure that was going to be on this shirt, but I got chided. You noticed right off there wasn't a... There's no Corsairs. No, no Corsairs. I'm a little bit sad about that, but oh well, that's life.

I made a model Corsair as a young person that was just really, really cool. I wish I still had that, because that was just a gorgeous plane. And it's just so sad that the vast majority of young people today have no earthly idea what that war was about, how in the world we won it in literally four years.

All they know about is drones and stuff like that. It was a different world. A different world. Anyway, so we need to finish up the response to Trent Horn. We have promised it and been working on it. I am really excited.

We should be able to get this done with a little time left at the end of the hour to be able to talk about this, but I'm really excited and I need to write back and invite her on the program. But I was just, you know that I have a debate coming up on September 16th in Mannheim, Pennsylvania with Dr. Gregory Coles, who is the author of Single Gay Christian.

And so he is, along with Preston Sprinkle, part of the movement that is presenting the idea of homosexuality as an inalterable, definitional aspect of a person's being. And I guess evidently transgenderism as well, at least from what I'm seeing.

And so one person that I wanted to reach out to in my preparation, of course, was Rosaria Butterfield. And so I did. And she very graciously responded, despite the fact that I even included in my email a picture of my kitten, which she thought was great because she's a cat person, too.

So we're discovering who the cat people are and who the cat haters are. It's a sad thing. And you know, blocking is going away on Twitter soon. That's going to be, I don't know, it's going to be going to be rough.

But I was thinking about just, you know, everybody who starts doing the anti-cat stuff, just use the block feature while we've got it. And we'll see what we'll see what happens with with Twitter down the road.

Anyway, I got in touch with her. And lo and behold, I didn't know this. But Summer already had her new book and had written an endorsement for it. And she has a new book called Five Lies that I is either out or is about to come out.

And so I was able to get hold of the review file on that. And obviously it's incredibly relevant. To the subject of my debate on in September, so I need to get hold of her and see if we can have her on to talk prior to prior to that debate.

I think it'll be very, very, very helpful. And it is interesting as I've gotten as I've been digging into it. The the impact of one's theology is very, very clear, very, very clear. We'll talk more about that a little bit later on.

But anyways, back to Trent Horn, we need to get this done before I start talking about other things. I don't I don't know if I had played this part or skipped it, but we're going to start with it and we'll we'll press on from there.

I'll try to be I'll try to be short.

The Meaning of Theopneustos and the Uniqueness of Scripture

Even if the word should not be translated in the active sense like God breathing, White and other Protestant apologists assume that the word connotes a unique authority to Scripture alone. But I've showed that this is not how the word was used in the early church.

Here's how I framed their argument.

OK, and I did play that. And again, there is no such thing as used in the early church as if there is some kind of encyclopedic way of being able to say, well, this is this is how this person used in this.

So this person used it there again. The material we have from the early church is extremely fragmentary. And so to try to pretend that there was a early church meeting, what's going to be funny here is that Trent's going to preemptively try to answer one of the more obvious objections to his new theory, his utilization of the vivification translation of Theodosius.

He's going to try to answer the reality that Rome has never rendered it that way. Because it would seem to be a rather obvious objection that the Roman Catholic Church has never come out and said, this is the proper way of translating this word.

That's why it's not relevant to sola scriptura, etc., etc. They just haven't done anything like that. So to to say, well, I've proven this, the best you can say is I've asserted this or I've I've quoted MacDonald.

And the reality is that there was a wide utilization of the term. But I have completely failed to even try to demonstrate that that's contextually Paul's usage. And I have so far kept completely mum about the fact that the man who's actually promoting the vivification translation doesn't believe Paul wrote it in the first place.

That's why I said this was spin-spin damage control, because it's not it's not actually dealing with the with the reality at that point. But to continue, OK, that's where I skipped something there. That's where I missed something.

This was where I had when when he made reference, sorry, when he made reference to that's where I was supposed to play it. I'll just do this quickly. He made reference to an ontological uniqueness to scripture, and I said that that's me.

That's what I've always been teaching is no, no, I was talking about Gavin Ortlin, not talking about you. And you sort of got this little grin on his face there that he has there. Well, that's nice. But and I don't I don't care whether Trent has actually read my book on scripture alone or anything like that.

But the fact of the matter is, and I, Rich is busy with something else, so I'll read it from the book because I can't bring it up while that's up. I had said this a long time ago. It doesn't matter. I've got it here now.

The nice thing is I had this book in accordance. That's why I was going to pull that up. But I mentioned that the title of this work of scripture alone, just the phrase faith alone, sola fide, the great cry of the Reformation, though no longer the great cry of many who were once considered children of the Reformation, is often misrepresented.

So to scripture alone could be misunderstood. When we say that faith alone brings justification, we're not saying that faith should be considered in a vacuum, separated from everything else God does in the work of salvation.

Instead, sola fide means that faith, apart from any concept of merit or works actually in opposition thereto, is the sole means of justification. In the same way, scripture alone does not mean that God, zoomed by planet Earth, dropped off the scriptures and left us on our own.

As we will know when we define sola scriptura, this is not a claim, for instance, that there is no church or that there is no spirit. The title does not suggest that scripture, apart from the spirit outside the church, is God's only means of leading his people.

It is, however, saying that the scripture is utterly unique in its nature. That's the exact same assertion, and this from 2004, so almost 20 years ago. It is, however, saying that scripture is utterly unique in its nature as God breathed revelation.

Nothing else is God breathed. It is unparalleled and absolute in its authority. It is the sole and fallible rule of faith of the church. It is both a positive statement, asserting the supremacy and uniqueness of the word, and a negative one denying the existence of any other rule of authority on the same level.

One would be dreadfully misunderstanding this book's title to think it supports the idea of a Christian absenting himself from the body of Christ, rejecting biblical teaching about elders and leaders, and perpetually sitting under a tree somewhere alone with the Bible.

While an individual believer may derive great benefit from solitary contemplation of God's truth in such a context, it will always lead one back to service to his or her fellow believers in the church and to ministry within the context of being salt and light in the world.

So it was my assertion many, many years ago, decades ago, that scripture is ontologically unique, and we need to keep in mind that Trent Horn is saying, no, it's not. Unlike all of his predecessors in all the debates we've done on this subject, he is saying, no, it's not.

And then he'll say, yes, it is, but on a different level or something, as we'll get into here. So there you go. Back to right here.

But to continue, one other argument White raises is that if Theopneustos has an active meaning of God breathing, and so it refers to scripture giving divine life to readers rather than being breathed out by God, then why doesn't the church say this?

By the way, he's conflating the idea of an active translation of God breathing as an ongoing process, which would make no sense whatsoever in Paul's usage of it, which doesn't matter to Poirier and the other people because Paul didn't write it anyways, but wouldn't make any sense in Paul's utilization of it because of the context of his exhortation to Timothy.

It is a known body that he is being referred to, not, you know, there's going to be more coming down the road, so, you know, you're going to have what the popes are going to say, and the successors of Peter, and none of this kind of stuff is even slightly in the context of 2 Timothy chapter 3.

But he's conflating two things because you can have a vivification idea, giving life without even using the term God breathe. So it's almost like he's trying to sort of connect part of it with another part, which isn't really what's being done, even in the literature that he's citing.

It's a little confusing as to exactly where that's coming from, and this, again, all this goes back to, do we start with meaningful methodologies of exegesis, or do we start with external traditions that then determine the methodologies we use to come up with whatever meaning we need to come up with out of the text?

That is very problematic.

Isn't it the magisterian's job to determine what the Bible means? Others have said in comments to my previous episode that theopneustos means inspired in a unique sense for Scripture, because that's how the Church uses the word in its biblical translations or magisterial documents.

First, the Church rarely officially defines what a word in Scripture means. It officially teaches doctrine, but it rarely says, this word in Scripture means X. It does that for Presbuteroi in James 5 to say this refers to priests and not merely to elders in the community, for example, but it doesn't officially define many of the words that are used in biblical translations.

Scholars have freedom to figure that out.

Now this is fascinating. I would like to know the specific reference that he has in mind in regards to Presbuteroi, because certainly that was part of what Mitch Paco and I discussed when we debated the priesthood, but the reality is that's Rome's error.

If there has been some infallible definition of that term, they're just wrong, and I would like to know where this infallible error is, because I'll add it to the other areas where Rome is infallibly wrong about a lot of things, but again, if you derive the meaning of Presbuteroi from its uses in the New Testament, and if you allow the New Testament to stand as a unit and not chop it up into pieces and say, well, this wasn't written by an apostle and that wasn't written by an apostle, and so on and so forth, the meaning of Presbuteroi is clear, and it's not priest.

It doesn't mean priest. There's a perfectly good term for priest in the Greek New Testament, and it is not used. There are no qualifications for priests in the New Testament, but there are for bishops, elders, teachers, pastors, because they are used interchangeably with one another in the two offices, the elders and the deacons, and so I'd like to know where that specifically.

Is.

But again, the question that all the rest of us have is, wait a minute. We're told that the only way to read Scripture is within the bosom of the church, that Scripture is simply the written tradition joined together with the oral tradition to make sacred tradition.

We're told that Rome defines doctrine and dogma. How do you define dogma without defining the words in which it was revealed? How do you do that? I don't even begin to understand, you know, we keep being told, you need the church for these things, and then we go, okay, show us, well, you know, the church doesn't normally.

Do that.

You know, it's the have your cake and eat it too type of thing. It's got to be one or the other, and if you're going to say, well, you need to have the church to define these things, well, first of all, you're not letting the church define these things.

You're letting a non-Catholic scholar from last year define these things. That's highly problematic, but at the same time, you all are the ones making the claims that Rome has this ultimate authority, and if it is true that, for example, in the last dogmatic definition of the bodily assumption of Mary, there was all sorts of covering your trail, covering your ankles.

Basically, you know, did Mary die?

Did Mary not die? Well, we don't know.

Well, there is lots of discussion of Mary's death in the early church, and so we're not really, you can't even know what it means. How is it even relevant? It's truly amazing when you really start pushing for consistency, it all just comes back to, well, just believe what we tell you to believe.

Don't worry about where we got it from or anything else. Just believe what we tell you to believe. So really, what we're going to see here in this interesting attempt to say, well, yeah, we haven't, Rome hasn't defined these words.

What that means is you don't have an infallible definition, so you can't argue anything. All you can say is, well, we don't know. My ultimate authority won't tell me. And you have to go, well, does that mean you don't have an apostolic tradition accurately understanding what this means?

Because you got to understand, the scripture was revealed in a world that did not have what we would call secularism in it. This is now a vitally important question. This is a vitally important subject.

What is the nature of scripture? And so how does Rome deal with that? We deal with that by plumbing the depths of scripture and making application of Christian worldview to any kind of even highly perverted perspective, such as secularism, that can arise in God's world and hold men accountable to that.

But when you have this super secret oral tradition that you never have to, you never have to go, here's where it is. We're going to put our cards on the table. Here's the entire content of oral traditions.

Never been done, never will be done, can't be done. That is obvious beyond question, that there is no oral tradition that has been passed down separately from scripture. But that's fundamental to the Roman Catholic position.

Can't possibly avoid it. And the irony is, Rome has told us in the past, remember Sixtus' infallible Vulgate? Remember when a Pope said, here is the final edition, use this. And he dies, and within a few years, they're collecting them all up and hiding them, because it was so badly done.

Remember when Rome, remember when you could die a gruesome death at the stake for promoting the Greek over the Latin? Remember that? Wasn't all that long ago. So now Rome has changed. Rome recognizes the primacy of the biblical languages and the secondary nature of Latin, but that wasn't the case at the Reformation and for a long period of time after the Reformation.

So if you're defining the Vulgate as the final word, are you not defining meanings of words thereby? If Sixtus said this is it, then this is what the text is supposed to be. This is the final word, it's not the final word anymore.

How could you have known that the day after Sixtus put out his version as the infallible Vicar of Christ? No one outside of Rome believed he was the infallible Vicar of Christ at the time. That's why you have to be all anachronistic and read stuff backwards and do things like.

That.

But how would you have known? I guess in the same way that you would have known Honorius was wrong about monothelitism?

No, you had no way of knowing.

That's the problem with this kind of stuff. So we press forward.

Ancient Terminology, Hypostasis, and the Limits of Word Studies

Second, the meaning of theological terms changes over time. The Church currently uses theopneustos in a narrow sense, like translating it inspired or saying it only properly applies to Scripture.

Now did he just say that theopneustos only applies to Scripture? But that that's just today? Is that an admission that the modern Roman understanding is not apostolic? It goes against the apostolic Church, the early Church?

He's going to try to argue this is some kind of evolution, but he doesn't give us any evidence as to why we should believe that. I mean, where does the Church say, well, you know, we've known about the vivification understanding, but we've developed a more narrow meaning of inspired.

The problem is inspired is a Latin term, which I can understand why Rome likes Latin terms. But as such, it is not nearly exhaustive of the depth of theopneustos itself. Because you can have inspired mean breathing into something.

And that's not what is being, that's not, this is, again, if you allow the New Testament to be the New Testament. And again, see, someone like Poirier is not going to believe this, because he's not going to believe that Peter wrote that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own will, own interpretation, own activity, epiluseos.

So, if you let the New Testament speak for itself as a body of revelation, then that meaning would not follow. Because it's not just human words that are being breathed into by the Spirit of God. That's not Peter's description.

He said men spoke from God as they were being carried along by the Holy Spirit. Not that their words are the first thing, and then there is a breathing into them that makes them special. It's God speaking that is first, comes through those men as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Can Peter's description be relevant to the meaning of Paul? Not in modern progressivism. Not in modern progressivism. Which is, again, the question that, progressivism never produces apologetics. There's nothing for it to defend.

There's nothing for it to, it has no interest in engaging in a defense of the faith. Because that assumes an objectivity, a historical reality that progressivism just doesn't even believe in. So, where's all that going to come from?

I don't know. I don't know, but I stopped it before I needed to.

Dave Urban speaks of the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time. Sacred Scripture contains the inspired Word of God in a particular written form.

Sacred Tradition contains the Word of God in an unwritten form that the Church lives out in its practice of the faith. So it's not inspired like Scripture.

So there's something unique about the nature of Scripture. Now, where this definition of oral tradition comes from, certain doesn't come from the apostles. Doesn't come from the early church. You have to look over, you have to ignore Augustine and Athanasius and all these other statements about the sufficiency of Scripture and stuff like that.

You have to ignore all that. So again, we're engaging in the necessary, from the Roman Catholic perspective, anachronistic reading of early church. But still, you have the assertion here, it sounds like that there's still something about inspiration that's unique to Scripture.

But if oral tradition is apostolic and has somehow been preserved without any historical record and against the witness of historical record for 2 ,000 years. I mean, again, what was the last dogma defined on the basis of oral tradition?

Bodily assumption. Unknown in early church. And that's not just an argument for silence. Gavin Ortlund put out a video just last week. And I guess he'd been working on it prior to Trent Horn's video where he identified arguments against bodily assumptions as arguments for silence.

Well, they're not just arguments for silence at all. At all. It's not just, well, no one ever mentioned it. Well, that's just an argument for silence. There were so many different theories and speculations later on.

And the point is that if you're going to say something was delivered by the apostles to the church, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate that. To give some stinkin' basis from the writings of the early church.

Unless you can sit there and go, well, you know, like you said, they're fragmentary. So there were lots of references to our dogmas, but they were all in the parts that got lost. Okay, if that's the best you got.

When you're making up fantasies, that's the best you've got. So anyway, there is a, oh wait a minute, I'm supposed to play through the text. It's very small for me today. For another minute here. So we press forward.

Second, the meaning of theological terms changes over time. The church currently uses theopneustos in a narrow sense, like translating it inspired or saying it only properly applies to scripture. De verbum speaks of the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time.

Sacred scripture contains the inspired word of God in a particular written form. Sacred tradition contains the word of God in an unwritten form that the church lives out in its practice of the faith. So it's not inspired like scripture because it's an unwritten form.

But that doesn't mean sacred tradition is not as authoritative as scripture or that the magisterium is not infallible. The teachings of the Council of Jerusalem were just as binding on Christians in the first century when they existed in an unwritten form before they were written down in scripture years later.

Okay, so let's just point that out. He's talking about, of course, Acts 15, which is during the apostolic period. So revelation continues. Okay, that is not relevant to a period after the last of the apostles died because we all agree that revelation ceased at that point.

And so the quote-unquote Council of Jerusalem, Acts chapter 15, is part of that apostolic period and there's still divine revelation that was being given through the apostles at that particular point in time.

The issue is, was there a body of oral traditions delivered outside of scripture? This is normally when you'd find people going to 2 Thessalonians 2 .15. Had a guy on Twitter go there today and I used our new transcript function.

I better be using it because I can guarantee you my enemies are using it. I used our transcript function to pull up a number of different places over the years where we have walked through 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 and demonstrated that what is being referred to there is not some separate body of oral tradition, but it is simply the gospel which has been delivered to the Thessalonians in written form and in oral form.

That is, orally when Paul was in Thessalonica and in written form in what's called 1 Thessalonians. That's all it's referring to. If Rome is going to try to use that text to say, then it is incumbent upon them to demonstrate the existence of this tradition and the content of this tradition from the 1st century.

Because it was delivered to the Thessalonians, not just to the bishop or bishops or elders in the church in Thessalonica. Because that's not who it's addressed to. It was delivered to all the Thessalonians.

So you're going to tell me the Thessalonians knew about everything that's in oral tradition? When did the bodily assumption of Mary enter into that? Was Mary already dead at that point? Who knows? But it's all just pure speculation.

Or when it comes to Rome, pure assertion without evidence is what you're really talking about in this type of a context. So, alright, we're getting close to the end here. Now, this is where you've got to give Trent props.

Because he's thought this through. And he's got to come up with an example. It can't be derived from the early church because there's nothing there for them to derive from. As far as oral tradition and stuff like that.

So, how do you explain that Theanostas was understood this way in the early church? But we've come up, in 2023, we've come up with the proper understanding without having actually asked the Pope about it.

Because I get, I'm sorry, I'm not really sure what you'd come up with if you asked Francis about anything like this. And I think most Roman Catholic apologists would be very fearful of asking Pope Francis about any of this as well.

But, and no matter what response he gave, would it matter? Who is he to judge? Right? That's what he said on homosexuality a long time ago. Who am I to judge? So, what would happen then? I don't know.

But my point is that the way the church uses the word now does not mean that was how the word was used in the first few centuries of church history. Hebrews 1 .3, for example, says Christ is the exact representation of God's nature or substance.

In Greek, apostasis. But by the 4th century, the word apostasis was no longer the common Greek word for nature or substance. It had been replaced with the word ouzia. So that was the word that meant substance.

So theologians in the 4th century said the Trinity was three apostasies, persons, that share one ouzia, substance. If you read this 4th century understanding of apostasies back into Hebrews 1 .3, it would say that Christ is the exact representation of God's person, the person of the Father, which could lead to the heresy that the Son and the Father are the same person, or modalism.

Now, other words like sacrament or mysterion in Greek, heresy, dogma, these words have changed meaning over time. So we can't read the modern definition of those terms back into their uses in Scripture and ancient documents.

So, fascinating. Give the man props. Here's the problem. There is no question that in the Christological controversies, specifically after the Council of Nicaea, one of the real issues that was struggled with was how to understand terms related to the nature and being of God and what terminology to use to refer to the divine persons.

And Nicaea was resisted initially in the East, by some anyways, because in the East they had already struggled with modalism, dynamic monarchianism, what we would call today Jesus-only-ism, UPCI stuff, obviously all sorts of different theories, but they had already rejected that stuff.

And using homoousius sounded to them like what their opponents from the preceding century were saying. Or at least it could be understood in that way. Then the other thing you've got going on is you have the confusion of the primary language in the East being Greek and the primary language in the West being Latin.

And so how to render those terms and make them understandable across the linguistic divide, to be honest with you, was never fully accomplished. And in fact, I would say that some of the tension and problems, all the way to Chalcedon, can be traced to suspicions, let's put it this way, suspicions in the East as to what the people from the West were meaning with Latin and vice versa.

It didn't help. So there is no question that hypostasis is used in scripture. And by the time they're trying to hammer out what terms to use, 400 years later, it has been decided to distinguish, to make a...

We've got to be careful that term distinguishes, don't we? We distinguish. To make a distinction that is not biblical. Now part of that is just simply you're seeking to answer questions that are not necessarily being asked by the apostles.

But it's very important to recognize that there has been a development at that point and that the biblical meaning of hypostasis and the related terms is different than the developed meaning later on.

But again, while that is a true observation, what does that have to do with taking a one-off, progressivist, non-Roman Catholic, 2022 speculative definition of Theanostas and reading it back into the text?

Because what we're saying is in its context, and that context includes Pauline authorship, it's apostolic, it came from the apostles, not from a group of followers at a later point in time, that the apostolic meaning in 2 Timothy 3 .16 speaks to the nature of scripture and its ability to thoroughly equip the man of God in the church to communicate the truth of God to the people in the church, to exhort them, to correct them, to train them, and that there is nothing like that that is presented to Timothy.

So just as in Acts 20, I commit you to God and the word of his grace, in 2 Timothy 3 .16, and this is in light of heresies, this is in light of the falsehoods that are coming that Paul's warning about.

And he says to Timothy, Timothy, you remain convinced of that which you've known from youth, those scriptures which are able to make you wise unto salvation. And why are they able to do this? Because they are God-breathed.

Not because they give life. They do give life. That is not an untrue definition. It's just extremely partial and insufficient in the context that Paul uses. Once you dismiss that, you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean, which is what progressivists do.

So there's two different contexts here. When I heard this, I was like, kudos to Trent. This is as good a cover as you're going to come up with. Until someone comes along and says, yeah, but that's not actually what's going on here.

And in reality, he would have to be arguing that his definition, he's actually arguing that the traditional definition is the evolved definition. But that he's found the immediately post-apostolic forgery definition, maybe?

And that what that means is he can continue to allow Rome to use inspired and to use the language it's always used, but then turn this new thing upon us, because you can't have that evolution thing, you see?

We can have that evolution under the authority of the magisterium, but you can't do that. And so we'll hold you accountable for what we're saying now is the meaning in the early church that we don't have any official word on, but we're going to argue it from McDonald and Poirier, even though they're actually sort of arguing different things.

But anyway, well done, but it doesn't actually fly, unfortunately. Almost there. Three little ones left to go.

Just because the church recognizes Scripture is unique because it's inspired does not prove 2 Timothy 3 .16 is saying that about Scripture.

So the church recognizes that Scripture is unique because it's inspired, but that's not what somebody else said to Timothy, or it wasn't to Timothy because Timothy wouldn't have been around either, but some forger made it look like Paul said something to Timothy.

So now the idea is the uniqueness that you can find in Roman Catholic statements and doctrines, documents, sorry, that teach doctrines, that that's the evolutionary understanding, but that the original understanding is this vivification, broader, Scripture isn't unique because he's arguing against, he's arguing that in the early church, they didn't believe Scripture was unique.

That's what he's arguing. Now, I think that's absurd, but he's arguing on the basis of, well, they would refer to, they didn't use a specific terminology as we're using later on. Okay, which is why the early church should be corrected by Scripture, which is why the medieval church should be corrected by Scripture, which is why the modern church should be corrected by Scripture, but you don't have any ability to correct anything by Scripture once you're a Roman Catholic.