Sola Scriptura
A Response to Kenny Pearce’s
Contemplated View of Scripture:
In
the remarks to his blog (http://blog.kennypearce.net/archives/000193.html), Kenny
Pearce has said that one view of Scripture he is contemplating is: “"ONLY
the text of Scripture is all and only a perfect, complete, and infallible
VERBAL expression of this same revelation" - I've already said there are
other perfect and complete expressions, but they are not essentially
verbal.” The revelation in discussion
here is the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Kenny seems to be referring to his remark that: “In fact, I would go so
far as to say that the entirety of the revelation is contained implicitly in
Christ's single word from the cross: tetelestai (John
In
general, I feel that the theology found on his blog is solid; however, I’m
going to have to disagree on this proposed view of Scripture and thus feel
compelled to discuss it. Protestants,
including myself, adhere to the doctrine of “sola scriptura”. While in informal use this is often taken to
mean that Christians should base their doctrine only on Scripture, as far as
its official meaning, I believe based on information from Tenth Presbyterian
Church that the primary substance of sola scriptura is that the Bible is the
ultimate authoritative source on what God has said to mankind. The exact text of a handout on Reformation
Sunday reads: “what they [the Reformers] mean is that the Bible alone is our
ultimate authority- not the pope, not the church, not the traditions of the
church or church councils, still less personal intimations of subjective
feelings, but Scripture only”. It seems
here that “authority” is used to mean “is authoritative about what God is like,
wants us to do, etc”. It is important
to note that Tenth’s statement doesn’t deny other sources have authority- in fact, it also says “Other sources of authority may have an
important role to play. Some are even
established by God…But Scripture alone is truly ultimate. Therefore, if any of these other authorities
depart from Bible teaching, they are to be judged by the Bible and rejected.”
The
overall question then, is not what has or doesn’t reveal God, but what is
ultimate. I certainly agree with Kenny
that Scripture is a perfect, complete, and infallible revelation of Jesus
Christ’s life and teachings. However, to
adhere to the doctrine of sola scriptura, one also needs to say that ONLY
Scripture is a perfect, complete, and infallible revelation of Jesus Christ’s
life and teachings, which he denies. I
think it is unclear from his response that this is a denial of one of the
foundation of the Protestant Reformation, which is partially the point I was to
make here.
I
will first look at Kenny’s proposed other “perfect, complete, and infallible
expression of the same revelation”- Jesus Christ’s statement “It is finished”
on the cross. Actually, my first
argument is that Kenny contradicts himself here. He claims to support that Scripture is the
only complete, perfect, and infallible verbal expression of the same
revelation, but if his remark is referring to the WORD Jesus said on the cross,
that is also a verbal revelation. I have
a feeling that Kenny would argue that since the entire revelation is implicitly
contained in this word, it is not “essentially verbal” but it is unclear to me
how that argument would work. Although
you need other things to reveal the entirety of the meaning of the word Jesus
uttered on the cross, you need other things to reveal Scripture- mainly, the
nonverbal assistance of the Holy Spirit.
So it seems that he already has two perfect and complete verbal
expressions- Christ’s word of the cross and Scripture.
Ignoring
that for the moment, and looking at the question of: is that one word truly a
perfect and complete revelation of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ? Notice that to make this work Kenny needs to
say that a lot of things are implicitly contained in that word- the divine
plan, the fall. What does it mean,
though, that something is complete? It
means that nothing needs to be added to it.
It is important to Kenny that Christ’s phrase “It is finished” includes
a lot more than is stated there- namely sin and God’s plan. This is the “it”, I suppose he would say, and
thus they are implicitly assumed within the subject. However, to fill in that subject, sin, the
divine plan, etc, we need another revelation- we need Scripture. Thus, in order to get to the meaning of this
statement, we need Scripture. Thus, I
would say it is not “perfect and complete”- if it were complete, to understand
the meaning, we should not need anything else, and since it does require
something else to understand, nor is it perfect.
This
claim is a vitally important statement- perhaps, I would say, the “thesis
statement” of Christ’s life and teachings, but I would say that it still
belongs WITHIN Christ’s life and teachings, and is not itself a separate
revelation of them. In fact, it may be
the most important teaching of Christ- the fact that everything is ended in
Him- but it remains a teaching of His, PART OF THE REVELATION, and not a
separate expression of the revelation, as Kenny says. He may want to claim that it is both part of
the teaching and an expression of it, which seems completely illogical to me.
However,
while this addresses the issue of the specific additional revelation Kenny
wants to say is also perfect and complete, it doesn’t address the issue of can
there be other, non-verbal, perfect and complete expressions of the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ? Essentially,
is sola scriptura correct? This doctrine
is accepted by the Protestants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is
correct. Could there be something else
that is on par with Scripture, or even above it? Because Kenny at least admits that only
Scripture is a perfect and infallible verbal expression of the revelation, I
will assume that he will not argue with the identification of Scripture as the
Word of God. Certainly nothing that is
contradictory to the Scripture, which is implied I believe when he says it is
perfect. Certainly nothing can go beyond
Scripture- it is complete. So does
anything exist that is identical in content to the
Scripture, remembering that the Scripture is the expression of the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ? So, yes, the
life and teachings themselves are identical, and are perfect and complete,
which is where Kenny gets into problems by mistaking a “thesis” of that
teaching as another revelation of life and teaching, but certainly something
can’t be a expression of itself. Is
there anything, besides the life and teachings of Jesus Christ themselves and
the Bible, that is a perfect and complete expression of those things?
The
clear answer, I believe, from experience is no, but doctrine certainly should
not be based on experience.
So let us look at the Scriptures
themselves, which even Kenny acknowledges as perfect and complete, to see if we
can determine from them whether there exists other expressions of Jesus
Christ’s life that are perfect and complete.
First of all, for the sake of being thorough, to check that we can
derive from Scripture that Scripture is perfect and complete. We know that all of God’s Word is truth, from
Psalm 119:160, “The entirety of Your word is truth”,
and from Proverbs 30:5, “Every word of God is pure”. Between these, I think a strong argument for
perfection can be made. Secondly,
Scripture is sufficient (or complete), from 2 Timothy
Notice that “complete” refers to a
“complete expression of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings”. Thus it is conceivable that God has other
revelations to mankind that are not part of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings
that may not be part of Scripture.
However, if this were true, these revelations would not be necessary for
salvation or sanctification. Knowing
what is and is not an expression of Jesus Christ’s life and teaching is
something that is necessary for sanctification, since sanctification is
becoming more like Christ. Thus, all
means of knowing who Christ is- what His life was- and what His teachings are- must
be contained in Scripture. So the
question becomes, does Scripture tell us that there are other expressions of
Jesus Christ’s life and teachings? This
is a relatively open question, because there are examples of things like
Peter’s vision (Acts 10) that seems to contain part of Jesus’ teaching. So are visions, or
anything besides Scripture, a perfect and complete expression of Jesus Christ’s
life and teaching?
The short answer would be to quote 1
Corinthians 4:6, which tells us “Now these things, brethren, I have
figuratively transferred to myself and Apollos for
your sakes, that you may learn in us not to think beyond what is written, that
none of you may be puffed up on behalf of one against the other”, and say that
Scripture clearly tells us not to trust anything beyond the written word as
perfect and complete. But some could
argue that is a misinterpretation of that verse. So, first of all, Scripture clearly does not
itself say that anything other source of information about Jesus Christ’s life
and teachings is perfect and complete, so by saying that something else is, we
are adding to God’s Word and run afoul of Proverbs 30:6. But this is a weak argument, open to claims
of misinterpreting that verse, so let’s investigate deeper. We could also say that in some sense, if
Scripture fails to tell us that there is another source, it is not
perfect. We could argue also that it is
not complete, but Kenny merely claims that it is a complete expression of Jesus
Christ’s life and teachings, so there could be difficulties there regarding is
part of Jesus’ life and teachings how to know His life and teachings? Remembering that this was a response to
comment on his blog, Kenny did not define perfect, and so for a moment I’m
going to ignore that route and press onwards.
The most obvious next question is:
is the fact that something is a perfect and complete expression of Jesus
Christ’s life and teaching either 1) part of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings
or 2) necessary for salvation or sanctification? If so, then that claim must be contained in
Scripture, since Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation and
sanctification. What do we need to know
for sanctification? Do we need to know
what things are sources of knowledge of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings, and
do we need to know whether they are a perfect and complete expression of Jesus
Christ’s life and teachings? The answer
to the first question is yes. Is knowing whether an expression of Jesus Christ’s life and
teaching is perfect necessary for sanctification? I think the answer is yes. Perfect includes being true, which implies
some sort of infallibility. We must know
that a source is infallible since we use that source as the basis to model our
lives on in order to become more like Christ- to be sanctified. If we don’t know that a source is infallible,
we need another source to model our lives around that we can be sure is
perfect, that will not lead us away from being sanctified. Thus, knowing that something is infallible is
important to sanctification. And what
expression of Jesus’ life and teachings does the Bible tell us are
infallible? The only expression of
Jesus’ life and teachings that I can think of that Scripture itself says is
absolutely, unconditionally true regarding Jesus’ life and teachings is, well,
Scripture itself. Scripture does not
need to be compared against anything else, we can trust it absolutely. But everything else does need to be tested
against Scripture. Thus, we don’t have
any other source that is a perfect expression of Jesus’ life and teachings, we don’t have any other expressions that are
perfect and complete. But just in case,
I’ll look at the issue of completeness.
Is the knowledge that a source is complete necessary for
sanctification? Well, if not, then we
won’t know when to stop looking for God’s truth regarding Jesus’ life and
teachings- and we’d have to accept that other things COULD be part of Jesus’
life and teachings, which could involve things on both salvation and
sanctification, leading to a contradiction.
Thus, Scripture must name at least one source that is complete. Well, for any other source, the only way we
could know that it is complete, since the Bible doesn’t tell us that anything
is complete, is by comparing it to Scripture and showing that everything that
is in Scripture is also in that source.
And since Scripture is complete, there should be nothing in that source
that is not in Scripture. But can we
ever know EVERYTHING that is in Scripture, in order to be able to determine
that something else is complete? I think
not, and therefore I think that even if there is something that is complete, we
cannot possibly know it. So, at the very
least, we cannot know if any other source is a perfect and complete expression
of Jesus Christ’s life and teaching. And
because of the above discussion on perfection, I would go further to say that
there IS no other perfect and complete expression of Jesus Christ’s life and
teachings.
As a side note, humanity on its own cannot
discover the entirety of God’s truth; it must be revealed to them by God
Himself. For example, see Romans
1:18-19, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because
what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to
them.” However, can we determine from
the Bible that humans, on their own, without God revealing Himself to them, can
find God’s truth? 1 Peter 20-21 states
that “…that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for
prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were
moved by the Holy Spirit.” Prophecy is
clearly part of God’s revelation to mankind, and this passage clearly refers to
prophecy that was confirmed by Jesus Christ (see verse 19). Thus the fulfillment of this prophecy is part
of Jesus’ life and teachings, and therefore needs to be included in an
expression of them. However, this
prophecy doesn’t come from man but is revealed by God. This is another argument that Scripture,
God’s perfect and complete revelation to mankind, must contain all other types
of revelation of Himself to them.
I know that this argument is rather
weak, and short on scriptural quotations, for which I apologize. At some point, probably after the semester
ends, I hope to formalize this in a stronger argument.
(For more information on sola
scriptura, please see the articles at: http://www.the-highway.com/c_scriptura.html.)