An Argument Summary

A summation of my argument(s) thus far.

1. In this post, I laid out the Scriptural evidence and my argument for my assertion that the Church is united to God’s divine nature in Christ, through the union of the humanity and divinity in the Person of Christ.

2. As a further argument from 1, I have argued that since the Church participates in the divine nature of God, by grace, through union with Christ, the Church has divine authority to declare God’s will and her knowledge about God is authoritative due to her participation in God’s divinity through Christ (for example, this authority was manifested through the ministry of the apostles and prophets on whom the Church was built, and who were themselves members of Christ’s Body, the Church).

3. I have also made two counter arguments against sola scriptura: namely that the Scriptures themselves enjoin upon us the necessity of adhering to the oral apostolic tradition, and that the Scriptures do not claim to be all-sufficient.

4. Given 1-3 above, then, the Church, as “pillar and bulwark of the Truth” (1 Timothy 3:15), has the authority to speak God’s will about Scripture (for example, as to what books are Scripture and as to Scripture’s proper meaning), and to speak about those things Scripture does not address (for example, as to gathering every Sunday for worship and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper).

5. Given 1-4, then, what the Church says about Scripture and about what Scripture does not address, the Church in her declarations will not contradict Scripture, nor will Scripture contradict the Church, for their source is the same, for the Church is being built up into the full man and the head which is Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16), and she cannot contradict herself without becoming something other than herself (given 1 above).

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Why 2 Timothy 3:16-17 Does Not Teach the All-Sufficiency of Scripture

I present here a brief sketch as to why 2 Timothy 3:16-17 does not teach the all-sufficiency of Scripture.

Every Scripture is God-inspired and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness, in order that the man of God may be perfect, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Sola scriptura advocates frequently utilize these verses to both prove the divine origin and authority of the Scriptures as well as that all that Christians need are the Scriptures, and either we need not feel bound to follow traditions not explicitly enjoined in or necessarily inferred from the Scriptures or, more strongly, we must not do anything that is not explicitly enjoined in or necessarily inferred from the Scriptures. Christians need nothing more than the Scriptures.

By “Scriptures” of course, sola scriptura adherents mean the (relatively late) Protestant canon of sixty-six books (minus the so-called “Apocrypha”), and, more pointedly, they mean the New Testament Scriptures. Thus, the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon are “all-sufficient” and we either do not need tradition, or even must reject all extrascriptural tradition.

But is St. Paul making a claim for the all-sufficiency of Scripture? The answer is no, and here’s why.

1. The “Scriptures” to which St. Paul refers here in 2 Timothy 3:16 has already been identified previously as what we would call the Old Testament just one verse prior in 2 Timothy 3:15. That St. Paul cannot mean the New Testament Scriptures is clear in that the Scriptures St. Timothy was taught in his youth could only have been the Old Testament since no New Testament book would have been written in St. Timothy’s youth. St. Paul first encountered St. Timothy on his second missionary journey (c. AD 50-53), and at this time it is possible for only one to three New Testament books to have been written, depending on how one dates them (perhaps Galatians and 1-2 Thessalonians), and St. Timothy could not have studied these in his youth.

2. St. Paul does not claim that the Old Testament Scriptures are all-sufficient, and, indeed, if they were, then the New Testament would have been superfluous. What he says is that the Old Testament Scriptures are “profitable” (ophelimos) for four purposes (teaching, reproof, correction, and instruction which is in righteousness), which purposes result in an “adult” (“perfect” here is artios which indicates complete, full-grown, prepared) Christian, who has been equipped for every good work. But that they are not all-sufficient is clear: the Old Testament does not tell us about baptism for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit; nor does it tell us about the Lord’s Supper; nor about the necessity for all Christians everywhere to gather on Sunday to worship and celebrate the Lord’s Supper (nor does the New Testament explicitly teach this last practice for that matter)–three of the most important practices of the Church and without which the Church and the faith would not be what they are.

3. Given 1 and 2, it cannot be the case that St. Paul, though he does not explicitly state the all-sufficiency of Scripture, he at least implies it.

As an aside, also in this same chapter, St. Paul refers to the names of two men who opposed Moses. Jewish tradition identifies these two as the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses (though the text here in St. Paul does not clearly state this). This is one example of what many take to be a clear use of tradition in Scripture (the other is in Jude 9, where the archangel Michael argued with the devil over the body of Moses). Sola scriptura advocates explain that it is not necessary to appeal to tradition for these facts, that the Holy Spirit could quite well have revealed these facts to St. Paul and St. Jude directly. This is certainly true that this could be the case. But it does involve some circularity of reasoning that makes such an explanation suspect.

In any case, appealing to tradition to explain 2 Timothy 3:8 is not necessary to my main argument above.

So, since St. Paul does not make any claims about the New Testament in these verses, and since manifestly the Old Testament is not in itself all-sufficient, St. Paul cannot mean that Scripture is all-sufficient for Christian faith and practice.

Especially given the fact that St. Paul enjoins upon the Thessalonian Church to adhere to the entirety of the apostolic tradition, both oral and written, as it comes from St. Paul’s ministry (2 Thessalonians 2:15), then to claim that St. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 is teaching the all-sufficiency of Scripture is a false teaching and must be rejected.

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2 Thessalonians 2:15 and the Necessity of Oral Apostolic Tradition

I here present a brief sketch as to why “tradition” in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 is necessarily apostolic oral tradition, and why we must adhere to oral apostolic tradition as it has been handed down to us.

So then, brethren, be standing firm and holding fast the traditions which ye were taught, whether by word or by our epistle. (2 Thessalonians 2:15)

1. The Church at Thessaloniki had been disturbed by a letter purporting to have been from St. Paul claiming that the day of the Lord had already come (2 Thessalonians 2:2).

2. St. Paul tells them not to be disturbed “by a spirit, a word, or an epistle (seemingly) from us” (2 Thessalonians 2:2).

3. After describing some particulars about the man of lawlessness, he asks the Thessalonians whether they remember, when he was last with them, that he had spoken these things to them (2 Thessalonians 2:5).

4. He continues speaking about the man of lawlessness and the spirit of delusion the Lord will send on those who persist in their unbelief, and then gives thanks that the Thessalonians are not of that sort but are the first fruits of sanctification, and then exhorts them to “hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by word or by letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Four interesting observations are in order:

1. The written word was not necessarily a guarantee of apostolicity; a fraudulent document going out in St. Paul’s name had misled and confused the Thessalonians.

2. The Thessalonians had the apostolic traditions which they had been taught through St. Paul’s apostolic ministry, and they were to use that to compare anything that disturbed or shook their mind (i. e., anything that was “new” or out of concert with the apostolic tradition), and the entirety of that apostolic tradition was not only St. Paul’s letter to them, but also his spoken word.

3. That the teaching of “the man of lawlessness” is not contained anywhere else in canonical letters of St. Paul clearly entails that this tradition was that which St. Paul had given them orally while ministering to them.

4. The unity of oral apostolic tradition and Scripture is clearly presumed; i. e., oral apostolic tradition and Scripture are not opposed to one another, and, in fact, are essentially the same since they are manifestations of the authority of a single source: the apostolic ministry.

Now some sola scriptura adherents will argue that since St. Paul’s teaching regarding the lawless one has been preserved in 2 Thessalonians, and since that letter has been received by the Church as canonical, that this obviates oral apostolic tradition. This conclusion, however is false, and here’s why.

First and foremost, St. Paul’s counsel to adhere to oral and written apostolic tradition is, itself, certified in the same canonical text that supposedly obviates apostolic tradition. This is simply self-contradictory. In other words, Scripture itself enjoins upon the Thessalonians that they hold to the oral apostolic tradition St. Paul had delivered to them. Clearly Scripture cannot be used to obviate oral apostolic tradition.

Secondly, this begs the question that sola scriptura advocates assert but do not prove: namely, that the Scriptures (which necessarily, on their terms, include the New Testament) are all-sufficient. Scripture nowhere asserts this (the spooftexting of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 notwithstanding), but more importantly the sheer logic of history denies it: the complete canon of Scriptures were not available to all Christians for many decades (to estimate on the highly conservative end) after Pentecost, since the New Testament was not complete until the end of the first century. Unless sola scriptura advocates are willing to argue that a partial New Testament canon is also all-sufficient (since various Churches in the first century would have only some copies of St. Paul’s letters, and not all the New Testament canonical books would have been available to all Churches till, minimally, well into the second century, perhaps a century after Pentecost), then they are forced to admit that the Church operated for decades after the death of the last Apostle, and for perhaps as long as a century after the death of most of the Apostles, before there was any realistic opportunity for Churches to have most, though perhaps not all, of the completed canon of the Scriptures. This means the Churches did not have direct access to the Apostles themselves, nor of their writings, for perhaps as long as a hundred years (again, estimating very conservatively, I happen to think it was much longer), and therefore were without anything that was “all-sufficient” to guide them in their faith.

Clearly, the Churches had to operate on oral apostolic tradition for many decades, even for as long as a century (I would argue longer even than that).

If, therefore, sola scriptura cannot withstand the test of canonical Scripture as well as historical fact, it is a false teaching and should be rejected.

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