Is Sola Scriptura a logical fallacy?

[Gilgamesh]

I believe it was Fr. Ripperger who pointed out in one of his online homilies that sola scriptura is self-defeating.

Basically the last book of the New Testament wasn't written until about 150ish AD? So for the 120 or some odd years between the Resurrection and that book being published, there was no scriptura to be soloed. So basically the very first Christians had no source of authority, and the Faith couldn't have been without that authority, so it basically extinguished right off the bat. 

Silly Prots.

Then again, the “silly Prots” have several verses from their beloved scripture which indicates to them that the scriptura was being circulated even before it was compiled, to wit 2 Thessalonians 2:15—“stand fast, brethren, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”  And St. Paul, in one of the earliest New Testament letters, told the Galatians that neither he himself nor even an angel from heaven was entitled to preach a gospel different from the one that the Galatians had already received (Gal. 1:viii*).  Fr. Ripperger was only half-right. Sola scriptura is as much self-defeating as it is self-supporting.  It just depends on what side of the fence you’re on.

___________________________
A minor internet annoyance: you can't type "Galatians 1:8" inside of parentheses without it appearing as (Galatians 1:.

[INPEFESS]

You made the claim the Church appeals to the New Testament to justify itself. Now you are saying that the Church appeals to some other unspecified internal evidence to buttress its claim. So what "internal evidence" are you now saying the Church uses if not the New Testament, which was the original topic of discussion?

No, I’m still saying that the Church uses the New Testament to justify her authority—at least in part (and is this even in dispute?  If so, standard Catholic apologetics is in for a massive overhaul!). 

Perhaps we're talking past each other. I don't have much time at the moment, but I just wanted to leave a quick comment . . .

My point on this was: for those who accept the New Testament as inerrant, one can use the New Testament to demonstrate the authority of the Church's interpretation via reason and a proper understanding of the appropriate historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, which allow no possible alternative reconcilable interpretations; but for one who does not accept the Scriptures as inerrant, though the Scriptures can sometimes be used as a whole [the symbiosis of the Old and New Testaments] to demonstrate their inerrant nature, the New Testament alone does not prove the authority of the Church.

[quotidianum]

But getting this back to our original dispute.  Satori made this observation, which I happen to agree with: “I want to know how one can prove the Bible has any authority whatsoever without referring to something outside of the Bible.”  Indeed, how can it be proven?  One simply has to take it on faith.  I only ask the same question of the Church.  How does the Church argue for her authority without referring to something outside of the Church? 

I quite like INPEFESS's explanations for you, but you are apparently not quite seeing what INPEFESS is saying, so let me give it a go.

Perhaps what you're really asking is "How does the Church prove her authority?"  The short answer is "God," to which you might reply, "Well, outside of God, how does she prove her authority?" 

It is not circular reasoning, but rather circular questioning, because there can be no other complete answer.  The fact that there is only one complete answer to a question does not make the answer fallacious or less likely true or inaccurate, and the fact that other "authorities" do or do not concur with the answer offers no weight one way or the other.  Obviously, non-Catholics do not accept the authority of the Church, or else they would be Catholics.  Non-Catholics who accept the Trinity and reject the Church on grounds of solo scriptura are the topic here.  Attempting to prove the authority of the Church to a non-Catholic who does not believe in Jesus Christ will never be fruitful: even if he agreed to accept that Jesus established the Church but did not accept that Jesus was God, he would be committing a fallacy of appeal to (bad) authority, because there is nothing special in any one man (as he would still claim Jesus to be just a man) that can overwhelm the "authority" of any other man to do the same if there is nothing unique about the first.  Authority involves domain and exclusivity over some truth, and in believing that just any man could establish a Church, the person himself would be in circular and fallacious reasons even if he accidentally accepts that Jesus did establish the Church and came to believe so.  Thus, one needs to have a precursor belief in the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus Christ in order to be able to logically believe in the special authority He had to establish His Church.

It is thus illogical to try to convince non-Catholics who don't believe in Jesus Christ as God that Jesus established a Church without first demonstrating to them that Jesus was, in fact, God and thus could establish a Church.  These are the facts that likewise support and prove the authority of the Church.  So, questions about proving the authority of the Church "outside" the Church are circular----the questions, not the answer.  The factuality of authority of the Church proceeds from other foundational facts in a logical progression, and so the foundation of truth must be laid first (just like Jesus convinced St Peter that He was God before He established the Church on St Peter).  Failing to do this would be like attempting to convince someone who believes in geocentrism that the calendar year is based on the time required for the Earth to make one elliptical orbit around the Sun.  As he fundamentally would not believe that the Earth orbits the Sun, you will never convince them of it.  You have to first start at an earlier stage of argument and establish certain facts from which your statements logically proceed.

So, back to the topic at hand, how can non-Catholics who believe in the Bible as the infallible word of God follow a man-made concept called solo scriptura which not only is not mentioned in the Bible itself, but is even actually contradicted by that same Bible which includes mention of the establishment of a Church?  I'm not sure.  I've had plenty of discussions, but not much progress.  The sedevacantist Dimond Brothers of Most Holy Family Monastery have an absolutely devastating audio file that just destroys the "faith alone" claim of Protestants, and they annihilate the concept by using a solo scriptura format to demonstrate to Protestants their illogical and contradictory errors.  Obviously, this is logically true with solo scriptura itself, as, as the other poster mentioned, solo scriptura is never mentioned in the scriptura which is supposed to be solo'd.

[Pax et Bonum]

I find it ironic that the Bible itself says to follow traditions, both written and oral, thus implying that the Bible alone is insufficient.

Protestants think that we insult the Bible by saying that, but what they don't realize is that Protestants insult Jesus' Church by saying that it isn't necessary.

[INPEFESS]

But getting this back to our original dispute.  Satori made this observation, which I happen to agree with: “I want to know how one can prove the Bible has any authority whatsoever without referring to something outside of the Bible.”  Indeed, how can it be proven?  One simply has to take it on faith.  I only ask the same question of the Church.  How does the Church argue for her authority without referring to something outside of the Church? 

I quite like INPEFESS's explanations for you, but you are apparently not quite seeing what INPEFESS is saying, so let me give it a go.

Well, I can't blame him. In all actuality, I am notorious around here for my obtuseness, so it does not come as a surprise to me that I am not expressing myself clearly enough. This clarity of expression is still a work in progress.

Nevertheless, is it more than Gilgamesh doesn't understand or that he doesn't agree? If I had to take a guess, I'd say it is the latter.

[Gilgamesh]

I am notorious around here for my obtuseness, so it does not come as a surprise to me that I am not expressing myself clearly enough. This clarity of expression is still a work in progress.

I don’t think your writing is obtuse at all.  I’d forgotten how thorough and meticulous your posts were.  Length might be an issue, but with my verbosity who am I to talk?  I think we may’ve both been overeager to make our arguments, though.  For my part, I neglected to mention that I was making my observations from the outside of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant “Reformed” churches.
 

Perhaps we're talking past each other.

Right.  I maybe should’ve responded to something you wrote earlier:

To the pagan who rejects the historico-supernatural authenticity of the Scriptures . . . well that is a whole different topic.

That pagan may very well be me.  I’m really only half-heartedly defending sola scriptura here, and in a devil’s advocate capacity.  Personally, in fact, I can almost agree with Cardinal Newman that Protestantism is “the dreariest of all possible religions”—theologically speaking, that is.  Me, I don’t mind the minimalist ambience.  I like the Anglican piety of William Law, and I think the Anabaptists, Quakers, and Amish were able to evolve something noble and commendable out of just sola scriptura—there’s a sublime austerity in those traditions that is nearly all but absent in the bourgeois Christianity outside of the monasteries and the Third World (and, I suppose, the so-called “Candyland” sect).  But that is neither here nor there.

My point isn’t so much to defend Protestantism, but just to illustrate that both Protestants and Catholics are making self-validating appeals to authority: one to the Bible, the other to the Church.  I don’t think it’s being solipsistic to say that they both ultimately require a leap of faith.

[Gilgamesh]

Perhaps what you're really asking is "How does the Church prove her authority?"  The short answer is "God," to which you might reply, "Well, outside of God, how does she prove her authority?"

If the answer is “God,” I guess I can’t dispute that.  This, then, is a deity that has established a Church with a three-pronged transmission of his revelation: scripture, Magisterium, and tradition. So be it.  I take off my hat.  The Protestant, on the other hand, appeals to God as well, with the Protestant’s deity having contained his revelation entirely in a book to be read.  How can I dispute that either?  If I tell him or her that the Bible alone appears insufficient even according to some of its internal testimony, I am only further to be told that I’m interpreting it wrong.  A “right interpretation,” I suppose, is what the presbyters are for.

Attempting to prove the authority of the Church to a non-Catholic who does not believe in Jesus Christ will never be fruitful: even if he agreed to accept that Jesus established the Church but did not accept that Jesus was God, he would be committing a fallacy of appeal to (bad) authority, because there is nothing special in any one man (as he would still claim Jesus to be just a man) that can overwhelm the "authority" of any other man to do the same if there is nothing unique about the first.  Authority involves domain and exclusivity over some truth, and in believing that just any man could establish a Church, the person himself would be in circular and fallacious reasons even if he accidentally accepts that Jesus did establish the Church and came to believe so.  Thus, one needs to have a precursor belief in the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus Christ in order to be able to logically believe in the special authority He had to establish His Church.

Right.  And we could let it go back to whatever point of departure you think is meet and right.  Even if you feel you must show the authority of the Church from the preeminent fact that Jesus is God, how is that going to be demonstrated without using the gospels or the teachings of the Church?  For those outside the Church, this will still be circular—and not just a matter of circular questioning.   “The Church is divinely instituted because Jesus was divine, and the Church teaches Jesus’ divinity.”  I understand, though, that you & INPEFESS are not addressing pagan skepticism here, and I may’ve been remiss in bringing it in.  With all due to concession the OP, I only wanted to illustrate how things appear from the vantage point of outside of both the Protestant and Catholic religions.

So, back to the topic at hand, how can non-Catholics who believe in the Bible as the infallible word of God follow a man-made concept called solo scriptura which not only is not mentioned in the Bible itself, but is even actually contradicted by that same Bible which includes mention of the establishment of a Church?

I don’t think an Anglican or a Lutheran would deny that Christ established a Church.  What’s left to debate after the establishment is the particular character of that Church.  Protestant apologetics don't shy away from the Fathers of the Early Church.  What everyone's doing, basically, is riffing on different interpretations of St. Paul, and a variety of snippets from the ante-Nicene writers.  The poor Gnostics, of course, always get rudely dissed—the official canon of contention having already been decided.

[INPEFESS]

You made the claim the Church appeals to the New Testament to justify itself. Now you are saying that the Church appeals to some other unspecified internal evidence to buttress its claim. So what "internal evidence" are you now saying the Church uses if not the New Testament, which was the original topic of discussion?

No, I’m still saying that the Church uses the New Testament to justify her authority—at least in part (and is this even in dispute?  If so, standard Catholic apologetics is in for a massive overhaul!). 

My point on this was: for those who accept the New Testament as inerrant, one can use the New Testament to demonstrate the authority of the Church's interpretation via reason and a proper understanding of the appropriate historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, which allow no possible alternative reconcilable interpretations; but for one who does not accept the Scriptures as inerrant, though the Scriptures can sometimes be used as a whole [the symbiosis of the Old and New Testaments] to demonstrate their inerrant nature, the New Testament alone does not prove the authority of the Church.

Being one of the three pillars of the Church, scriptural evidence qualifies as internal.

I am not sure why you are suggesting that this internal component of the Catholic religion somehow reduces the Church's claim of authority to circularity. I have already outlined some of the external evidences that support this internal pillar of the Scriptures from various angles outside of Her walls.

  If you’d like to extend the evidence to the Patristic testimonies, then that’s fine: but that evidence nonetheless remains that of Catholics arguing for Catholic ecclesial authority.

I must reject that as an ad hominem: discrediting the content of one's testimony because of their perceived interest. This is the easy way out, I think.

Of course, an Eastern Orthodox Christian might use some of those same Fathers to appeal for his or her own tradition.  And a Gnostic Christian would dismiss them all in favor of contemporaneous writers going on about the pleroma (he or she would even fashion non-canonical gospels). 

But this all reduces to nothing more than your speculations about which authorities you think I might use to support my claim.

The Gnostics even took the Old Testament into account—and maintained that it was the sordid history of a jealous demiurge drunk on power!

Sure they did, but you seem to be reducing the objectivity of reason to little more than the bias inherent in one who uses it. If this were the case, then no-one could ever maintain any ideology, for the moment reason procured a conclusion, the conclusion itself would then tarnish the objectivity of the reason used to deduce it. Is this any less circular than that with which you charge the Church?

  Again, though, we can all take that or we can leave it: every tradition merely testifies to its own authenticity.

It seems you are proceeding from the premise of comparative religion 101: all religions claim to be true, so no one can know who is right and who is wrong. Haven't you and I been here before?

But getting this back to our original dispute.  Satori made this observation, which I happen to agree with: “I want to know how one can prove the Bible has any authority whatsoever without referring to something outside of the Bible.”  Indeed, how can it be proven?  One simply has to take it on faith.  I only ask the same question of the Church.  How does the Church argue for her authority without referring to something outside of the Church? 

Perhaps I have misunderstood this whole discussion, but I thought the original problem was the circularity of the Church's claim of authority: that to prove Her authority She has to go inside of Herself. Now you are saying the problem is that She can't prove Her authority without going outside of Herself? Isn't that what you were originally saying She needs to do? Please explain.

Perhaps you could elaborate on the “other means,” besides the bible, by which you said that the Church can justify her authority?

1) I would first need to know what you are really arguing. First it seemed you were saying that the only way She can justify Herself is to appeal to Herself. Now it seems you are saying that the problem is that She can't argue for Her authority without going outside of Her boundaries. Isn't that the reciprocal?

2) The original discussion concerned the circularity of the Church's claim to authority as it concerned the New Testament. The simple solution was to show that, since the Church penned the New Testament, the Church must have claimed authority before the New Testament was actually penned. Before She had penned the New Testament, She must have appealed, then, to something besides the New Testament to justify Her authority. The substance of that discussion--namely, "What is it She used to justify Her authority before the New Testament had been written?"--will take us far away from the original challenge: that the Church's claim of authority is circular because it relies upon the New Testament.

I’m grateful for the thorough research you did on scriptural interpretation.

I thank your for your acknowledgment. I hope it was useful in some way.

  But let it suffice for this discussion that Protestants include (most of) the Old Testament in their biblical canon and have interpreted it to their own satisfaction.

Yes, but fortunately, reason does not rely upon subjective satisfaction. I have already addressed some of the deficits of the Protestant interpretation.

With all due respect, were you really asking me whether or not the Church's claim to authority was circular reasoning in your original post, or had you already made up your mind that it was but covered that up with an inviting question to lure naive victims? 

[quotidianum]

The Protestant, on the other hand, appeals to God as well, with the Protestant’s deity having contained his revelation entirely in a book to be read.  How can I dispute that either?  If I tell him or her that the Bible alone appears insufficient even according to some of its internal testimony, I am only further to be told that I’m interpreting it wrong.  A “right interpretation,” I suppose, is what the presbyters are for.

Well, I would dispute that by pointing out to the Protestant that the "deity" revealed in their book is apparently a liar, because He said that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church, yet, according to the same Protestant, the gates of Hell--the Catholic Church---was not only prevailing against, but was indeed the only Church for 1500 years, and was actually responsible for bringing together the books which make up the testimony the Protestant calls the the Bible.  Arguing with Protestants about solo scriptura is best done, in my experience, by pointing out how illogical the position is, and, again, asking them to prove solo scriptura using solo scriptura (which they cannot do).

Even if you feel you must show the authority of the Church from the preeminent fact that Jesus is God, how is that going to be demonstrated without using the gospels or the teachings of the Church?  For those outside the Church, this will still be circular—and not just a matter of circular questioning.

This is why I point out that people disqualify evidence.  The Gospels are historical documents.  Even people who do not consider them to be divinely-inspired concede this.  The fact that the Church has taken these historical accounts and kept them "within" her does not change their historicity.  It is like an evidence file at a court case: of course the evidence file will have all the prosecutor's evidence for the case, what else is the point?  Should a judge then say, "No, I'm disqualifying everything in the evidence file because the prosecutor has an agenda."  Well, agenda or not, there are facts in there that are independent of agendas, and so a judge needs to sort through those facts and evidence.  The fact that the Church has (smartly and obviously) assembled an evidence file on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ does not disqualify it.  It is not circular reasoning, again, but a prejudicial and arbitrary disqualification of evidence by the questioner.  There is a certainly a wide-spread prejudice against non-secular documents that some non-religious (or anti-religious) people espouse, and they will flatly disqualify anything that is "tainted" by the Church or "religion," including historical documents like the Gospels.  If someone refuses to consider the historicity of the Gospels, then they are being illogical from the get-go.  Again, its like a judge in court refusing to look at the prosecutors evidence file.   

I don’t think an Anglican or a Lutheran would deny that Christ established a Church.  What’s left to debate after the establishment is the particular character of that Church.  Protestant apologetics don't shy away from the Fathers of the Early Church.  What everyone's doing, basically, is riffing on different interpretations of St. Paul, and a variety of snippets from the ante-Nicene writers.  The poor Gnostics, of course, always get rudely dissed—the official canon of contention having already been decided.

Well, I think Gnostics should be dismissed because they are illogical, also.  Esoterism is fundamentally contrary to revelation, even as a simple sentence.  As for the Lutherans and Anglicans, they do deny the establishment of the Church, because they do not accept the Church that existed for 1500 years before them, thus there was no church for 1500 years according to them; furthermore, they maintain that St Peter took his authority to the grave, but that he remained the "rock," but they reject the Church.  The Anglicans especially suffer from this, because they cannot logically have severed from the Church in schism because of the Church's refusal to change, and then claim to have an unchanged "church" themselves, right after having severed for the purposes of changing.  The Lutherans are so lost and disorganized that they can't even make up their minds.  They've been making various contradictory claims since that thoroughly illogical person of Luther himself, who likewise couldn't make up his mind.  You're right that they are riffing on different interpretations, which is exactly why God established one source for interpretations and not 25,001, or however many Protestant denominations there are this weekend.  I was interested to read somewhere about a Protestant who converted to Catholicism after mentally realizing how counterintuitive it was for him to think that God established a Church, but put no one to head it.   And again, I have no sympathy for the gnostics (including Islam, of course), as they are dragging souls to hell, and so easily disproved, as well.

[INPEFESS]

I am notorious around here for my obtuseness, so it does not come as a surprise to me that I am not expressing myself clearly enough. This clarity of expression is still a work in progress.

I don’t think your writing is obtuse at all. 

Oh? Well, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose that means that it's a bad thing because that means the problem is not a communication barrier.

I’d forgotten how thorough and meticulous your posts were. 

If obtuseness isn't a problem, the length of my posts is. This is something else I am working on.

Length might be an issue, but with my verbosity who am I to talk?

Length is always an issue with me, but then again verbosity isn't exactly alien to you either. 

I must apologize for filling my earlier reply with stuffing; I didn't need to include examples . . . yet.

  I think we may’ve both been overeager to make our arguments, though. 

I'dn't've noticed hadn't you mentioned it.   ;)

For my part, I neglected to mention that I was making my observations from the outside of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant “Reformed” churches.

Well, I figured that you were approaching from this direction; it isn't as if you usually don't. But I would like to know exactly what you are now saying.

You originally said that the Church appeals to the New Testament to justify Her authority. If the Church penned the New Testament, how could She have appealed to it to justify Her authority before She had penned it? The Apostles certainly didn't appeal to an allegedly inerrant New Testament when they spread the gospel of Christ, teaching and baptizing all nations in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.

Right.  I maybe should’ve responded to something you wrote earlier:

To the pagan who rejects the historico-supernatural authenticity of the Scriptures . . . well that is a whole different topic.

That pagan may very well be me. 

Well, I thought as much, but your failure to acknowledge it led me to think that you were perhaps coming from a different perspective.

I’m really only half-heartedly defending sola scriptura here, and in a devil’s advocate capacity.

Yes, I realize this.

  Personally, in fact, I can almost agree with Cardinal Newman that Protestantism is “the dreariest of all possible religions”—theologically speaking, that is.  Me, I don’t mind the minimalist ambience. 

Me, it isn't a matter of minding anything. It is what it is, not what I'd like it to be. The mind is only so powerful. At some point it has to realize that something much more powerful must have designed it, and hence done so with certain purposeful limitations. We should use our intellects to perceive the purposes of such limitations and exploit these intellectual deficits through the use of other uniquely-endowed tools by which we can shed our reliance upon our puny intellects and transcend the influence of the material realm (Matthew 16:16-17). Not of selfish motives should we pursue this end, but to fulfill the purpose for which were designed; in effect, to derive good pleasure from seeking that of Another. In other words, faith isn't as irrational as some would suggest.

I like the Anglican piety of William Law, and I think the Anabaptists, Quakers, and Amish were able to evolve something noble and commendable out of just sola scriptura—there’s a sublime austerity in those traditions that is nearly all but absent in the bourgeois Christianity outside of the monasteries and the Third World (and, I suppose, the so-called “Candyland” sect).  But that is neither here nor there.

Yes, let's not go there, shall we? 

My point isn’t so much to defend Protestantism, but just to illustrate that both Protestants and Catholics are making self-validating appeals to authority: one to the Bible, the other to the Church.

But can that really be said of the Church? Does the Church really validate Herself or does history validate the Church? This goes back to my point concerning the unique fulfillment of the Scriptural prophesies by the Catholic Church. Dissenting opinions which are based on incomplete or false understandings of history, culture, and language only result in irreconcilable contradictions that can't possibly provide solutions to the puzzle.

  I don’t think it’s being solipsistic to say that they both ultimately require a leap of faith.

If based upon an incomplete understanding of the Church's claim to authority, I do.

While I will never deny that the belief in the Christian God requires faith (for, according to the Christian, without this faith, life on earth would be practically meaningless), your claim seems to be the product of a convenient generalization of the Church's view.