The Protestant Philosopher @ProtPhilosopher

@EcciusMaximus Thanks for your kind words. Here's an article that goes into more detail regarding Trent and the canon: protestantreview.substack.com/p/what-jedin-s…

Catholic Maximus offers us a "perfect example" of reading "malicious" motivated reasoning into a case where a more charitable and accurate explanation is available. As I clarified: Yes, I have since corrected my statement in light of Jedin's footnote, but that correction shouldn't read "malicious intent" into Metzger's typo and mistake. That's an overreach to make a polemical point yourself. The details of the vote in February are themselves contested by the Catholic source. I simply sided with Jedin, as he's typically regarded as the definitive source. But, siding with him is just siding with him siding with one of three interpretations of what the February vote was about. He says it was attaching an anathema. There were two other live readings of what actually happened. Moreover, the April vote was promulgated to affirm what was already decided in February. The April vote wasn't a fresh deliberative vote. And the deliberative vote in February was genuinely contested, as 40% dissented. So, by way of a divided body (i.e., not even close to a consensus), it erased with an "anathema" a long-standing Catholic tradition of reading two levels of canonical texts. It silenced Jerome's long-standing division of the canon for doctrine and the canon for edification-only (the deuterocanonical). And the opposition were great scholars, following in Jerome's line. So, unless you can read Metzger's mind as wanting to make a malicious polemical point (and he was no polemicist), then his mistake is understandable as the data on the vote is messy and contested. The misreading of the ambiguity concerning "nay" votes as "abstentions" I have corrected, but that still doesn't do much regarding the polemical point, namely that a whole tradition of reading the deutros as of lesser canonical status was silenced by a mere simple majority (60-40). That it was a contested vote with substantial dissent that fell well-short of consensus means that's it's still a problem for the tidy Catholic claim that the canon was definitively declared at Trent. More accurately, the dissent was voted out of existence by a simple majority. The deutros officially became canonical by a contested vote.

CATHOLIC MAXIMUS @EcciusMaximus

15 hours ago

This is a perfect example of 𝖂𝖍𝖎𝖙𝖊𝕭𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖉 appealing to tertiary sources, in this example to @ProtPhilosopher who himself is going by secondary sources Metzgers book The Canon of the NT. This book swaps two key details for no other reason than to push the narrative that

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@ProtPhilosopher You have integrity, I have a lot of respect for you. Honestly you’re one of my favorite Protestants accts here on X. You actually make me think. 🙏🏻

Yes, I have since corrected my statement in light of Jedin's footnote, but that correction shouldn't read "malicious intent" into Metzger's typo and mistake. That's an overreach to make a polemical point yourself. The details of the vote in February are themselves contested by the Catholic source. I simply sided with Jedin, as he's typically regarded as the definitive source. But, siding with him is just siding with him siding with one of three interpretations of what the February vote was about. He says it was attaching an anathema. There were two other live readings of what actually happened. Moreover, the April vote was promulgated to affirm what was already decided in February. The April vote wasn't a fresh deliberative vote. And the deliberative vote in February was genuinely contested, as 40% dissented. So, by way of a divided body (i.e., not even close to a consensus), it erased with an "anathema" a long-standing Catholic tradition of reading two levels of canonical texts. It silenced Jerome's long-standing division of the canon for doctrine and the canon for edification-only (the deuterocanonical). And the opposition were great scholars, following in Jerome's line. So, unless you can read Metzger's mind as wanting to make a malicious polemical point (and he was no polemicist), then his mistake is understandable as the data on the vote is messy and contested. The misreading of the ambiguity concerning "nay" votes as "abstentions" I have corrected, but that still doesn't do much regarding the polemical point, namely that a whole tradition of reading the deutros as of lesser canonical status was silenced by a mere simple majority (60-40). That it was a contested vote with substantial dissent that fell well-short of consensus means that's it's still a problem for the tidy Catholic claim that the canon was definitively declared at Trent. More accurately, the dissent was voted out of existence by a simple majority.

I just watched a thoughtful conversation between Dr. Gavin Ortlund and Fr. Gregory Pine on three important topics. First, they discuss sins of speech in the internet age, with special attention to the lack of Christian civility online. This portion draws from Fr. Pine’s recent book, Training the Tongue: Growing Beyond Sins of Speech, and begins around the mark. Second, they consider areas of Protestant and Catholic agreement, especially classical theism and our shared confession of and love for the triune God. This portion begins around . Third, they turn to Protestant and Catholic disagreement, which was the most interesting part of the discussion for me. Beginning around the mark, Gavin and Fr. Pine have a frank and respectful exchange about doctrinal history, organic development, and the difference between legitimate development and later accretions. In my opinion, this is the kind of tone and mutual respect Protestants and Catholics should strive for in serious theological dialogue. We can speak clearly about real disagreements without caricature, hostility, or contempt. I will let the video speak for itself, but I recommend listening. youtube.com/watch?v=PmsE-f…

The article version of my second and final reply to Joe is now live! open.substack.com/pub/protestant…

Catholic apologists often cite 1 Tim 3:15 that the church is "the pillar and ground of truth," where this is read in a architectural sense. Truth is the building. The church holds up the building. Without the church, the truth doesn't stand. This makes the church have a constitutive role regarding truth. It doesn't just steward and transmit truth. Contra sola scriptura, Paul doesn't mention Scripture as the ultimate norm of truth. Rather, the church is the pillar and foundation of truth. The Catholic reading of 1 Tim 3:15 contrasts with the Protestant reading, which is forensic, not architectural. This passage in Turretin's Institutes is an apt articulation of the Protestant take on this verse: "The church is called 'the pillar and ground of the truth' (stylos kai hedraiōma tēs alētheias, 1 Tim. 3:15) not because she supports and gives authority to the truth (since the truth is rather the foundation upon which the church is built, Eph. 2:20), but because it stands before the church as a pillar and makes itself conspicuous to all. Therefore it is called a pillar, not in an architectural sense (as pillars are used for the support of buildings), but in a forensic and political sense (as the edicts of the emperor and the decrees and laws of the magistrates were usually posted against pillars before the court houses and praetoria and before the gates of the basilica so that all might be informed of them, as noted by Pliny, Natural History, lib. 6, c. 28+ and Josephus,? AJ 1.70–71 [Loeb, 4:32–33]). So the church is the pillar of the truth both by reason of promulgating and making it known (because she is bound to promulgate the law of God, and heavenly truth is attached to it so that it may become known to all) and by reason of guarding it. For she ought not only to set it forth, but also to vindicate and defend it. Therefore she is called not only a pillar (stulos), but also a stay (hedraiōma) by which the truth when known may be vindicated and preserved pure and entire against all corruptions. But she is not called a foundation (themelion), in the sense of giving to the truth itself its own substructure (hypostasin) and firmness. (2) Whatever is called the pillar and stay of the truth is not therefore infallible; for so the ancients called those who, either in the splendor of their doctrine or in the holiness of their lives or in unshaken constancy, excelled others and confirmed the doctrines of the gospel and the Christian faith by precept and example; as Eusebius says the believers in Lyons call Attalus the Martyr (Ecclesiastical History 5.1 [FC 19:276]); Basil distinguishes the orthodox bishops who opposed the Arian heresy by this name (hoi styloi kai to hedraiōma tēs alētheias, Letter 243 [70] [FC 28:188; PG 32.908]); and Gregory Nazianzus so calls Athanasius. In the same sense, judges in a pure and uncorrupted republic are called the pillars and stays of the laws. (3) This passage teaches the duty of the church, but not its infallible prerogative (i.e., what she is bound to do in the promulgation and defending of the truth against the corruptions of its enemies, but not what she can always do). In Mal. 2:7, the 'priest’s lips' are said to 'keep knowledge' because he is bound to do it (although he does not always do it as v. 8 shows). (4) Whatever is here ascribed to the church belongs to the particular church at Ephesus to which, however, the papists are not willing to give the prerogative of infallibility. Again, it treats of the collective church of believers in which Timothy was to labor and exercise his ministry, not as the church representative of the pastors, much less of the pope (in whom alone they think infallibility [anamartēsian] resides). (5) Paul alludes here both to the use of pillars in the temples of the Gentiles (to which were attached either images of the gods or the laws and moral precepts; yea, even oracles, as Pausanius and Athenaeus testify) that he may oppose these pillars of falsehood and error (on which nothing but fictions and the images of false gods were exhibited) to that mystical pillar of truth on which the true image of the invisible God is set forth (Col. 1:15) and the heavenly oracles of God made to appear; and to that remarkable pillar which Solomon caused to be erected in the temple (2 Ch. 6:13; 2 K. 11:14; 23:3) which kings ascended like a scaffold as often as they either addressed the people or performed any solemn service, and was therefore called by the Jews the “royal pillar.” Thus truth sits like a queen upon the church; not that she may derive her authority from it (as Solomon did not get his from that pillar), but that on her, truth may be set forth and preserved." Reference: Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, vol. 1 (P&R Publishing, 1992–1997), 93–94.

You're both having an interesting discussion. There's a lot I could say, but let me just offer 3 key concepts to keep in mind and how they suggest the falsity of some of Mar's comments. The first concept is grounding, which is an explanatory relation. The properties of Scripture obtain in virtue of being God-breathed via God's essential attributes acting as the exemplar cause of the communicative acts that get inscripturated. God being the primary author of Scripture, which is the closed canonical communicative act, is what makes it the case that Scripture bears textual properties giving it unique normative authority. This is a question of the nature of Scripture, which is what it is because of who breathed it into existence. The next concept is epistemological. It's the concept of recognition. How do people like us recognize Scripture as having those properties? I ground that in proper functionalism. Very roughly, we perceive Scripture as canonical and arrive at interpretations of Scripture via the Holy Spirit operating on cognition to reliably perceive those properties in a way that tracks truth (setting aside a bunch of other qualifications). Third, we have the concept of sola scriptura. Its a universal negative claim, and it's a second-order claim. It's a ranking of putative rules of faith that says Scripture is the norm that norms but isn't normed itself. It's not something we should rightly expect to find in Scripture as a first-order doctrine alongside the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. We can apply those concepts to make sense of why Protestants aren't committed to some of Mar's claims. For instance, it is false that "the assent of faith... can not be given to things that are not infallible by means of inspiration of the Holy Spirit." The Holy Spirit can enable and work through properly-functioning human cognition (which is fallible) to arrive at warranted true belief. This can move one from non-belief to belief, i.e., assent of faith, concerning the objective properties that Scripture bears that result in warranted beliefs concerning the canonical status of Scripture. So, it's false that the assent of faith can only be given by the Holy Spirit to things that are infallible. Such assent can come to individuals and it can come to the Church, which for Protestants is the ministerial means of stewarding the word and sacraments, and though spirit-protected is also a fallible institution comprised of believers. I'd also deny Mar's claim that, "To be consistent with sola scriptura would entail that you can find the canon of scripture in the words of scripture, and that the only things that are given divine assent of faith are found in the scriptures." We can consistently embrace sola scriptura without that entailing "the canon of scripture in the words of scripture." What makes the 66-book canon the true canon depends on the marks inherent in the text given their divine authorship and properties they possess as a result of being a product of God's essential attributes serving as the exemplar cause of a divine communicative act. That canonical status is conferred quite apart from the texts themselves saying "this is the full set of canonical texts: a, b, c, d, and so on. Canon lists emerge from the epistemological notion, and they reliably track the objective properties that make books canonical given certain things are in place. That can include spirit-aided insight into those properties as well as corporate reception. And other of Mar's comments confused the fallible recognition process with the grounding of the properties the text possesses. Scripture can be infallible and recognized as such without the knower needing to be infallible herself. Sola scriptura includes the formal sufficiency of Scripture, a property which it possess as a result of being authored by a truthful, wise, and loving Father. God doesn't keep his saving message tucked away. Rather, using ordinary means, an ordinary believer can come to saving knowledge of Christ through Scripture. The saving message doesn't require an external certifier in order to reliably access those truths and form warranted beliefs about them. A final thing I'd flag is that Mar is using terms that involve scholastic categories. While many great Protestant thinkers fall in that camp, we just have to exercise care that we're not talking past each other, as many of the scholastic ways of defining things carry with them assumptions doing work without being argued for. It's important to surface those assumptions so that they can be argued for and not be free-riders on value-laden assumptions.

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Joe Heschmeyer stepped into the kitchen to take on the Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT). Did he get burned? Let's find out. (@ShamelessPopery) youtu.be/ifti_9lGlTw?si…

I'm diggin' the physical copies of this disputation.

That's a good question. If I were doing what you suggest, then, yes the same reasoning could be applied to the Church, humanity, and all sorts of things. Analogical participation in God's perfections is a generic relation that could apply very widely. I'm targeting something narrower, namely exemplar causation at work on a communicative act. And it's restricted by kind-correspondence. The properties that are produced must fit the kind of act that produced them. The Church and the image of God don't satisfy that. A human isn't a communicative act authored by God. You might pushback and say didn't God speak humans into existence in Genesis? Yes, that's efficient speech where the words are the means by which God brings a thing into existence. That contrasts with communicative speech. That's a speech-act addressed to an audience with propositional content, illocutionary force, and a message. Genesis is the former. The human is the product of the efficient word, but the human isn't the content of a communicative act. Scripture is. And the Church isn't breathed-out in this sense either. The Church is a creature Christ builds and indwells. It's an agent that receives, transmits, and proclaims the communicative act. It's not an instance of it. Spirit-indwelling and protection of an institutional mission is a different relation from breathed out authorship. Even Rome draws this distinction. The Magisterium isn't inspired the way Scripture is. It's the wrong relation. It's a messenger of Christ, assisted and protected. It isn't an utterance itself. You might worry why does coordinate supreme authority require breathed out authorship rather than Spirit protection? The short answer is that supreme normative standing is the textual analogue of God's metaphysical perfections, such as aseity, sovereignty, immutability, operating on God's own speech-act. Assistance protects a messenger from error in transmitting. What it doesn't do is make the messenger's words God's words. Only authored speech is the kind of thing those perfections characterize with ultimate standing. Hence, we get Scripture's normative ultimacy.

What is sola scriptura (SS), really? Catholic apologists claim we don't know what it is, and that they could endorse what we say about SS and it could still be false. They do this, I think, because we Protestants often don't make clear that SS is technically a second-order principle. It isn't a first-order doctrine itself that tells you about God's nature or salvation directly. Rather, it tells you how doctrines are normed. It tells you which authority ranks ultimate over all the rest. So it's a principle of authority at the meta-level that governs first-order doctrines. It's a second-order ranking principle. Catholics can affirm, at the first order, most of what we Protestants say about Scripture. So if you try to exegetically extract SS from Scripture itself, you're treating it as a first-order doctrine, which can be established exegetically. You try to show the texts that teach it or implies it, and then the Catholic says, "I agree Scripture teaches that about itself," and then asks, "show me the exact verse that teaches sola scriptura." With the first/second-order distinction in hand, locating SS at the second order, you have a ready-made response. That question is a category error. It's demanding that SS prove itself as a first-order doctrine, when it's really a second-order principle, and you don't establish second-order principles the same way you do first-order ones. First-order ones you establish by showing where the text teaches them. A second-order authority-principle can't be read off the texts the same way. Scripture is crucially involved, but you reason from what Scripture is to where it stands in the normative landscape. This is why my Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT) reasons from the nature of the text (inspiration), facts about its Author (essential divine attributes), how authorship transmits character (exemplar causality, kind-correspondence), the textual properties entailed as a result, which entails that Scripture holds rank R. That's AIT proper. Then I invoke an elimination argument to get to SS. It shows no other normative authority holds coordinate authority (all others are below R, though they are real authorities). This is fitting, given that SS is a meta-principle. The AIT establishes SS, in part, by metaphysical entailment from the doctrine of God, not by exegesis of authority-claims. And the strength of the AIT is that it runs on premises Catholics already endorse, namely classical theism, key commitments in Dei Verbum, and Thomistic exemplar causality. So SS gets forced by Catholic commitments. The AIT gets you the positive part of the equation, namely that Scripture qualifies for supreme rank. It doesn't by itself get you to the exclusion, namely that no rival is coordinate. You then have to look at the other candidates, like the Magisterium, and show that it couldn't occupy the same rank as Scripture, since the rank's qualifying conditions can only be satisfied by a divinely authored communicative act, and no rival, whether tradition or a council or anything else, is that kind of thing. This I call establishment by elimination based in kind-correspondence. The metaphysical mechanism that secures supreme authority operates on theopneustos speech. Anything that isn't such speech won't possess properties fit to inherit the standing. So the "alone" part of SS, the part Catholics often contest as something we Protestants never establish, is not reached exegetically. It's reached by a principled reason, namely no candidate authority of the wrong kind can satisfy the conditions. This answers the Catholic charge that we don't know what SS is and that the Catholic can affirm everything we say SS amounts to. Exegesis supplies premises about what Scripture is and how the Church has treated it, but SS itself, as a meta-principle, is established by what follows from those premises, not by proof-texting the principle itself.