Sola Scriptura vs Sola Dei Verbum

Thank you for coming to tonight's debate. It's a priviledge to debate this topic with Darth_Pius. We met on a blog and became friends on facebook 2.5 years ago. He is a really bright guy and fearless in the defense of his religion and morals. I really admire him. I invited him to this sight because I thought he could make a valuable contribution.Sola ScripturaSola scriptura has three implications:1. The scriptures are inspired by God and therefore authoritative.2. Although God can speak through other means (e.g. personal revelation)...(a) everything else is subordinate to the scriptures, and (b) only the scriptures are normative for all Christians.3. The scriptures, by themselves, are sufficient. They contain all the information necessary for a person to be a Christian, to know the gospel, to live morally, and to obtain salvation.The first implicationCon and I agree on that first point, but Catholics think protestants have a problem. Without an additional source of authoritative information, how do protestants know which books belong in the canon? Catholics, at least, can point to Tradition, which is preserved by the Catholic church, reflected in the councils, and is also inspired by God and equally authoritative. It is through the councils that we know which books belong in the Bible.But this argument is based on a premise that renders Catholic reasoning circular. If one must have a divinely inspired source of information before one can identify a divinely inspired source of information, then how do Catholics know what is Tradition and what is not? How do Catholics establish the authority they attribute to their own councils and teaching magisterium? Well, they appeal to such scriptures as Matthew 16:18 and 1 Timothy 3:15 as justification for attributing divine authority to the Catholic church and 2 Thessalonians 2:15 as justification for attributing divine authority to Traditions preserved by the Catholic church. This is circular reasoning. They "know" that Matthew, 1 Timothy, and 2 Thessalonians are divinely inspired scripture because of their divinely inspired Tradition. And they "know" their Tradition is divinely inspired because of their divinely inspired scriptures.The only way to escape this circular argument is if it's possible to reason your way to the conclusion that some source of information is divinely inspired, and to do so from premises that are not divinely inspired. And that's what some Catholic apologists try to do. They'll appeal to historical arguments to try to make their case. When they do so, they are unwittingly engaging in protestant epistemology, for that is how protestants arrive at the canon. It is not by attributing divine authority to councils, but by attributing historical authority to councils. As a protestant, I trust that the early church knew what they were doing. They didn't discover the canon by divine revelation. Rather, they subjected various writings to scrutiny. They had criteria (e.g. apostolic authorship) they applied to discover what was to be included and what was to be rejected. While I personally don't know all the reasons for their decision, I trust that they made a good decision. I don't need that decision to be infallible any more than the Catholic apologist needs his historical assessment to be infallible.Ultimately, Catholics and protestants are in the same epistemological boat. Catholics don't solve any problem by postulating an additional source of authority. They just postpone the problem. Both of us have to begin with our fallible assessment of history to arrive at a divinely inspired source of authority. The second implicationAt first glance, it may not be obvious what the difference is between "scripture alone" and "the word of God alone" since the scriptures are the word of God. But the difference is that the word of God encompasses more than just the scriptures. There were prophets in the Corinthians church, but none of their prophecies became scripture.We can see this aspect of sola scriptura practiced in the Bible. Even though Paul was an apostle, the Bereans were considered nobel because they recieved his words with eagerness and "examined the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11). So Paul's teachings were submitted to scriptural scrutiny.Likewise, even though the Pharisees believed their traditions were handed down from Moses [1], Jesus rejected their tradition because it turned out to be inconsistent with the command of God recorded in the scriptures (Matthew 15:1-6).God may reveal something to an individual, but that revelation is not automatically normative for the whole church. Rather, it's up to the church to test those things in light of what has already been revealed in scripture. Scripture is the final authority.The third implicationThe sufficiency of the scripture can be gleaned from 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which says, "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work." This passage is explicit in saying that the scriptures alone are enough for a person to be adequate and equipped for every good work.A practical considerationWe should not attribute the same authority to Tradition as we do to scripture because even if Tradition once carried the same authority as Scripture, we cannot be as certain of it's accurate preservation. There are textual variants in the Bible, but we are able to reconstruct what the originals said because we have thousands of ancient manuscripts to compare to each other. But we have no such thing in the case of Tradition. Moreover, traditions handed down by word of mouth tend to me more fluid than writings that are copied. So we should test traditions in light of scripture, which means that scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith.Thank you.1. http://www.torah.org...