Power of God

WHAT IS YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY (YOUR “THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE” OR YOUR “STANDARD OF TRUTH”)?

In this reality, everyone has an epistemic ultimate commitment they hold to that governs how they interpret the world.

The Muslims’ ultimate commitment is the Quran.

The Rationalists’ ultimate commitment is reason.

The Empiricists’ ultimate commitment is sense perception.

The Protestants’ ultimate commitment is Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone).

The Catholics’ ultimate commitment is the Tradition of the Church (Scripture and Sacred Tradition), etc.

In this post, I will be showing why Protestantism is logically impossible to be true by offering a transcendental argument for an infallible magisterium which was utilized by the great Doctor of the Catholic Church, St. Francis De Sales, in his book, The Catholic Controversy. The transcendental argument is a meta-logical type of argument which argues from the impossibility of the contrary. In this case, it goes like this: The proof for an infallible magisterium is that, if it was not the case, then there would be no valid epistemic authority for a Christian to hang on to, which in the end would result in blaspheming Jesus Christ.

Protestantism is not a system that can offer a valid epistemic authority for a Christian. The presupposition of the Protestant is that sola Scriptura is already true from the outset. But the thing is, no matter how much Scripture a Protestant may throw that they believe supports the doctrine of sola Scriptura, or other Protestant teachings, like sola fide, the canon question is always going to come back to bite him. The fact that the Bible does not tell us what the canon of Scripture is, is enough to prove that sola Scriptura is false and cannot be a teaching from God. And since sola scriptura is false, then it follows that Protestantism as a whole is false, since sola Scriptura is the necessary preconditional bedrock for Protestants’ interpretations of scripture. So Protestants cannot be in the possession of having the hermeneutical authority to interpret the Bible.

Answering Objection #1: Some Protestants would argue that the canon of doesn’t need to be in the Bible.

Well: (1) That is totally arbitrary; (2) The canon is a very important teaching within Christianity; (3) The canon is unavoidably authoritative. It is logically impossible to argue for sola Scriptura or even teach from the Bible without having some knowledge of the list of Scriptures. So the canon must be in Scripture if sola Scriptura is true.

Answering Objection #2: Some Protestants would say that I am misunderstanding sola Scriptura, because sola Scriptura just means that Scripture alone is the sole infallible authority for Christian faith and practice. They will say that the Scriptures are infallible, while the canon is fallible and is a secondary authority. Protestants who say this do not understand the philosophical nature of ultimate commitments. The issue is that the moment you appeal to Tradition to justify the canon in order to know what Scripture is, you have abandoned Scripture alone as your ultimate commitment and have now posited Catholic Tradition as your new ultimate.

An ultimate commitment must be self-accounting and must be able to epistemically account for proximate commitments. Otherwise, there is an infinite regression. So you cannot, as a Protestant, claim that the canon of scripture is a proximate commitment, when it is logically impossible for a proximate to be if the ultimate (example: Scripture alone) is unable to epistemically justify it. This critique also applies to Anglicans & Methodists who holds to a different view of sola scriptura called, prima scriptura.

Now I have seen some reformed Protestant presuppositionalists try to adopt a transcendental argument for their man-made teaching of sola Scriptura. But the moment you give a transcendental argument for sola Scriptura, you have proven the Catholic position that sola Scriptura is not true, since you are offering an argument for a teaching that you believe is from God, but is not taught in Scripture alone.

Protestants borrow from the Catholic paradigm in order to try to make sense of their own. The Catholic Church is the necessary precondition for making sense of the intelligible use of scripture. But in the end the Protestant paradigm falls flat since, as I have shown, it cannot help offer a valid epistemic authority for a Christian to have better union with God in this life.

(By Kevin Gemma)