In this episode, Trent sits down with Joe Heschmeyer to discuss Protestant attempts to ground the canon of Scripture in its ability to “authenticate itself.”
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. Today, joining me is Fellow Catholic Answers Apologist, Mr. Joe Heschmeyer of Shameless Potpourri. Joe, welcome to the program.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thanks. It’s good to be here.
Trent Horn:
So I saw that you did an episode recently on your podcast and I definitely encourage our listeners go and check out Joe’s podcast. I’m really excited to see more Catholic podcasts that are really edifying people that aren’t just complaining about what’s going on in the church or just useless banter. Joe, your podcast is a wonderful thick cheesecake of knowledge tastily delivered is the best analogy I can give for it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
As a person who hates cheesecake, I’m still very grateful for that compliment.
Trent Horn:
You hate cheesecake?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I do. It’s a personality flaw, one of many, but I’ve never… Something about the texture just really weirds me out.
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:01:00]. Are you okay with a pie then? Just regular pies?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, yeah. There we go. Pie. I love pie.
Trent Horn:
I think I understand why you feel that way because cheesecake is not technically a cake. I believe it belongs to the tart family because it has-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Actually makes more sense.
Trent Horn:
It has a crust, but it does not have a flaky crust on the top. So perhaps it’s just an anti-tart bias that you have.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I don’t know what the problem is with me. It’s a tort I guess. I feel like I’ve got your own podcast really to thank for kind of pioneering this path of substantive, meaningful conversations on the topics that matter.
Trent Horn:
Well, I’m really excited about that. So today what I want to talk about is you did an episode recently on scripture and the self-authenticating canon, and I wanted just to talk a little bit and introduce my audiences, some of your arguments related to this because it’s something that Protestants are leaning more into now, though this is something that has been argued for going all the way back to Martin Luther and John Calvin because a lot of Catholics think, “Oh, well, debating Protestants is easy.” You say you believe in Sola scriptura. You can’t even justify the canon of scripture without some kind of infallible tradition to which a Protestant apologist might say, I don’t need an outside tradition or authority. Scripture authenticates itself. So I want to read a passage from Calvin actually, and I’ll let you take it away a bit and we can kind of go back and forth here.
So this is what Calvin wrote. He said, “How shall we be persuaded that it, scripture, came from God without recurring to a decree of the church? It is just the same as if it were asked. How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth as white and black do of their color, sweet and bitter of their taste.” So the idea here is you don’t need an outside authority. A person can just see that scripture is God’s word, that it has divine authority and that’s good enough. So feel free to add any more, but let’s jump into this. What is the self-authenticating nature of scripture and what’s wrong with it?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So I think that’s a really good way of capturing it. When you read Calvin on this, and I think he’s particularly notable because Calvin’s not, I’d say a big feelings guy, but then when he gets into how we know that we have the right books of the Bible, it’s this incredible repeated witness to just, you just feel it in your bones, that kind of reasoning.
Trent Horn:
He would say, if you find aspects of his theology about God, that gives me a bad feeling to think that God essentially determines who is going to heaven and who is going to hell through Calvinist double predestination. That feels like God is unjust. Calvin would say, your feelings can’t tell you what’s right here.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, he’s the first, like facts don’t care about your feelings guy. But when he comes to this, he literally says, so you’re quoting from book one chapter seven of Institutes of Christian Religion and elsewhere in this same chapter he says that we don’t know because of the church or anything like this, but “We feel a divine energy living and breathing in it.” And it’s like, when did he take up surfing? This is the most hippie dippy kind of argument for how we know the canon. We feel it in our bones. And so there’s a few things that follow from that, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
If everyone can just know, well, more specifically he’s going to argue everyone guided by the Holy Spirit just knows which books are in the Bible. So we don’t need the church. We don’t need the Holy Spirit guiding the church because basically he guides all of us the level of our feelings. Now the first thing to point out is that is a weird model of infallibility and inspiration and Holy Spirit guidance that the Holy Spirit’s not going to guide the external visible church. He’s going to guide the individual Christians. This is a very inefficient way for the Holy Spirit to work, that the church isn’t infallible. I’m infallible and you’re infallible and so is everybody else. And the second thing is just, it’s obviously false, right? We can say this in a few ways. First, because Calvin and Martin Luther and modern Protestants don’t just disagree with the Catholic church about which books belong in the Bible. They don’t just disagree with the early Christians, they disagree with one another, and Calvin cites to Baruch as scripture.
Modern Protestants think he’s wrong to do that, so somebody’s feelings are wrong there. Martin Luther argues four of the New Testament books shouldn’t be in the New Testament. Somebody’s feelings are wrong. So all these people appealing to like, well, you just feel it in your bones. It’s so easy. It’s no more difficult to tell which books are in the Bible as telling black from white. Okay, well, why are so many of you disagreeing and contradicting one another? It doesn’t make sense. Those two things can’t both be true.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And then the other thing to maybe add to that is when you look at how did the early church come to know which books were and weren’t in scripture, nobody on any side of the question was saying, well, isn’t it so obvious we all just feel it in our bones? Nobody is saying this because that’s not really how anyone who’s ever told which books are and aren’t in the Bible.
Trent Horn:
It’s also the case if you ask, think about just modern Christians. How do most people come to know that the Bible is inspired? It’s rarely because you open a Bible and you read it and are convinced, yes, every single book, page and word in this collection is so beautiful and profound it must have God as its source. It is just obvious to me. There’s certainly passages of scripture that are beautiful, but there’s other passages that are just long census collections, for example. It doesn’t really seem to pass that test. It seems like I would say for most people, the reason they came to believe the Bible is inspired is because somebody else told them. I think that’s probably true for nearly all Christians well throughout history and especially even until today.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I remember reading a book from a fundamentalist author who argued that we should read the Bible as if we were on a desert island and it had washed ashore. So we’d read it as free as possible from any human interpretation.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And it struck me that not only was this a terrible standard-
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But even in this world, someone is putting together the books that are in the Bible that washes on your particular shore. It could be a Catholic Bible, it could be a Protestant one, it could be an Orthodox one. It could be the Joseph Smith interpretation of the Bible that was used by some Mormons. It could be a Jehovah’s witness translation. It could be the message where it’s the paraphrase of the Bible, what is determined. There’s still this incredible role of human agency to figure out which books and which translations are you having ashore. Unless you’re just getting ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that wash ashore, in which case as a non-Greek or Hebrew speaker, you’re probably not struck by the profundity of them. You’re probably at a loss to know what they mean.
Trent Horn:
Right. And also I think this idea about contradicting the facts of history, because if we’re saying, well, the Bible authenticates itself, then how do we know that people come to believe in the Bible, not because of a tradition, but just because they immediately encounter the text? It would seem if we went back in church history, let’s say to the early second century, the time [inaudible 00:08:14] Ignatius of Antioch. When you go back to this period, and this is after the apostolic age, probably at least by [inaudible 00:08:23] of Antioch, we would say the period of public divine revelation has ended. And yet here you have authors that barely ever cite the New Testament as scripture. They far more likely cite the Old Testament as scripture. Lee Martin McDonald, who is a Baptist scholar, one of the best on the canon. I know you’re familiar with him.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I am.
Trent Horn:
He says, “The notion of a closed New Testament canon was not a second century development in the early church, and there were still considerable differences of opinion about what should comprise that canon even in the fourth and fifth centuries.” So it seems like how could it really be self-authenticating if these earliest Christians still had these vast kinds of disagreements?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah. And it’s not as if this is an area where he’s just speculating. The Christians in the fourth and fifth century are very clear about this. St. Augustine an on Christian doctrine has rules that he gives for this skillful interpreter of sacred writings to know which books are and aren’t in the Bible. And what he argues for is that we should follow the canonical writings favored by the greater number of the churches and by the churches of the greater kind of authority, like ones that were founded by apostles. And so notice in that he doesn’t say, just search your feelings and you’ll know it to be true. He doesn’t say, everybody who follows Jesus all just agrees. He’s clearly acknowledging that there are discrepancies in which books are and aren’t in different Christian canons.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that there’s a way we can know, and it’s not our feelings, it’s by looking to the church and the broader church consensus that we should take the majority opinion here. And it’s a safe sort of theological conservatism. It’s not in my heart I just think God wants me to believe in x, Y, or Z book. And so it’s really remarkable that the first thing I’d say is the church fathers don’t use the approach Calvin lays out. But the second thing is that scripture itself, you get nothing in scripture that says, this is how we’re going to know which books belong in the Bible. Now I would contrast that with the Quran and with the Book of Mormon. So in the Quran in the 17th Surah Al Isra, it actually proposes that one of the ways you can know the Quran is inspired by God is it’s so beautiful that no one can create us equal. And very much the kind of standard you were talking about, no one has that reaction upon reading one of the census lists and then in the book of [inaudible 00:10:50].
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:10:50] in the book of numbers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. And there’s plenty of these things where there are these passages that are hard to understand and are confusing, and scripture acknowledges this, right? Second Peter, Peter acknowledges that Paul’s theology is hard to understand. It’s almost as if building your entire rejection of the church’s teaching off of your understanding of Paul’s theology would be a really poor idea. Right? Maybe a theology that’s labeled in the Bible is hard to understand, might be actually hard to understand, and maybe your understanding is mistaken.
Trent Horn:
And I was going to say that it seems like for these Protestants who try to use a self-authenticating canon as their ultimate source of authority, it seems like they’ve really undercut their ability to really oppose the Mormon standard for authority that uses the burning of the bosom for the Book of Mormon.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. And [inaudible 00:11:41] verse four to five explicitly lays that out that if you want to know, well just quote it says, “And when you shall receive these things, I would exhort you that you would ask God the eternal Father in the name of Christ if these things are not true. And if you ask with a sincere heart, with real intent having faith in Christ, he’ll manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost.” Now, you’ll notice Maroney and John Calvin are doing the same move, the same trick is what I wanted to say, but maybe that’s too harsh. They’re saying-
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:12:10].
Joe Heschmeyer:
Same gambit. You can know on this subjective level that it’s true if you’re one of the chosen ones, if you ask with the sincere heart or if you’re one of the elect the Holy Spirit is working in. This creates a really strong impetus as a seeker to say, oh, yeah, yeah, that’s got to be right. The emperor must have clothes because if he doesn’t, then I’m not one of the righteous ones.
Trent Horn:
Right. It becomes [inaudible 00:12:39].
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
How do you say, oh yeah, well, it must be scripture because I’m one of the elect? How do you know that you’re the elect? Well, scripture gives these signs and I fulfill them. So I’m among the elect, and so I know that this is scripture, so you’re going to end up having this kind of circular argument and trying to prove it. It reminds me when James White was debating Pat Madrid on Sola scriptura, that classic debates 30 years ago, 1993, and he was saying, “Well, II Timothy 3:17 says, all we need is scripture because it equips the man of God to do every good work.” And so you don’t need anything beyond scripture to which Madrid asked in his rebuttal, “Well, Mr. White, who is the man of God? Is the Lutheran who believes in baptismal regeneration? Is he a man of God? Are you a man of God who disagrees with him? How do you know that you are the man of God that scripture’s equipping in the first place?”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. What did he say to that?
Trent Horn:
Well, I don’t recall because it wasn’t in cross. It was in a-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh, fair enough. Fair enough.
Trent Horn:
It was in a rebuttal that [inaudible 00:13:43].
Joe Heschmeyer:
If you’re someone who’s starting to question, where did the Bible come from? Or where did the Book of Mormon come from for that matter, if you’re an LDS viewer, both of these systems are set up where even ask that question calls into question your good faith or calls into question your elect status. And so there’s a strong deterrent about probing any deeper. And I just want to really point out, this is not biblical.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Scripture never makes this manipulative move. It doesn’t say, if you’re really one of the good ones, you’ll know this is all true.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s nothing like that. Instead, we’re warned by the Jeremiah of the prophet that the heart is deceitful above all things.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So the fact that you feel really deeply in your bones X, Y, or Z is not a terribly great predictor of X, Y, or Z being true.
Trent Horn:
So it seems like with scripture authenticating itself, you sort of have, let me see, two or three options here. So one would be you could try to create just like a set of criteria, objective rules say, okay, scripture authenticates itself because it meets these criteria, which of course isn’t self-authenticating. You’re coming up with the criteria, but even there, you can’t reverse engineer it to only get and just say the 27 books of the New Testament for simplicity. If you say, well, it’s apostolic authors, what do you do about Mark, Luke, the anonymous author of Hebrews, you talk about, does it preach Christ? Well, III John doesn’t preach Christ. Any objective thing you’ll never reverse engineer it back into the canon we have now. So that might be one option.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, [inaudible 00:15:13] notice, by the way, you’re throwing the darts and then painting the bullseye around them.
Trent Horn:
Yes. That is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Yes. Is what that’s called to see the data afterwards and draw the boundaries around it. [inaudible 00:15:28].
Joe Heschmeyer:
We want exactly these 66 books in. What rules do we need to create to make sure these books and no others make it through the door? And once you’re doing that, you’re not… Obviously you didn’t follow that journey to get there yourself.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You’re trying to invent a route that would’ve gotten you to a predetermined conclusion.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So it’s blatantly post hoc rationalization. You’re not actually following any principled standard there.
Trent Horn:
Another way would be, okay, ultimately the reason we have this is because the church selected it, but it’s so funny. Yeah, the church selected it, but that has no bearing on really the nature of the church, which I find amazing. Here’s a quote from Robert Godfrey. He’s a Protestant apologist. It’s from an anthology, and I love the title, which I must emphasize because it includes an exclamation point. It’s a 1995 anthology, Sola Scriptura! The Protestant position on the Bible because it has the exclamation point in there, I must pronounce it that way.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Of course.
Trent Horn:
And Godfrey has an article in there, what do we mean by Sola scriptura? And he says, “The self-authenticating character of the canon is demonstrated by the remarkable unanimity reached by the people of God on the canon.” So the idea is that because the church gives us this tradition, ah, that’s just further evidence that it’s self-authenticating, which is another bold gambit to make.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And once you do this, it’s funny because the whole reason the reformers are creating this doctrine of self authentication is to get rid of the need for the church to know the Bible.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because if you admit that you have to have the Catholic church to know which books are in the Bible, that undermines the Reformation project in a pretty serious and pretty obvious way. And so it is not a coincidence. I mean, the quote you gave from Calvin, he’s explicitly asking, how do we know which books are in the Bible without the church? And so you have this modern generation of Protestant apologists. I would include Michael Krueger on the list as someone even newer doing this who say they’re defending self-authentication, but their idea of self-authentication is, well, these books have X quality that is recognizable, not necessarily to the individual believer, but to the church.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And once you do that, you’ve just backed into the Catholic model, but in a really weird and confusing kind of way.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Where you say, basically we still know it through the church. Now, one important distinction is that frequently these Protestant apologists and Krueger here, I’d say is extremely guilty of this in an obvious way. They’re arguing against a false vision of the Catholic view. And so Krueger gives the example of a thermostat versus a thermometer.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So a thermometer tells you what temperature it is, a thermostat controls what temperature it is. And so the church’s relationship to the canon, the Catholic model, is that it’s like a thermometer. It tells you which books are divinely inspired.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But Kruger claims that the Catholic position is that the church imagines that it’s creating these books [inaudible 00:18:24], that if the church had chosen 73 other books that Catholics would consider those inspired, not because of anything in the books themselves, but just because of the church’s subsequent decree. Now, the thing to know as a Catholic is that position is explicitly condemned by the first Vatican Council.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That it says explicitly, we are not saying this. We are not claiming to be a thermostat making uninspired books inspired. These books were inspired from the moment they were written. The church is guided by the Holy Spirit to recognize that, not to create that. So these Protestant apologists work by ironically defending the real Catholic view against a fake Catholic view, but they defend the real Catholic view by claiming it’s the view of the reformers when it’s not the view… It’s the view the reformers were actually arguing against. So it’s a fun house mirror. It is a real strange distortion of the actual debate. And I want to turn to these Protestant apologists and say, great, there’s X criteria or criterion or criteria that is recognizable not by the individual, but by the church.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And the church is guided by the Holy Spirit and not the individual.
Trent Horn:
Well, I’ll give you an analogy I sometimes give or comparison is there are three views. So we’re not saying that the church infallibly determines the canon, but we’re also not saying that the church infallibly discovers the canon either. We have a middle position, which would be that the church infallibly declares the canon, which is very different. We’re not, and that’s where you have the thermostat that says what the temperature is versus making it or just happening to get it right. But apart from any kind of divine authority.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And I actually like the thermostat image because as an individual non thermostat, I can still have a rough idea. I can feel the difference between 50 and 80 degrees.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But I’m not going to know precisely. And that’s very much like what we find with the early Christians before the church steps in with regard to the books of the Bible. It’s not like they have... Read more on Catholic.com