Melissa

@IamJonte_ Congratulations!

Update: I am officially an Orthodox Christian!

@TheSire4 @ProtPhilosopher Your reversal does not actually parallel my criticism. My point was that the antecedent structurally privileges inscripturated normativity in a distinctly Protestant direction. Your reply never identifies a comparable structural assumption in my critique.

@MaJack123 @ProtPhilosopher Under your layman Catholic jargon, your claims already encodes Papists notions that the scripture’s role and lack of sufficiency, which is why those of a question begging response that never fully disappears.

On Substack I received pushback on the claim I made in my first reply to Joe Heschmeyer that one of his question-begging charges dissolves once the AIT's conditional is correctly specified with the modal operator taking wide scope. I've copied my reply below because it helps clarify how the AIT's conditional is actually specified and how modality functions in the AIT. I agree that we might be talking past each other. So let me restate why Joe’s question-begging charge at the 5 min mark of his video does depend on the narrow-scope reading. Then I’ll show how the wide-scope reading avoids the charge, as I argued in Part 1 of my reply. In his video, Joe says I’m assuming that God communicates in all possible worlds with the Bible and the Bible alone. He thinks I’m baking ‘Bible alone’ into my modal claim by restricting the worlds that count to worlds that God only communicates via the Bible. As you and I both pointed out, on Joe’s reading of the conditional the modal operator takes narrow-scope. It attaches to the consequent. Making Joe’s conditional more precise, let P be ‘God authors Scripture’ and let Q be ‘Scripture has textual properties T.’ Joe reads my claim as P→□Q. If God authors Scripture, then necessarily Scripture has T. The □Q is true at world w iff Q is true at every world accessible from w. So Joe takes me as claiming that in every accessible world Scripture has T. How does this narrow-scope reading underwrite the question-begging charge? Joe is saying that to get □Q (Scripture has T in every accessible world), I have to restrict accessibility to worlds where God communicates just via the Bible. If I allowed accessibility to worlds where God communicates without producing a text with T, □Q would fail. So the necessity in the narrow-scope position forces me to restrict R so that R only accesses worlds where Q holds. That restriction smuggles in ‘Bible alone’ as the universal form of divine communication. Hence, we get Joe’s charge that I’m smuggling sola scriptura into an argument designed to derive sola scriptura as the conclusion. Shifting to a wide-scope reading avoids this question begging move, as I’ve argued. Further, as I’ve pointed out, Joe’s antecedent is anemic as compared to the actual antecedent of the AIT, which is a combo of the premises that generate the internal critique. Instead of just, as Joe specifies, P = ‘God authors Scripture’, a more accurate rendering of the antecedent of the AIT is P* = ‘God freely authors Scripture through theopneustos, where Scripture is a canonical communicative act for the salvation of fallen humanity, addressed to the faithful across all centuries, individuated by covenantal closure.’  The premises that generate the antecedent are P4, P5, P6, P7, P8, P12, and P13. We also get background commitments, supporting features, and metaphysical machinery in the first part of the argument, which is AIT proper. The consequent is a conjunction of P23, P24, and P25. I didn’t give a detailed specification of the consequent in the video, but if I were being more precise, as I am now, I’d specify Q* as a conjunction of those premises Q* = ‘Scripture's textual properties are determined by exemplar causation operating on God's essential perfections, Scripture bears the textual-property conjunction, and the conjunction is jointly distinctive of theopneustos exemplar grounding’.  The wide-scope reading is then □(P* → Q*), and it's true at w iff ∀w'(wRw' → (P*(w') → Q*(w'))). Given this, for all worlds accessible from w, if P* holds at that world then Q* holds at that world as well. This doesn't require P* to hold in all accessible worlds. Given the truth-value of material conditionals, if the antecedent is false at a world, the conditional is vacuously true at that world. Thus, the accessibility relation includes worlds where P* fails, and it can include them for many different reasons. These can be worlds where God doesn't author Scripture at all, God authors Scripture but not through theopneustos, Scripture isn't a canonical communicative act, the salvific purpose fails, the audience condition fails, or canonical individuation fails. In all these worlds, P* fails and the conditional is vacuously true. As such, none of those worlds count as counterexamples to the wide scope reading. Yet, the conditional does substantive work at worlds where P* holds. At those worlds, exemplar causation operating on God’s essential perfections delivers Q*. The upshot is that Joe's question-begging charge fails. The accessibility relation isn't restricted to "Bible alone" worlds when the conditional takes wide-scope. P* is a conjunction of premises in the argument that jointly entail the textual properties. The uniqueness of Scripture isn't derived until the elimination sub-derivation in Part 2 (T1 through T3 plus P38), where alternatives are eliminated and Scripture alone emerges as the ultimate infallible norm. P* just specifies the kind of divine act, not Scripture's uniqueness. It's worth emphasizing that the modal force isn't coming from restricting the accessibility relation to worlds where Q* holds throughout. The modal source under wide-scope isn't frame restriction. It's the metaphysical apparatus of exemplar causation grounded in essential perfections, operating on the structured antecedent. No restriction of R is required to get the conditional. The conditional's truth is grounded in the structured antecedent's content plus the metaphysics that operates on it. Now we can apply this to your cashing out of the scope distinction as a red herring. Your argument works in the frame you spelled out. If C is the set of worlds where God communicates, and P is "God communicates," then P is true at every world in C by your definition of C, and □(P → Q) collapses into □Q within C. I grant that the scope distinction would be a red herring within your frame. But your frame isn't the AIT's frame. The AIT's antecedent isn't ‘God communicates.’ It's P* as I specified it. The AIT's accessibility relation includes worlds satisfying the doctrine of God plus the possibility of God's free decision to inscripturate. Worlds where God communicates orally only, or through a strong-constitutive Magisterium, or not at all, are within the accessibility relation but fail P*. P* isn't universal across the AIT's frame. Within the AIT's actual frame, the scope distinction does real work, as I've laid out. Wide scope handles non-P* worlds through vacuous satisfaction. The accessibility relation can be broad without restricting to worlds where Q* holds throughout. Narrow scope would force the frame restriction Joe charges, where the accessibility relation has to be narrowed to worlds where Q* holds for □Q* to come out true. The wide-scope reading locates the modal force in exemplar causation operating where P* obtains, not in frame restriction. The red-herring charge depends on collapsing P* into "God communicates" and treating C as the AIT's accessibility relation. Once P* is treated as the structured antecedent the AIT actually specifies, and the accessibility relation is treated as my argument specifies it, the scope distinction is substantive, not trivial. There’s one last thing worth mentioning. This still is an internal critique. Each component in the antecedent is Catholic-friendly, if not dogmatically Catholic-affirmed. So, your claim that the argument has lost its attractiveness as an internal critique also doesn’t hold once the antecedent is properly specified and structured.

@Exwretch @BishopJaxi 😳

@BishopJaxi I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Dude on here a week ago really asked why would any Christian in the first century think Rome or Latin had anything to do with Christianity whatsoever. And then he asked this: why isn’t Rome in the list of Churches addressed in Revelation?

This is the theological depth you get from 500 years of DIY Christianity. People with the reading comprehension of a goldfish believing they’ve dismantled 2,000 years of Christian theology.

@Acts17David Because Christ established a living apostolic community to preserve, proclaim, and interpret the faith together, whereas the Bible can be misread when separated from that communal and historical context.

It's weird how they think the Bible is so hopelessly unclear and so thoroughly confusing that it can't be understood without a church telling you what it means. Why is the church so clear but the Bible so unclear?

@Cath_SteelMan @BishopJaxi @McCree79 🤣

@BishopJaxi @McCree79 Them:

All these people “Bishop” points to do not hold to Sola Scriptura. Then all turn to dreams, vision, experience, and progressive revelation (doctrinal development). You know who else does this? Roman Catholics. They are in Bishops camp of placing men (and women) of Scripture.

@WayOfTheDadPod @BishopJaxi @McCree79 🤣

@BishopJaxi @McCree79 @BishopJaxi we're waiting for his answer.....

@Verita_dirigit1 @HwsEleutheroi @Verita_dirigit1 💯

@HwsEleutheroi Translation: I'll be making my opinion known on my own show without inviting people on to rebut my nonsense. Please watch so I can grift money off of you to feed my cats.

I will be responding to this, and a few other examples of how very dismal the Roman Catholic apologetics world is on X, on the Dividing Line in...about half an hour, live from Las Cruces, New Mexico! Join us then! youtube.com/live/WzXH1shIw…

@ProtPhilosopher @ShamelessPopery My disagreeing with your premise is not a jab. A jab would be you repeatedly framing Catholicism in ways that predispose the reader against it before the actual argument is even evaluated.

Your comment is trading on ambiguity I was trying to disambiguate for productive conversation. But if you mainly want to throw out jabs then it seems we can't have a productive conversation. Ironically, as I showed in my first reply to Joe, the appearance of him dealing handily with the AIT involved key misunderstandings of the view. I'm trying to do the same regarding your take on the OP.

There's a secret assumption hidden in many Catholic objections to sola scriptura. It's what I call the "dead letter" assumption. It starts with something true and derives something false. The truth it starts with is that, physically speaking, Scripture is a text. It's not a biological entity. It's not alive in that sense. It's just going to sit there until you do something with it. Fair enough. From this truth, though, the Catholic objector moves toward a falsehood. It starts with the phrase "Scripture doesn't interpret itself." That's also sort of true. Interpretation requires cognition. It requires a living interpreter. Fair enough. Then we get the slide into falsehood. Given the above, Scripture is inert. It's a passive, historical text. It's a dead letter without a voice that speaks into today. A bunch of rational agents interpret this dead letter in a bunch of ways, some of which are incompatible. So you need a final boss to swoop in and settle the disagreement definitively, authoritatively, with certainty. After all, an inert letter can't do that. Hence, you need a final boss interpreter like the magisterium. Otherwise, we get subjectivity generating interpretive chaos. What's wrong with this dead letter assumption? First, it makes the Bible read as third-personal to the neglect of the second-personal. The Bible becomes a letter speaking to "those people over there," whoever they are. In reality, we read the Bible before the living God, and he addresses us, in the second-personal, through it. As Scott Swain argues: "In dealing with the Bible interpretively, we are not rational subjects dealing with an inert object; we are instead rational subjects addressed by the divine Subject and called to loving attention and fellowship." God addresses each of us as we read it. It isn't merely a third-personal catalogue of the "others" he addressed long ago. Second, the dead letter assumption neglects the present power of Scripture. As Vanhoozer clarifies, using Hebrews: "The doctrine of inspiration preserves this emphasis on the Bible as divine address, as expressed by the Nicene Creed's description of the Holy Spirit as one 'who spoke [Lat. est locutus] by the prophets.' To locate the Spirit's speaking exclusively in the past, however, is to subscribe to a deistic picture of God's relation to his word, according to which God orated, and then let his word get on with it, without further action or assistance. According to the author of Hebrews, however, the Holy Spirit speaks the words of Psalm 95:7–11, even though they originally proceeded from the mouth of David centuries earlier: 'Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, "Today, if you hear his voice …"' (Heb 3:7)… The 'today' of the author of Hebrews and his original audience is, of course, long past. Yet God continues to address the church through this passage, such that the original reader's today (our yesterday) becomes today anew, for contemporary readers too: 'The writer believes that through his discourse (a sermon comprised of a series of scriptural expositions), he himself communicates that divine word and effects an encounter between his hearers and the God who speaks.' If the author of Hebrews could view the Spirit who spoke through David as speaking today (i.e., to his audience), then we should too." Third, the dead letter assumption does violence to the active voice of the Holy Spirit and the risen Christ speaking through Scripture. Again, Vanhoozer is helpful here: "The voice Israel heard out of the midst of the fire was 'the voice of the living God' (Deut 5:26). Moses repeats what God said on Mount Sinai to the first generation to a second generation in the book of Deuteronomy, and there is a clear expectation that God will speak his covenant word to future generations as well (Deut 4:9–24; 30:1–10). Centuries later, King Darius wrote, 'He is the living God, enduring forever' (Dan 6:26). Centuries after that, Peter identified Jesus as 'the Christ, the Son of the living God' (Matt 16:16). The risen Christ is 'Lord both of the dead and of the living' (Rom 14:9), including biblical interpreters today, which is why John Webster said both the Bible and its readers belong to 'the domain of the revelatory presence of Christ.' The Bible is part of the pattern of divine communication and communion over which the risen Lord presides and in which he presents himself. The Bible is not only 'the manger in which Christ lies' but a bed the Lord has made for himself. Unlike the human authors of Scripture, who are dead and buried, the risen Christ is alive, communicatively present and active." Thus, the secret assumption underlying many Catholic objections to sola scriptura ends up doing violence to the true nature of Scripture in an effort to justify the falsity of sola scriptura and the need for a teaching office to definitively do what Scripture alone supposedly can't do. References Scott R. Swain, Trinity, Revelation, and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 7. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2024), 8–9.

@ProtPhilosopher Neither. The Catholic position is not that the Church “activates” an otherwise inert text. Are you aware that you are forcing a false binary? This is the exact same conversation we had over a month ago. I believe @ShamelessPopery dealt handily with your AIT thesis.

Your gloss on "living divine discourse" is ambiguous as it relates to the issue in the OP. By "living divine discourse" do you mean the inscripturated text is itself the living discourse God performs through theopneustos? Or do you mean the text becomes living discourse only when activated by the Magisterium's interpretive economy?

@ProtPhilosopher Still conflating the Catholic position. Scripture is living divine discourse entrusted to and normatively received within the Spirit-formed communion of the Church. And it is much closer to the broader ecclesial instincts of Swain and Vanhoozer, than you seem willing to concede.

If you think this is a strawman, let me provide a few recipes of Catholics assuming the dead letter assumption. In this post DeepNess repeated the assumption, "Scripture would remain a "dead letter" if it isn't read in accordance with the Spirit who inspired it, and that can't be done outside of the Tradition of the Church, which exercises the ministry of interpreting God's Word (Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 111, 113, 119)." That's pretty explicit. And the CCC pointers help. Though CCC doesn't use "dead letter" as a phrase, the claim is that Scripture must be read "in the Spirit who inspired it" (111) where that reading context is "the living Tradition of the whole Church" (113). Then we get in 119 that "the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgement of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God." The secret appears in this explicitly, namely that apart from these mediating things we fail to get accurate meaning or proper interpretation. Then we have more implicit uses of the dead letter assumption. Here's Trent Horn on personal interpretation, in his recent debate with Rogers on SS: "The Bible never interprets itself. Every time you read it, you are interpreting it. And the question is whose interpretation has authority. If it's just your interpretation against my interpretation against the interpretation of the church across two thousand years, what privileges your interpretation?" A premise in that is "the Bible never interprets itself." This is almost exactly what I said in the OP. This is actually a metaphysical claim that Scripture's content is external to the text. As such, it requires interpretive authority beyond the individual. Trent goes from you read it and are interpreting it to you don't get objective content out of Scripture unless you have an external interpreter. I could keep multiplying examples. My claim is far from a strawman of the Catholic position. It emerges from what Catholics assume in argumentation against SS, as I said.

@ProtPhilosopher You slide from the Spirit speaking through Scripture to therefore no normative ecclesial authority is necessary for doctrinal adjudication. Neither Swain nor Vanhoozer would actually support in the way you are deploying them.

The enduring preservation and global confession of the Nicene Creed across nearly seventeen centuries of cultural upheaval, schism, empire, language, and denominational divide stands as one of the most extraordinary examples of theological continuity in human history.

Two Current Saboteurs of Christianity: Modern individualism relocates authority into the self. Digital hyperpluralism destabilizes ecclesial continuity and Christian formation.

@bannedpastor Cheap shot!

Orthodox are spiraling after $250 Baptism goes viral!

@88mph121 @BishopJaxi 🤣

@BishopJaxi Did you say WORKS?!

“Idolatry,” they cry at Catholics. Then they unveil a golden statue of a man and celebrate it. “It’s just honor,” they say. Funny how that works.

The tragedy of Protestantism is that I could start my own "church" tomorrow, call myself pastor, preach whatever I think sounds spiritual, and no one could objectively tell me I’m outside the Church. Because once you reject apostolic authority, "church" becomes whatever a man with a Bible and a following says it is.

@Acts17David @paleochristcon @paleochristcon @Acts17David @JayDyer @GodLogic_GL Strangely, there was something virtuous about watching two men stand up for their friends. The larger issue at hand is that online apologists claiming to represent Christ often reinforce the scandal of a divided Church.

I'm LIVE with @paleochristcon! youtube.com/live/dl5E74_w2…

@garrettham_esq @CrushnSerpents @WesleyLHuff Some deuterocanonical books originated in Greek, but several have demonstrable Hebrew or Aramaic roots. It is inaccurate to say they were entirely Greek with no Hebrew background at all.

The problem with the @WesleyLHuff argument is not that the premises about the LXX and Dead Sea Scrolls are wrong, it's that the conclusion doesn't follow. The Catholic argument builds on the same premises, noting how they help demonstrate that the OT of the first century was not a closed canon. Indeed, what he argues for the LXX is equally true for the Masoretic text. The LXX and the Dead Sea Scrolls are evidence of usage, not the criterion for canonicity. The Church canonized the OT the same way she canonized the NT, not by deferring to one Jewish faction, but by conciliar affirmation beginning in the fourth century, not at Trent, based on centuries of usage within the Church. The same authority that established the NT Protestants accept established the OT they don't.