Robert Sungenis on the Impossibility of Proving Sola Scriptura from the Bible

For Latter-day Saints who engage in Evangelicals, one of the main dividing lies is that of the question of Sola Scriptura, the formal doctrine of the Reformation. This doctrine states that the Bible (defined as the 39 books of the OT; 27 books of the NT) are the sole infallible rule of faith and that it is the final authority. While there are some Protestants who hold to a more watered-down form of this doctrine where the Bible is the only authority, the historical interpretation is that, while tradition, history, creeds, councils, etc are authorities, they are subordinated to the biblical texts.

There are a number of "proof-texts" cited by apologists for this doctrine (e.g. 2 Tim 3:16-17; 1 Cor 4:6; Matt 4:1-11, etc), and I hope to exegete these in future blog posts, there is one hurdle to Protestant apologists--it is impossible to prove the formal sufficiency of the Protestant Bible using the Bible, as no verse, no pericope, no book in the Bible can possibly teach, when exegeted, the formal sufficiency of the 66 books of the Protestant canon.

Catholic apologist, Robert A. Sungenis, edited a volume, Not by Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura (Queenship, 1997), which is perhaps the best critique of Sola Scriptura in print. Sungenis contributed an essay, "Does Scripture teach Sola Scriptura?" pp.106-67. On page 128 n. 24, he writes:

Evangelical James White admits: “Protestants do not assert that Sola Scriptura is a valid concept during times of revelation. How could it be, since the rule of faith to which it points was at the very time coming into being?” (“A Review and Rebuttal of Steve Ray's Article Why the Bereans Rejected Sola Scriptura,” 1997, on web site of Alpha and Omega Ministries). By this admission, White has unwittingly proven that Scripture does not teach Sola Scriptura, for if it cannot be a “valid concept during times of revelation,” how can Scripture teach such a doctrine since Scripture was written precisely when divine oral revelation was being produced? Scripture cannot contradict itself. Since both the 1st century Christian and the 21st century Christian cannot extract differing interpretations from the same verse, thus, whatever was true about Scripture then also be true today. If the first Christians did not, and could not extract sola scriptura from Scripture because oral revelation was still existent, then obviously those verses could not, in principle, be teaching Sola Scriptura, and thus we cannot interpret them as teaching it either.

Furthermore, there are many biblical texts that show that the biblical authors did not hold to Sola Scriptura. Consider, for instance, in 2 Chronicles 29:25:

And [Hezekiah] set the Levites in the house of the Lord with cymbals, with psalteries, and with harps, according to the commandment of David, and of Gad the king’s seer, and Nathan the prophet: for so was the commandment of the Lord by his prophets.

Note the following things that disprove SS:

(1) First, David, Gad, and Nathan were dead about 250 years at this point;

(2) Yet, they passed on a “commandment of the Lord” which was prescribed by God's prophets on how worship was to be conducted in the temple;

(3) That prescription and commandment of the Lord is nowhere found in the Old Testament Scriptures.