There are
instances in the Bible itself where the authors extract explicit doctrine from (often,
very weak) implicit Scripture. One
example is Jesus’ use of Exo 3:6 in his debate against the Sadducees in Mark
12:18-27 (cf. Matt 22:23-33; Luke 20:27-40).
Commenting
on Mark 12:18-27 and Jesus' debate with the Sadducees, Catholic apologist
Robert Sungenis (who has done great work refuting Sola Scriptura) noted:
Jesus in a discussion with the Sadducees
about the resurrection. Trying to prove their belief in no future resurrection,
the Sadducees pose a seemingly unanswerable question to Jesus concerning a
woman who was married to seven men, each dying before they had children with
her . . . After answering the "marriage" question, Jesus proceeds to
the "resurrection" question. It is only here that he uses Scripture.
But as we will see, Jesus does not merely cite a 'proof text.' Rather, Jesus
uses his own reasoning ability to draw a conclusion that is only implicit in
Scripture, he says:
Now about
the dead rising--have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the
bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly
mistaken!"
The above text does not explicitly say there
is a resurrection. Rather, Jesus reasons, and expects the Sadducees to accept
his reasoning, that Exodus 3:6's statement can only be true if Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob are still living in conscious existence, albeit in another realm,
even though their bodies are in graves. The separation of their consciousness
from their dead bodies is, according to Jesus, a "resurrection" (John
5:25; Eph. 2:6; Col. 2:12). What is Jesus doing? Well, having already answered
the question about whether people will be married in heaven, Jesus goes beyond
the Sadducees' original inquiry to an aspect of resurrection they have probably
never given much thought. Jesus shows that resurrection is more than raising a
physical body; it is also raising a soul to heaven. In fact, the resurrection
of the soul is the more critical of the two, since it must precede the
resurrection of the body for the latter to occur . . . Notice that is
happening. Interpretation depends on the reasoning ability of a thinking
person. Reasoning is the ability to gather independent acts and determine how
they relate to each other. Scripture itself cannot "interpret" Exodus
3:6, because Scripture cannot, in fact, "interpret itself." Jesus'
reasoning is astounding. Without Jesus' penetrating interpretation, someone
could read Exodus 3:6 for a whole lifetime, as the Sadducees apparently had
done, and never extract from it the conclusion that Jesus reached. Since Exodus
3:6 does not explicitly, only implicitly, teach that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
[are still alive]-we see that "interpretation" depends on much more
than cataloguing facts from the text . . . We have discovered that Scripture is
far deeper and mysterious than we may have imagined. We see how easily it can
be misinterpreted or even ignored. As far as we know, no one before Jesus ever
used in Exodus 3:6 to prove the resurrection.
Such
insights call into question the formal sufficiency of Scriptura, รก la Sola Scriptura, the formal doctrine of
Protestantism, especially as this shows that Jesus Himself did not hold to
such! For a lengthier discussion of the overwhelming problems (including the
biblical evidence against) this
doctrine, see:
