Monday, May 6, 2019

Jesus' use of Exodus 3:6 vs. Formal Sufficiency of Scripture


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: