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Opening
Argument
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Gerry Matatics
I want to thank all of you for coming out this evening and
sharing with us in this debate. I want to thank my esteemed
colleague here, Mr. James White, for being willing to come and to
debate me again. We've had some debates before in the past and he
pays me a compliment in being willing to debate me again. And I
would like to finally tell all of you why, very briefly, I was
willing to come out here and to engage in this debate.
I do so, primarily out of the motive of love.
Love, first of all for you. And love, including of course, for
also, my friend and fellow human being, Mr. James White. He is
someone for whom Christ died, as are each one of you, as I am and
Christ, who loves us so very much, came into the world as he said
to Pontius Pilate, to bear witness to the truth. Jesus Christ
believed that the truth is something that you and I can know, can
be sure of. And he said, "If you continue in my word you
will know the truth and the truth will set you free." He
promised the Holy Spirit would guide his disciples into all the
truth.
And that's the second and perhaps the more
important reason that I wanted to have this debate with Mr. White
tonight. Not only out of love for my fellow human beings, for
neighbors, as God commands, but out of love for truth, which is
really, ultimately, out of love for God, who is truth, Himself.
And I believe that if you came tonight you believe in truth,
also. You believe that there is such a thing as truth, with a
capital T. And that this truth can be known and you believe that
if a certain proposition is true, such as the proposition that
the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith in practice, then
the opposite proposition must be false. You believe, in other
words, in what we call the law of non-contradiction. If you don't
believe in the law of non-contradiction then ultimately, I think
you would have to conclude, if you reasoned it out, you don't
believe in God, or at least you don't believe in the God that the
Christians worship. The God who is truth as opposed to error. The
God who affirms right as opposed to wrong. The God who says, for
example, that if murder is wrong, that if the preservation of
life is right, then murder, the taking of innocent life, is
wrong. That if a certain style of life that is correct than the
opposite, the distortion, the perverse of that kind of life, is
wrong.
The Bible speaks of truth and error, right and
wrong, light and darkness. And it commands us to give ourselves,
every day of our lives, afresh to God and ask Him to show us the
truth and to give us the courage to stand for the truth and to
change our opinions when God, in His mercy, in His undeserving
grace, shows us that what we formerly held to be true was wrong.
That was the case with me, because, for those who may not know my
background or my story, several years ago and for several years,
I believed exactly what Rev. White believes and what he has very
effectively, very eloquently proclaimed tonight: the Protestant
principle of sola scriptura.
This was one of the two great principles that
sparked the Protestant Reformation. One was sola fide, that we
are justified by faith alone and that no action on the part of
any man can be added to the work of Christ, or is necessary to
make us righteous in the sight of God. The other was sola scriptura, that we arrive at the truth of God's Word by Scripture
alone and that Scripture can act on its own to bring us the
fullness of Christian faith.
The Reformers, John Calvin, Martin Luther and
others, were willing to risk the whole Reformation on the
truthfulness of these two principles. Repeatedly in their sermons
and their writings they said, "If either of these two
principles can be shown to be erroneous then even though we have
been driven by what we believe in sincerity, and in an honest
desire to reform the Church and to proclaim the Gospel, then all
of what we are doing is a revolutionary movement absolutely
elicit and illegitimate in the eyes of God, and we should recant,
we should retract, we should repent and we should recognize that
though we thought we were fighting error, in fact we ourselves
have been guilty in spreading the most pernicious error
imaginable."
I have changed my position on sola scriptura
against my own initial prejudices, my own initial convictions,
nurtured and sustained in my own Protestant seminary training and
in my life as a Protestant minister. When I began to study the
case for Catholicism, I was amazed and overwhelmed to discover
that the Catholic Church rejected sola scriptura, this principle
which Mr. White has explained and supported and stood up and
defended before you, on the basis of the fact that it is not
taught in Scripture itself and that is the basis upon which I
want to explain why I reject it and I believe every
Bible-believing Christian, whether you call yourself Protestant
or Catholic or something else, ought to, in honesty and in
obedience to God, reject the principle of sola scriptura.
So this is a debate and this is a discussion
about truth. And I think it's appropriate then, since tonight is,
or is supposed to be, about truth and is not primarily a contest
in cleverness or an exercise in ingenuity or any type of beauty
contest between Mr. White or myself. As a matter of fact, I am
quite willing to concede that Jim, in a Protestant standard,
might be a far more faithful Christian than I am. He might be a
far more intelligent man than I am. I certainly believe that he
is a far better prepared apologist than I am, given the week that
I had have to go through.
As a matter of fact, I will take moment here
to make an aside and to say that I, in all honesty, and humility,
do not believe that I am actually the best person qualified to
rebut Mr. White or Protestantism. There is someone that I got to
speak with, as a matter of fact, for the very first time
yesterday. We spent a little bit of time on the phone yesterday.
And, as a matter of fact, this gentleman, a Catholic apologist by
the name Vincent Lewis, has challenged Mr. White to debate him on
this or on any issue of Mr. White's choosing. And I am convinced,
that even from a one-time conversation with Mr. Lewis, that he
would do a far more capable, competent, and I believe absolutely
indestructible job of presenting the truth of the Catholic faith
and critiquing and absolutely demolishing the fraudulent but
ultimately, I believe, unscriptural basis of the Protestant
principle of sola scriptura than I am able to do. And I promised
Mr. Lewis that I would say something and that's why I have to
take the time now, although its robbing me of the time I want to
share, I promised him that I would publicly renew the challenge
to Mr. White to respond. If Mr. White is really interested in
putting up the principle of sola scriptura against the very best,
most competent critic possible, he really owes it to, I think his
own reputation as a courageous man, but to his own commitment to
intellectual honesty to meet Mr. Lewis in some debate format,
whether in writing or publicly or on the radio or something. And
Mr. Lewis, in his rather characteristic braggadocios style, has
said that unless he does he brands himself someone who doesn't
have the courage to really to stand up against the one who is the
very best on this issue. He says, "Please, Mr. White, meet
me in debate on this or sue me for liable but put an end to this
cloud that might hang over your reputation otherwise." And I
hope that Mr. White will do that.
I would like to say, although I feel not as
competent as I would like, still, that my sole motive here is to
really proclaim the truth of God. And I would like to begin by
therefore, taking a public vow with my hand upon the Sacred
Scriptures, which Mr. White and I both accept as the inspired,
infallible, inerrant Word of God. We agree on that. We agree that
this is the only inspired, inerrant book, the only inspired,
inerrant, written Word of God. And with my hand on the Sacred
Scriptures I would like to publicly vow before God to do the
following in my time with you this evening:
To tell the truth about sola
scriptura. When
asked to question, to give a straightforward and honest answer, a
"yes", a "no", an "I don't know" if
I don't know the answer to the question. If I don't understand
the question, to ask for clarification. If I make a contradiction
in anything that I say, in presenting my own position, to admit
or to resolve the contradiction, to recognize that since God is a
God of truth and if we are all agreed that "A" can also
be "not A," the law of non-contradiction stands, that
the principle of sola scriptura is either true or it is false and
that God, therefore, either agrees with Mr. White or myself. And,
that in a sense, He must take sides, not in the persons involved,
not in the personalities, but on the two positions and that God
will, for those who are willing to study this with an open mind,
God will vindicate one position and vanquish the other, refute
it.
And I am willing to further swear before
Almighty God, before whom I will one day give account as the
judge of all the earth, and the one whom I will have to give
account, Scripture says, for every idle word I speak, let alone
the words that I share in all seriousness and solemnity with you
this evening. I am willing to swear before Him and before His
holy angels that if I am shown to be wrong in my adherence to the
Catholic position or to the Catholic faith as a whole, that I am
willing to publicly admit that I am wrong, to recant and, if Mr.
White can demonstrate that his faith is the correct one, then I
am willing to embrace it, and to convert once again to the
Protestant faith. And I would ask, Mr. White, that you, in your
time of first rebuttal, would be willing to make the same vow, to
swear this same oath before this audience as a sign of good
faith?
Now, I would like to, in my remaining moments,
explain to you why I rejected six years ago, finally in coming
into the Catholic faith, and why I still reject to this day with
a clear conscience, with intellectual----- (Tape Switch) -----
the doctrine of sola scriptura. I do so for two reasons. It is
contrary to faith and it is contrary to reason.
When I say it is contrary to faith what I mean
is that I'm willing to meet Mr. White on his own grounds, it is
contrary to the faith proclaimed by this book itself, by the Holy
Bible. And I am glad that Mr. White mentioned our Lord Jesus
Christ's awesome words in Matthew 15, where He tells us in no
uncertain terms that we must reject every tradition of man that
nullifies or counters or cancels out the Word of God. I reject
sola scriptura precisely because it is a human tradition. It is a
tradition of men. It was not taught in the early Church or in the
first 15 centuries of church history--contrary to what Mr. White
has said, and we will get into the details of his quotes, and the
other things those Church Fathers said-- until Wycliffe and
Luther invented this concept as a way of justifying their revolt
against classical Christianity for their own purposes, and their
own agenda. It is a tradition of men that goes contrary to the
teaching of even the written Word of God and so I reject it and I
will seek to demonstrate that here tonight.
And it is also contrary to reason. It is
nonsense. I do not say that in a prejudicial, or in an attempt to
be flippant or to be disrespectful but I mean by nonsense that it
does not make sense. It is illogical. It is logically
inconsistent. It is a self-refuting proposition. In other words,
sola scriptura can only be true, according to Mr. White's own
criterion, if it is taught in Scripture, since he himself, on the
basis of sola scriptura says that he accepts no other authority.
There is no other authoritative, infallible source of truth
outside of this book. And I will demonstrate to you that the
Bible does not teach this and that the concept of sola scriptura
has to be imported from outside the Bible and then certain Bible
verses read in the light of that presupposition for you to come
up with the principle.
Why do I say that it does not tie into
Scripture? Well, first of all, let me stress the areas of
agreement between Mr. White and myself, the areas in which there
are at least formal agreement between our positions.
We both agree that the "Word of
God," whenever that phrase occurs in the Bible, does not
refer to Scripture alone. So all statements or quotes from Mr.
White this evening that say, "The Word of God is
binding," or, "The Word of God is our only
authority," or, "The Word of God is alone inspired and
normative in our life," are statements that I agree with. I,
as a Catholic, accept every statement in Scripture and I accepted
those as well. But Mr. White agrees that in the Bible the phrase,
"Word of God" is a larger, a broader, a richer, a
deeper concept than simply the Scriptures. The Word of God, for
example, refers actually to a living person, to the second person
of the Trinity who became flesh and dwelt among us and revealed
the glory of the Father to us, as St. John says in his prologue
in John 1:1ff. When God reveals His Word to the human race
repeatedly throughout Scripture it comes often, primarily and
initially for thousands of years as far as we can tell, in an
exclusively oral fashion. When God's word brings the world into
existence, it is a spoken word. God does not write on a huge
blackboard on the sky, "Let there be light," and then
there is light. It is not a writing, it is not a scripture, it is
a spoken word. It is a spoken word that comes to Adam, it is a
spoken word that comes to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph.
And as far as we can tell, this spoken Word of God first begins
to be written down at the time of Moses. That's the first record
at least we have in Scripture of the inscripturation, of the
writing down, of God's holy and inspired word.
But it continues to be an oral entity and God
continues to speak to Moses, and to Joshua and to all the
prophets and only a portion of this, only a fraction of this gets
written down. Obadiah, for example, is a prophet of God. There is
a very slim, little one-page book of Obadiah in the Old Testament
with about 22 verses in it. Certainly, as a prophet, Obadiah
didn't just get up every morning and recite those 22 verses and
say, "Good-bye, folks" and then go back to bed. He said
more in his ministry than is recorded in that book. And when the
prophets speak of the Word of God, they are referring to His oral
proclamations they had, whether or not they were ever a writing
prophet.
The same is true, of course, in the career of
our Lord Jesus Christ, extremely so. Since Jesus, as far as we
know, never writes anything at all. And yet, He is the Word of
God and proclaims the Word of God to His listeners and He says
that His word is binding on the consciences of His hearers. They
must believe it, they must obey it and they have an obligation,
as we all do when we hear truth, to teach it to others and to
ensure that it will be passed on. At the end of His life, the
provision that Jesus makes for the continuation of His Word is to
ordain and to send forth ambassadors, emissaries, whom we call
Apostles, "sent ones." And he tells them to go forth
and preach. There is no exclusive command in the New Testament to
go forth and write. Some of them do, but most of them do not. And
yet those apostles carried out the commandment of Christ to
proclaim and to spread and to transmit the Word of God. Even
those that did write, such as the Apostle, Paul, certainly their
writing was but a fraction, the minority of the way in which they
exercised their apostolic ministry of sharing the Word of God.
And Mr. White would agree with that. He would agree that there
were Apostles who never wrote any gospels or letters, so far as
church history or the Scripture itself tells us.
Now, all the truth that Jesus taught and all
the truth that the Apostles taught, they were commanded to pass
on. He never commanded it be passed on in an exclusively written
form. Jesus had this to say about His words, that Heaven and
earth would pass away but His words would not pass away, in
Matthew 24:35. John, at the end of his gospel, twice in John 30:1
and John 21:25 said that he has only given us a brief selection
of all that he could have said about what Jesus said and what
Jesus did. He says, "What I've written is sufficient to
demonstrate to any open-minded hearts that Jesus is, indeed, the
Son of God and that you could have faith in that and in having
that faith have life in His name." And the Catholic agrees
with that. That's not the issue. We believe in the sufficiency of
Scripture, in that sense, to bring someone to faith in Christ.
Obviously people come to faith in Christ on the basis of the
Bible all the time without reading papal encyclicals or reading
Church Fathers or knowing any of the broader tradition, which was
entrusted to the Church. The sufficiency of Scripture and sola
scriptura are not the same thing and this is a mistake,
unfortunately, that Mr. White and other anti-Catholic apologists,
frequently make in their writing and in their speaking, and I
hope that we can get into that this evening.
Jesus commanded His Apostles to teach
everything that He had taught them and the Apostles said the same
thing. The Apostle, Paul, at the end of his three years after
teaching in Ephesus on a daily basis, could say in Acts 20 that,
"I have not been sent here to proclaim to you the fullness
of the counsel of God." And we don't find that full counsel
of God. We don't find three years of daily instruction by simply
reading a letter he wrote to the Ephesians, which takes about six
pages in the Bible and takes about a half an hour to read.
The passage, II Thessalonians 2:15, which Mr.
White referred to, and which I agree with some of the things
which he said about it and disagree with others, commands the
Thessalonians to hold fast to all the traditions passed on to
them, whether they came to them in oral fashion, or in written
fashion. And so the Bible is a tradition. It is part of sacred
tradition. It is the written component of that. But there is an
oral component, as well, and it is up to Mr. White, of course, to
substantiate his claim that there is nothing in the oral
component of that tradition which adds to or is anything
different than what is stated in the written. Paul says to pass
them both on, which doesn't seem to make much sense if the
written does, indeed, contain everything in the oral. Why would
there be a need to pass on both? Why not say, "Just stick
with the written stuff, folks and then you know you're safe,
you're on sure ground."
Now here's where we do disagree and this is
what it all boils down to. This is point to which it all comes.
We agree on all these other things. That the Bible is the Word of
God. It is the only inspired, infallible, written Word of God. We
agreed that the Word of God came in oral fashion in the days of
Jesus, in the days of the Apostles to be passed on in an oral
fashion. What the Catholic Church teaches is that these standing
commands to proclaim the full Word of God and to pass them on and
that Jesus would be with the Church until the end of time to
ensure its faithfulness in carrying out this mission, that these
standing commands have never been revoked. There is nothing in
the Bible that tells us that after the Apostles die or that after
the canon is closed, that is, all the documents of the Apostles
have been collected into a complete book, a collection of
inspired books, that at that point we must stop passing on the
oral, as well as the written Word f God as II Thessalonians 2:15
commands. There is no teaching, there is no hint in the New
Testament that the completion of the written canon retires the
Word of God coming to us in oral fashion, authoritatively
proclaimed by the Apostles or by their appointed or anointed
successors, as Timothy was, as Titus was, for example.
The burden of proof, therefore--contrary to
what Mr. White has attempted to do in shifting the burden of
proof, and I will explain what I mean by that in my period of
rebuttal--the burden proof remains squarely upon his shoulders.
If he is going to prove that sola scriptura is true, that the
Bible is the only trustworthy place you can hear the Word of God
today, in 1992, for example, or, for that matter, any previous
year in church history, then he must show that the Bible teaches
this. The Bible foresees an age after the apostolic age during
which he admits the Word of God was preached in an inspired,
infallible fashion by the Apostles, that a coming age would come
in which there would no longer be a proclamation of a normative,
oral word. The Bible says absolutely nothing about it. And by Mr.
White's own standard, that he tests everything by the Word of
God, written by the sacred Scriptures, that he has no basis, in
the Bible for this creed, for this Protestant principle, that
oral tradition no longer transmits to us what Jesus and the
Apostles taught.
I will also point out to you and to Mr. White
in our time this evening that, in fact, for him to hold aloft the
Bible and to say that this is the Word of God, he makes himself
completely dependent on oral tradition. The only way that Mr.
White knows that he has the right books, that these are the books
coming to him by the Apostles is by the tradition of the Church,
by the oral tradition and by the teachings of the early church
outside of Scripture. There is no inspired Table of Contents in
the Bible. There is no statement in the Bible that says that
Matthew wrote Matthew and therefore we should accept it as
inspired, apostolic and canonical. And so, Mr. White, as all
Protestants do, bites the hand that feeds him on this, by
attacking the authority of the Church.
Thank you very much.
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