Defending Sola Scriptura: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis

Part 1: From God’s Nature to Scripture’s Authority

There’s a gap in Protestant apologetics. Sharp Catholic interlocutors exploit it, and it can leave you feeling stuck and frustrated. Yet if you build a bridge from God’s nature to how that nature is expressed through Scripture, you can turn the tables. You can press a dilemma from premises Catholics must accept. What’s that gap?

Protestants argue that Scripture is ontologically unique. It alone is God-breathed. It alone has God as its primary author. Catholics grant all of this. Then Protestants argue that because Scripture is ontologically unique, it’s normatively ultimate. It alone is the supreme rule of faith and practice. And here the Catholic presses, “Why? How does uniqueness in nature produce ultimacy in authority?” The inference is asserted by Protestants but never fully explained. That missing explanation is the gap.

Gavin Ortlund, Keith Mathison, Michael Kruger, Herman Bavinck, and on and on, haven’t filled the gap. The goal is to end that in this series. It’s time to start shoring up the foundation of Sola Scriptura in a robust way.

This series has five parts. In this first part, I present the Canon Conundrum at full strength, showing that the Catholic challenge has three fangs. Protestant responses leave the best version unanswered. I look at Gavin Ortlund’s argument for Scripture’s unique authority and identify the gap in his reasoning. And I introduce the Attribute Inscripturation Thesis and lay its foundation, which involves the distinction between efficient and exemplar causality, Turretin’s causal theory, the doctrine of God, and the supervenience mechanism by which divine communicative perfections produce textual properties. In Part 2, I develop the canonical epistemology, showing how the AIT’s textual properties produce observable marks that the Spirit enables the faithful to recognize, and I answer each fang of the Canon Conundrum. In Part 3, I develop the full many-to-many mapping between the thirteen divine perfections and the twelve textual properties, present a robust definition of sola scriptura, provide the disqualification argument showing no rival qualifies for the supreme normative position, and deploy the full account against Casey Chalk’s The Obscurity of Scripture. In Part 4, I derive the right of private judgment as a second-order entailment of the AIT. And in Part 5, I take the Catholic Church’s own official teachings and show that the premises they affirm generate conclusions they deny.

To start we need to see what it takes to fill the gap. There’s no better way to do that than to look at an objection that makes the gap visible.

The Canon Conundrum

The Canon Conundrum is probably the most common objection to Sola Scriptura. It comes in different versions. We’ll look at two.

The Popular Version

At a popular level, the Canon Conundrum is a genetic argument. It concerns historical origin. Where did your Bible come from? It came from an organic process across a vast stretch of time, with Rome’s oversight playing a key role. There was the Council of Rome (382 AD), in which the first major list was advanced that matched the Catholic canon. Then there are the regional councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397/419 AD) that affirmed the same list of books. Skipping forward a millennium is the ecumenical Council of Florence (1442 AD), which again listed the same books but didn’t dogmatically define them as canonical. And, finally, at the Council of Trent (1546 AD) we have a definitive declaration of the 73-book canon as dogmatic. So, the objection goes, you need the Church to even know what the Bible is. Scripture alone isn’t the ultimate norm, as you need something outside the norm to define it. Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid captures this when he says, “There is no ‘inspired table of contents’ in Scripture that tells us which books belong and which ones do not. That information comes to us from outside Scripture.”¹

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer makes the same point using an example. Whatever confidence a Protestant has that the Gospel of John belongs in the Bible:

“there’s no book in the Bible that quotes it. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is scripture. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is written by an apostle.” Whatever certainty you have about John’s canonicity “is coming from somewhere other than the Bible.”²

The standard Protestant reply is that this only undermines Solo Scriptura, not Sola Scriptura. For Solo Scriptura, Scripture is the only real authority. If that’s the view, then that the Church helped officially identify the list of canonical books is problematic. But this is a pretty extreme view that results in the individual believer being an island of their own interpretation of Scripture. It’s not what the Reformers taught. Instead, what we might call, following John Peckham, “Canonical Sola Scriptura,” is the view defended by Keith Mathison and Gavin Ortlund as well. It makes room for the Church to have a ministerial role in the process of canonization.³

The Church identified which books were canonical. It didn’t make them canonical. The distinction between ministerial and magisterial authority handles the popular version of the Canon Conundrum. Canonical Sola Scriptura is fine with something outside Scripture having a ministerial role in canonization. Case closed? Not quite.

This response moves past the pop-level objection a little too quickly. The Canon Conundrum has an epistemic edge that the ministerial/magisterial and solo/sola distinctions don’t fully address. The popular apologist isn’t just asking whether Sola Scriptura allows the Church to have some role in the process of canonization. The objector is pointing out that the identification of Scripture needed something outside of Scripture. It needed something other than Scripture. Granting the Church a ministerial role just concedes this point. It doesn’t answer it.

The Protestant who says “Scripture alone is the ultimate norm” still has to explain how the contents of that norm were identified by a process that wasn’t governed by the norm itself. Even at the pop-level, the objection points to a real difficulty about epistemic self-sufficiency. The sophisticated version of the Canon Conundrum takes this difficulty and sharpens it.

If you prefer video, this article is accompanied by a lecture version below.
Although, this article presents the full argument with greater detail and precision.

The Sophisticated Version

The epistemic worry I just pointed out at the pop-level is that canonical identification required resources beyond Scripture itself. When a philosophical Catholic takes this to the next level, it becomes an argument against the coherence of Sola Scriptura as such. The sophisticated version doesn’t just observe that the Church was historically involved in canonization. It argues that the nature of that involvement entails conclusions incompatible with Sola Scriptura.

A Catholic interlocutor might argue that the canon was settled through a historical process, involving earlier councils and usage of specific books, but was officially settled by an act of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Church used its divinely given authority to declare, not just identify, the canon. As the Council of Trent explains:

“[The Church], following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety, and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament - seeing that one God is the author of both - as also the said traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals, as having been dictated, either by Christ’s own word of mouth, or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession. And it has thought it meet that a list of the sacred books be inserted in this decree, lest a doubt may arise in any one’s mind, which are the books that are received by this Synod.”⁴

Though “God is the author” of Scripture, the Catholic apologist claims a formal decree by the Church was needed to create a binding and settled collection of books for the faithful. The Church determined the canon of Scripture in a way that pronounced them to be the Sacred Deposit. Yves Congar captures the theological force of this claim when he argues that:

“There is, however, in the establishment of the canon, that is to say in the giving of a character of normativity to certain definite writings to the exclusion of others, an act of the Church which is posited in virtue of a charism quite distinct from the apostolic inspirational charism, although in continuity with it.”⁵

For Congar, this means, “Scripture demands Tradition and the Church; the act which made Scripture requires a second divine act occurring both outside Scripture and in continuity with it.”⁶

This is a key point. The Catholic isn’t just saying that the Church noticed which books were inspired. The claim is that canonization required a distinct divine charism, exercised by the Church, that isn’t reducible to the inspiration of the books.

This decree was performative. It changed the status of the books from a loose collection of sacred writings into the dogmatic canon, which one must embrace. On this view, the Church’s authority is constitutive of the canon. It didn’t just find a collection of books lying around and point at them as canonical. The books to be included in the canon weren’t already in a finished box, so to speak. Rather, the Church’s authority put together the box, put the books in the box, and locked the latch. This is more like a legal act of declaration, saying “these letters, and no other letters, constitute our Sacred Deposit.”

Robert Sungenis, responding to the Protestant claim that the Church “merely discovered” the canon, grants the initial premise but presses on the mechanism. He agrees that there had to be:

“a ‘recognition’ process of some kind.” But “the real question is HOW did he give us the canon, and how were the people of God able to recognize it? The moment ‘recognition’ is added to the issue, we then enter into the whole realm of how man perceives and distinguishes truth from error.” Unless that recognition was “infallibly and directly guided by the Holy Spirit,” it “would turn out to be nothing more than the best guesses and conjectures of men.”⁷

Notice what Sungenis is doing. He’s taking the epistemic gap that even the popular version of the objection identifies, namely that canonical knowledge comes from outside Scripture, and pressing it further. The question isn’t whether extra-Scriptural resources were needed, which even Canonical Sola Scriptura concedes. The question is whether those extra-Scriptural resources were infallible, and if they weren’t, what that means for the epistemic status of the resulting canon.

The Church constituted the boundary. Without this, you have a group of possibly inspired writings. With this, you have a defined Deposit of Faith. The Church acts like a high court and moves Scripture from being in a state of historical dispute to a state of dogmatic certainty. This removed the fuzzy edges, the Antilegomena. After Trent, the boundary of the canon was sharp. The Council didn’t just notice the line. It drew the line and constituted the group as a distinct, finished set. Without this, we may still have an open-ended pile of texts vying for canonicity.

That’s the sophisticated version. But the real force of the Canon Conundrum lies in the specific consequences it draws from this observation. It has three fangs, and each one bites differently.

Fang 1: The Logical Priority Claim

If the Church’s definition settles what counts as the Sacred Deposit, then the Church is logically prior to the canon. Protestants can’t claim Scripture alone is the ultimate final authority if you first have to rely on a non-Scriptural authority to determine what counts as Scripture.

Madrid’s way of making this point is sharp. Under Sola Scriptura, he argues:

“Scripture is placed in an epistemological vacuum, since it and the veracity of its contents ‘dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church.’ If that’s true, how then can anyone know with certitude what belongs in Scripture in the first place? The answer, of course, is that you can’t.” Moreover, “as soon as Protestants begin to appeal to the canons drawn up by this or that Father, or this or that council, they inadvertently concede defeat, since they are forced to appeal to the very ‘testimony of man and Church’ that they claim not to need.”⁸

Philip Blosser draws a distinction that sharpens this fang further. He argues that James White and other Protestant apologists conflate two different questions:

• (1) the ontological property of being canonical, which is “a function of Scripture” and which no Catholic denies, and

• (2) the identification of the canon, which is the epistemological question of “how we identify the canon.”

White’s mistake, on Blosser’s analysis, is to think that affirming Scripture’s inherent canonicity resolves the question of how we know which books possess that property. As Blosser argues, “the ontological property of being canonical (inspired) does not even begin to answer the essential epistemological question at issue (how we identify the canon).”⁹

This distinction is important because it exposes a category error at the heart of many Protestant responses. Saying that God determined the canon, which is an ontological claim, doesn’t tell us how the Church or the individual believer comes to know the contents of that canon, which is an epistemological claim. The fang of logical priority focuses on the epistemological question, not the ontological one.

Fang 2: The Fallible Collection Problem

The second fang pushes on the epistemic status of the canon itself. If the Church only recognized the canon, and the Church is fallible, as Protestants claim, then the canon might be fallible. Without an infallible constitutive authority, you’re left with Sproul’s famous phrase of having “a fallible collection of infallible books.”¹⁰

Sungenis presses the weight of this concession. If the canon is fallible, “then how can a preacher honestly wave his Bible from the pulpit on Sunday morning and declare ‘Thus saith the Lord’ when he does not know for certain that the Lord has said thus?”¹¹ Sungenis further notes that Sproul’s formula has “met with consternation and sharp criticism in evangelical circles” because evangelicals can see the logical conclusion.

A fallible canon opens the door to canon reduction. Sungenis notes that Sproul himself complains about Bultmann’s program of stripping away “myth” from the canon, but Sungenis asks, “on what basis can this apologist make such a judgment if he himself believes the canon is fallible and perhaps might include things that are myth and legend?”¹² Without infallible controls, Sungenis concludes, Protestants “have no other recourse than to agree with Karl Barth that ‘the canon, as a list made by the Church, can be revised, and writings could be added to or subtracted from it.’”¹³

The standard Protestant escape route is to invoke divine providence. But Sungenis dismantles this move. Providence applies to everything that exists, good and bad alike:

“The rebellion of Satan, the sin of Adam, the Bubonic plague, the Hitler regime, were all in the ‘providence of God,’ but that doesn’t mean at all that they were good or error-free. In fact, in basing the argument on God’s providence, there is equal justification from the Protestant perspective to say either the Church received a fallible canon or that it received an infallible canon. Moreover, using the ‘providence’ argument, Catholics can claim that God ‘providentially’ gave the early Church the very doctrines with which this Reformed apologist disagrees....We all want God’s providence to be on ‘our side’ and accomplish the things we desire, but that is not the way the real world operates. We cannot just invoke God’s providence to judge whether a certain event in history is good or bad, true or false. Providence means only that, whatever happens, good or bad, all is in God’s control and he will work it out the way he sees fit. Thus, the ‘providence’ line of argumentation does not help.”¹⁴

Appeals to providence, by themselves, can’t distinguish a correct canon from an incorrect one. Blosser identifies the same maneuver and calls it out as disingenuous. Protestants, he argues:

“adopt the fallback position of admitting that the Bible is only a ‘fallible collection of infallible books,’ thereby hoping to avoid the consequence of granting the Church’s bishops the divine authority implicit in the Catholic doctrine of the apostolic succession.”¹⁵

But the move,

“is immediately followed by various caveats implying that, for all practical purposes, they do believe in an infallible canon after all; and what they denied to the Church under the heading of ‘infallibility,’ they quickly restore under the heading of ‘providence.’”¹⁶

The Protestant, in other words, wants the epistemic benefits of infallibility without accepting the ecclesiological costs.

Blosser then presses the deeper philosophical point. Protestants already accept, implicitly, the principle that God can infallibly guide fallible humans, both in the oral teachings of the prophets and apostles, and in the writing of Scripture. As he argues:

“there is no more reason why one should deny that God infallibly guided the process by which the Church ‘discovered’ the canon any more than the process by which the Church ‘wrote’ the books contained in it.”¹⁷

To not extend this principle to the canonical process is, on Blosser’s analysis, a violation of the principle of causality and a largely anti-Catholic reflex rather than a principled philosophical position.

If the list is just a probabilistic gambit by early Christians, then the authority of Sola Scriptura is only as strong as the historical accuracy of those Christians. For Scripture to qualify as a “rule of faith,” mere probabilistic gambits won’t do. The list itself needs to be certain, and only an authoritative Church decree can offer that certainty.

Fang 3: The Institutional Fact Thesis

The third fang involves some philosophy of language. The Catholic might argue that “Canon” is an institutional fact. It gains meaning within a system involving social norms and rules. This is like “Touchdown” and “Money.” The canon of Scripture isn’t a natural fact. It’s a status granted to specific texts by the Church.¹⁸ If that status is given by the Church, then the Church’s Tradition is the context in which Scripture breathes. You can’t get rid of Tradition and have “Scripture Alone,” as the Tradition constituted those specific books as The Bible in the first place.

Madrid captures one dimension of this. Knowledge of the canon, he argues:

“must be binding; otherwise men would be free to create their own customized canon containing those books they value and lacking the ones they devalue. This knowledge must also be part of divine revelation; if not, it is merely a tradition of men, and if that were so, Protestants would be forced into the intolerable position of championing a canon of purely human origin.”¹⁹

What Madrid is pointing toward, even if he doesn’t use the philosophical vocabulary, is that canonicity isn’t a property that inheres in a text the way, say, the number of pages inheres in it. Canonicity is a normative status that exists within an institutional context. A book is canonical because it’s been received as such by a community with the authority to confer that status.

Sungenis presses a related point by observing that the fathers who “collected the Canon” weren’t free agents operating independently of the ecclesial body. They “did not consider themselves outside the ‘ecclesial body.’”²⁰ The attempt to separate the canon-discerning activity of individual Christians from the institutional authority of the Church is to read:

“back into early Church history” a distinctly “Protestant mindset, a mindset that believes there can be a legitimate separation between the Church at large and individual Christians. None of the Fathers ever entertained such a notion.”²¹

If this is right, then the institutional foundation isn’t an optional add-on to the canonical process but is constitutive of it.

The Force of the Conundrum

That’s the Canon Conundrum at full strength. Three fangs that include the logical priority claim, the fallible collection problem, and the institutional fact thesis. I’ll answer each in Part 2 of this series. But notice what the Canon Conundrum does. It forces the Protestant to explain not just that Scripture has authority, but why Scripture possesses specific properties that make it capable of functioning as an ultimate norm without depending on an infallible Church. As Blosser notes regarding James White:

“what is at issue is not (1) the property of being canonical (inspired), which Catholics would agree is ‘a function of Scripture,’ but rather (2) the identification of the canon. White’s argument begs the question, since the ontological property of being canonical (inspired) does not even begin to answer the essential epistemological question at issue (how we identify the canon).”²²

Thus, resolving the Canon Conundrum requires answering not just the ontological question of whether the canonical books are inspired, but the epistemological question of how we identify them as such.

Hermann Ridderbos identified the stakes clearly. The real reason Protestants resist granting infallibility to the canonical process is that it would “eventuate in affirming the infallibility of the church, as in Roman Catholicism.”²³ The task for Part 2 of this series is to show that there’s a principled Protestant account of canonical recognition that avoids both the fallible-collection concession and the Catholic conclusion, without smuggling infallibility back in under the heading of “providence.”

Yes, first, I need to build the tool that makes the resolution possible. And the best starting point is Gavin Ortlund, whose recent work gets us most of the way there but leaves a gap that the Catholic is quick to exploit.

Ortlund’s Gambit and Its Gap

Since Gavin Ortlund published What It Means to Be Protestant, a section of his book has been like a splinter in my brain.²⁴ I've found it insightful and incomplete at the same time. In personal correspondence, Gavin clarified that his argument is more developed than any single passage suggests. He grounds Scripture's infallibility in its redemptive-historical role and inspired nature, then runs an empirical argument from elimination, asking whether any other authority possesses comparable infallibility and arguing on four grounds that none does. That's a multi-step case, and the empirical elimination is powerful. But a question remains about the inference's internal structure, and I think the AIT can fill it. I see our approaches as complementary. Gavin establishes the historical and empirical case. The AIT explains why that case holds with metaphysical necessity.

Gavin’s Gambit: The Leap from Ontology to Normativity

As part of his case for Sola Scriptura, Gavin argues for Scripture’s ontological uniqueness. As inspired and God-breathed, Scripture is unique in its makeup.

“In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul calls Scripture theopneustos, often rendered ‘inspired by God’ but literally meaning ‘breathed out by God.’”²⁵

“This is the ontological distinction we seek to convey with the adjective ‘inspired.’ The words of Scripture are breathed out by God; the words of a sermon are not.”²⁶

“Scripture is ontologically unique in its nature. No other rule of faith we have is the inspired Word of God. Nothing else that we possess today constitutes the God-breathed, Spirit-carried, unbreakable oracles of God.”²⁷

Scripture is unique. It’s in a class of one regarding being the very speech of God. Church councils, creeds, confessions, and so on, might be protected from error by the Holy Spirit, but they have humans as their primary author. Only Scripture has God as the primary author. Only Scripture is God’s self-expression in a direct sense. Gavin connects this ontological fact to a normative fact:

“Sola Scriptura is simply the position that, as the Bible is unique in nature, so it is correspondingly unique in authority.”²⁸

He continues:

“One can express this concern at a more metaphysical level: God is unique; therefore, his speech is unique. Why should we accept that which isn’t the speech of God to have equal authority to that which is the speech of God?”²⁹

And he memorably concludes:

“This is the heart cry of sola Scriptura: Test that which isn’t the inspired Word of God by that which is the inspired Word of God. This makes sense because God’s speech is of greater authority than all other speech.”³⁰

Given Scripture’s unique nature, it has unique authority. It is the highest, ultimate, supreme authority. The Church has real authority, but its authority is subordinate to and answerable to Scripture. Gavin provides a helpful hierarchy:

“Scripture is the norma normans (the norming norm).

Ecumenical councils are first-tier norma normata (norms that are normed).

Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are second-tier norma normata.

Doctrines espoused by individuals (including those regarded as Doctors of the Church) that aren’t mere reiterations or entailments of matters that are de fide are theologoumena, or theological opinions.”³¹

Scripture is the highest norm. It’s the norm that norms other norms but isn’t itself normed by any other norms. It gains this authority status from its unique nature as God-breathed. Further, Gavin argues there’s no warrant for the claim that the post-Apostolic church is infallible:

“[T]here is simply no good biblical or historical reason to conclude that the post-apostolic church possesses ongoing capacities of infallibility. This does not mean the church died or fell away from God. It simply means the church can err and therefore must continually measure her doctrine and practice by the infallible words of Holy Scripture.”³²

And Gavin offers a thin definition of Sola Scriptura centering on its infallibility:

“The core idea is that Scripture is the church’s only infallible rule. A rule is a standard that governs the church’s faith and practice. Infallible means being incapable of error. So sola Scriptura is essentially the claim that Scripture is the only authority standing over the church that is incapable of error.”³³

Given all of the above, Gavin responds to the Canon Conundrum by asserting the fallibility of the Church and using the distinction between recognition and constitution:

“The necessity of the church, however, does not entail her infallibility. Protestants have often compared the church’s role in the process of canonization to that of John the Baptist in pointing to Christ: It is a ministerial role of witness or testimony.”³⁴

Moreover:

“Infallibility is not necessary for canonization since the church’s responsibility is not constituting Scripture but simply recognizing it. Such recognition is not itself the action of an infallible agent. As J. I. Packer more recently stated, ‘The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.... Newton did not create gravity but recognized it.’”³⁵

Finally, he points out a confusion in the Catholic position:

“[S]etting sola Scriptura at odds with the process of canonization confuses the recognition of infallibility with the possession of infallibility. The simple fact is that it is not necessary to be infallible to discern that which is infallible. When Moses heard God at the burning bush, he didn’t need a second voice whispering in his ear that this was indeed God. This is what Protestants intend when they speak of Scripture as self-authenticating. This simply means that the ultimate ground on which we receive the Scripture is inherent in it, rather than external to it. For there is no higher authority the Word of God could rest upon than the Spirit speaking through it.”³⁶

These are excellent points. Gavin is right about each of them. But notice what’s missing.

The Gap

Gavin's definition and his defense against the Canon Conundrum are solid as far as they go. The empirical elimination is the right move. But a Catholic interlocutor can still offer a rejoinder along these lines:

“Sure, we grant the ontological uniqueness of Scripture, but that doesn’t entail its uniqueness as an authority. Even if, in principle, closing the canon doesn’t require an infallible Church pronouncement, the Church can meet the burden of infallibility and count as a rule of faith that’s on par with Scripture in terms of authority. Recall Christ’s promise to guide the Church (John 16:13), the keys given to Peter (Matt. 16:18-19), and the Church as the pillar and ground of truth (1 Tim 3:15). These count as divine backing giving the Church infallible prerogative in its Holy Spirit-protected teaching authority.”

The reply works against Gavin’s gambit because the Catholic Church readily grants, within its official teachings, the distinction between inspiration and infallible guidance. The key is why that distinction matters for normative status. Gavin doesn’t bridge that gap by arguing that only Scripture can bridge the ontology-to-normativity gap such that all other authorities are necessarily subordinate to Scripture. Gavin asserts the inference without doing the bridge-building that would prevent the Catholic rejoinder.

Further, the move from “Scripture is ontologically unique” to “Scripture alone is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice” isn’t a single inferential step. Sola Scriptura is a universal negative claim. That is, it holds not only does Scripture have authority, but no other source has coordinate ultimate authority. A universal negative can’t follow from a positive qualification claim alone. Catholics accept the positive qualification. They deny the negative exclusion. That negative exclusion requires a detailed argument showing that God’s attributes, when inscribed in Scripture through exemplar causality, produce textual traits that Scripture alone can possess, and that every rival candidate for the supreme normative position fails to meet the conditions that position requires. Given such a divinely grounded, unique constellation of theological properties, Scripture is uniquely fit to serve as the supreme normative perspective for faith and practice.

Gavin's definition shines a light on the need to ground Sola Scriptura metaphysically, not just historically. Without doing this, Catholic apologists regularly grant everything Gavin says and still argue the Catholic Church is a uniquely infallible authority on par with Scripture. The AIT aims to provide the metaphysical foundation showing that Gavin's empirical result is not an accident of history but a consequence of the divine nature.

I frequently see Catholic apologists steeped in scholasticism make this exact move. They say something like:

“I agree that Scripture is ontologically unique. I agree that it alone is God-breathed. I agree that its authority is unique. But Sola Scriptura requires something more than unique authority. It requires that the text is also sufficient, clear, and self-authenticating. And those further properties don’t just fall out of the bare fact that Scripture is the inspired word of God.”

I sympathize with this line of thinking. Yet, today I put the burden of proof back on the Catholic apologist. Today I offer a new thesis, rooted in a classical Protestant distinction, and I offer a thick definition of Sola Scriptura that emerges out of the hard work of linking the Doctrine of God with the Doctrine of Scripture.

The question Gavin’s gap leaves open is this: What is the mechanism by which God’s ontological uniqueness produces Scripture’s normative ultimacy? What connects the being of God to the binding authority of the text? And what disqualifies every rival candidate from claiming a share of that supreme normative position?

The answer, I’ll argue, is inscripturation itself, understood not as the bare efficient causality of inspiration but as the exemplar causality of the divine perfections exercised communicatively. And that answer has a name.

The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis

Most Protestant defenses of Sola Scriptura tell you that Scripture has unique authority. They don’t tell you why. And they don’t tell you why no other source can share that authority. The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT) tells you both.

Recall that Gavin argues from the nature of Scripture as inspired to it being “correspondingly unique in authority.” The AIT fills in what Ortlund’s “correspondingly” leaves unexplained. There isn’t an automatic inference from ontological uniqueness to normative uniqueness. That inference runs through the inscripturation of divine communicative attributes. And we can understand this through the causal method of the Reformed scholastic tradition.

A critical distinction is needed here. Standard inspiration doctrine, affirmed by Catholics and Protestants alike, holds that Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16), that the divine Spirit worked through human authors to produce an authoritative text. This is an efficient-causal claim: God acted on the authors to produce the text. The AIT is an exemplar-causal claim. Exemplar causality (causa exemplaris), which Aquinas calls a species of extrinsic formal causality, is the causality by which an agent’s nature or ideas serve as the pattern determining the character of what the agent produces. God is the “first exemplar cause of all things” (ST I, q. 44, a. 3): his essential perfections serve as the pattern in likeness to which the text’s intrinsic formal character (causa formalis intrinseca) is determined. The result is a text whose inherent character reflects the essential perfections of the Author, not because those perfections become part of the text (Aquinas explicitly condemns that as the Almarician heresy in ST I, q. 3, a. 8), but because they determine what kind of text the efficient cause produces. This distinction matters because the Catholic interlocutor who says “we also affirm inspiration” is affirming efficient causality. The AIT is making a different and stronger claim: not just that God produced the text, but that God’s essential nature, functioning as the exemplar cause, determined what kind of text was produced.

According to the causal method, God as principal efficient cause produces a text whose intrinsic formal character, its inherent divine authority and truth, is determined by the essential perfections of the Author functioning as the exemplar cause. And that Speaker isn’t some bare theistic deity. It’s the God of Christian theology proper: omniscient, truthful, faithful, wise, good, loving, holy, righteous, self-existent, immutable, simple, omnipotent, sovereign, possessing his perfections essentially.

Though the AIT is a new thesis, it has classical Protestant pedigree. It’s a systematic development of a principle that Francis Turretin cashed out in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology. In the Second Topic on Holy Scripture, Turretin distinguishes causal relations regarding Scripture using the Aristotelian fourfold causal theory.³⁷ What Turretin provides is the architecture. What the AIT adds is the mechanism that makes the architecture able to bear the weight of ultimate normativity.

Turretin’s Causal Theory

The causa efficiens principalis (principal efficient cause) is God himself. God inspired the text. The human authors wrote by, “immediate inspiration and the internal impulse of the Holy Spirit by which the writers were influenced,” which “was to them in the place of command.”³⁸

These human authors are the causa efficiens instrumentalis (instrumental efficient cause). They’re the agents through which God produced the text. They’re genuine authors. They’re not stenographers. But their agency is subordinate to God’s primary authorship.

The causa formalis (formal cause) is the key to the AIT. This is what Turretin identifies as the divine authority and truth inherent in the text. Turretin defines this authority:

“The authority of Scripture ... is nothing else than the right and dignity of the sacred books, on account of which they are most worthy of faith with regard to those things which they propose to be believed and of our obedience in those things which they command us to omit or to do. The divine and infallible truth of these books (which have God for their author) is the foundation because he has the highest right to bind men to faith and duty.”³⁹

Notice what Turretin is saying. The authority of Scripture isn’t conferred on it from the outside. It’s inherent in the text because God is its author, and the divine truth of these books is the foundation of their binding power. The formal cause is what makes the text the kind of thing it is, which is a communication bearing the character of its divine Author.

The causa finalis (final cause) is the glory of God and the salvation of his people. Turretin identifies this among Scripture’s internal marks, “With regard to the end: the direction of all things to the glory of God alone and the holiness and salvation of men.”⁴⁰

The church enters the picture as a causa ministerialis in the process of recognition. Turretin is clear about what this means and what it doesn’t:

“The church is: (1) the keeper of the oracles of God ... (2) the guide ... (3) the defender ... (4) the herald ... (5) the interpreter ... But all these imply a ministerial only and not a magisterial power.”⁴¹

The church serves God’s purposes by identifying and receiving what God has given, but it contributes nothing to the authority of the text itself. Turretin insists that a triple distinction governs how we know Scripture’s divinity:

“The Bible with its own marks is the argument on account of which I believe. The Holy Spirit is the efficient cause and principle from which I am induced to believe. But the church is the instrument and means through which I believe.”⁴²

The objective ground is the text’s own marks. The efficient ground is the Spirit. The instrumental medium is the church. It follows that “we maintain that primarily and principally the Bible is believed by us to be divine on account of itself (or the marks impressed upon it), not on account of the church.”⁴³ Muller shows that the church’s subordination to Scripture wasn’t a polemical stance against Rome but a structural consequence of the causal theory itself. Because Scripture’s authority is inherent (formal cause from divine authorship), the church can only operate ministerially in its reception, interpretation, and defense.⁴⁴

A Note on Aquinas’s Causal Theory

A further precision strengthens the AIT’s Thomistic credentials. Aquinas distinguishes two modes of formal causality in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book V, lect. 2, §764): the causa formalis intrinseca (the form actually inhering in a thing, making it what it is) and the causa formalis extrinseca or causa exemplaris (the pattern in the agent’s mind in likeness to which the product is made). An architect’s blueprint is the exemplar cause. The built structure of the house is the intrinsic formal cause. Both are species of formal causality, but they’re categorically different, as one is in the agent, the other is in the product.

Aquinas insists that God cannot be the intrinsic formal cause of anything he produces. In ST I, q. 3, a. 8, he asks whether God enters into the composition of other things and answers in the negative, “It is not possible for God to enter into the composition of anything, either as a formal or a material principle.” His first argument establishes a strict metaphysical principle, “the efficient cause is not identical numerically with the form of the thing caused.” Even in univocal generation, where father and son share the same species, the father’s form isn’t numerically identical with the son’s. The agent determines what form the effect will have, but the agent never becomes that form.

Making God the intrinsic formal cause of creatures is what Aquinas identifies as the Almarician heresy (followers of Amalric of Bena). His reply to the objection that the Godhead is called “the being of all things” is, “The Godhead is called the being of all things as their efficient and exemplar cause, but not as being their essence“ (effective et exemplariter, non autem per essentiam). God is the efficient cause who produces things. God is the exemplar cause in whose likeness things are made. God is not the intrinsic form of the things he produces. The fourfold summary in q. 44, a. 4, ad 4 is revealing, “God is the efficient, the exemplar, and the final cause of all things.” The intrinsic formal cause is absent from this list. The intrinsic formal cause belongs to the product, not to the agent.⁴⁵

Applied to Scripture, God is the efficient cause who produced the text. God’s essential perfections are the exemplar cause (the pattern) that determined the text’s intrinsic formal character. And the text’s intrinsic formal character, what Turretin calls the causa formalis, is the text’s inherent divine truth and authority. The AIT’s claim is that the exemplar pattern can’t fail to produce perspicuity, sufficiency, inerrancy, and the rest, because the pattern is constituted by perfections God possesses essentially. This account isn’t a Protestant import. It’s Aquinas’s own causal architecture, deployed by the Reformed scholastics, and it sits at the foundation of the Thomistic metaphysics that Catholic theology officially endorses.

The Marks of Divinity

Turretin doesn’t treat the formal cause as an abstract theological claim disconnected from the text’s observable character. He argues that Scripture proves itself divine not only “authoritatively and in the manner of an artless argument or testimony, when it proclaims itself God-inspired (theopneuston)” but also “ratiocinatively by an argument artfully made (artificiali) from the marks which God has impressed upon the Scriptures and which furnish indubitable proof of divinity.”⁴⁶ God has impressed marks on the text. These marks are communicative impressions of divine perfections:

“The internal and the most powerful marks are also numerous. (1) With regard to the matter: the wonderful sublimity of the mysteries ... the holiness and purity of the precepts ... the certainty of the prophecies ... (2) With regard to the style: the divine majesty, shining forth no less from the simplicity than the weight of expression ... (3) With regard to the form: the divine agreement and entire harmony ... (4) With regard to the end: the direction of all things to the glory of God alone and the holiness and salvation of men. (5) With regard to the effects: the light and efficacy of the divine doctrine ... These criteria are such as cannot be found in any human writing.”⁴⁷

Turretin is tracing specific textual properties to the divine Author’s character:

• Sublimity of mysteries reflects omniscience and wisdom.

• Holiness of precepts reflects goodness and righteousness.

• Certainty of prophecy reflects sovereignty and faithfulness.

• Majesty of style reflects holiness and immutability.

• Harmony reflects the unity of the divine essence.

• Efficacy of doctrine reflects omnipotence.

These aren’t random. They are, as Turretin puts it, “rays of divinity” from the “Father of lights.” They’re communicative impressions of the divine nature on the text.

Further, Turretin argues that the bridge from Scripture’s inherent authority to its binding authority for us isn’t mediated by the church. It runs directly through these marks:

“As authority belongs to the genus of things related..., it should not be considered absolutely but relatively. Therefore Scripture cannot be authentic in itself without being so as to us. For the same arguments which prove it authoritative in itself ought to induce us to assent to its authenticity as to us.”⁴⁸

There’s no gap between what Scripture is (ontology) and what it is for us (normativity). The same formal cause that makes it divine makes it binding.

What Turretin Provides and What the AIT Adds

I need to be clear about the boundary. What I just shared might give the impression that Turretin systematically connected these elements. He didn’t. Turretin provides materials. The AIT provides the systematic connection between them.

In his Second Topic, Turretin treats three things separately:

1. The Causal Method (Q’s 2-4, 6): God as efficient cause, the text’s formal cause as inherent divine authority and truth, and the church’s ministerial role.

2. The Marks or Notae (Q4, para. IX): the observable evidences of divinity I just listed, including sublimity, holiness, prophetic certainty, harmony, and efficacy.

3. The Affectiones Scripturae or Properties of Scripture (Q’s 5-18): authority (auctoritas), necessity (necessitas), sufficiency (sufficientia), perspicuity or clarity (perspicuitas), and efficacy (efficacia).⁴⁹

These affectiones are doctrinal properties that Turretin predicates directly of the text. Scripture is sufficient. Scripture is clear. Scripture is authoritative. They’re textual attributes. As such, they’re either identical with or specifications of the causa formalis. They unpack what it means for a text to bear inherent divine authority and truth.

But Turretin doesn’t place the affectiones within the causal method. He treats them in separate questions. He treats them as doctrinal commitments about Scripture without systematically grounding each one in a specific cluster of divine perfections from theology proper. And he doesn’t draw a line from the marks (apologetic evidences) through the formal cause (the text’s inherent character) to the affectiones (the specific doctrinal properties). The marks, the formal cause, and the affectiones sit in different parts of his treatment. They’re related, but the relation isn’t made explicit.

This is the gap the AIT fills. And it’s a systematic development, not just a cashing out of what Turretin already said. The AIT takes the causal method (God as causa efficiens principalis produces a text bearing a causa formalis of inherent divine authority). It takes the theology proper (God’s communicative perfections are essential). And it takes the affectiones (the text’s specific doctrinal properties). Then it connects them through a mechanism: the supervenience of communicative qualities on the essential perfections of the divine communicator.

The AIT grounds the affectiones that Turretin affirmed in the theology proper that Turretin also affirmed. And it does this via the exemplar causality by which God’s essential perfections determine the text’s intrinsic formal character. Plus it shows that this grounding produces necessary rather than contingent entailments, as the divine perfections are essential rather than accidental. That’s the bridge from ontology to normativity, and it’s the AIT’s own contribution.

The argument flows as follows (note: this isn’t a formal deduction, just the rough outline of the argument):

1. God’s Nature: The full doctrine of God (thirteen essential communicative perfections)

2. God as Primary Author: causa efficiens principalis

3. Inscripturation of Divine Communicative Attributes: The text’s causa formalis (its inherent divine authority and truth, determined by God’s essential perfections functioning as the causa exemplaris)

4. Two Classes of Textual Properties (many-to-many structure):

   1. Intrinsic properties (belonging to the text in virtue of what it is): Inerrancy, Infallibility, Material Sufficiency, Formal Sufficiency, Completeness, Perspicuity, Efficacy, Unity

   2. Positional properties (describing the text’s normative standing relative to every other source): Necessity, Supreme Authority, Self-Authentication, Perpetuity

5. Fitness for Sole Ultimate Normativity: Scripture as the supreme normative perspective, with closure (ontological, epistemic, functional)

6. Sola Scriptura: The normative conclusion, including a disqualification argument showing that no rival candidate possesses the full complement of these properties

Before the thesis can do its work, we need to address two questions. First, what does the AIT require from the doctrine of God? Second, how do divine attributes produce textual properties? If we get these two questions right, the rest of the argument follows with the force of a deduction.

What the AIT Requires from the Doctrine of God

Everything depends on a key distinction. If God’s communicative perfections are essential properties, the entailments from divine attributes to textual properties are necessary, and the argument works. If they’re accidental, the entailments are contingent, and the argument collapses. So everything rides on whether omniscience, truthfulness, faithfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, holiness, righteousness, aseity, immutability, simplicity, omnipotence, and sovereignty are essential or accidental properties of God.

These thirteen perfections organize into two tiers.

The first tier consists of eight primary communicative perfections: attributes that directly govern the character of any communicative act God performs. These are omniscience, truthfulness, faithfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, holiness, and righteousness. They primarily ground the intrinsic textual properties (inerrancy, infallibility, material sufficiency, formal sufficiency, completeness, perspicuity, efficacy, unity).

The second tier consists of five metaphysical perfections with direct communicative consequences: attributes of God’s being that determine the normative standing of anything God produces. These are aseity, immutability, simplicity, omnipotence, and sovereignty. They primarily ground the positional textual properties (necessity, supreme authority, self-authentication, perpetuity). The primary communicative perfections determine what the text is. The metaphysical perfections determine where the text stands relative to every other normative source. Both are essential, so both sets of entailments hold with modal necessity.

An essential property is one a being possesses in every possible world in which it exists. An accidental property is one a being happens to possess but could lack without ceasing to be what it is. A brilliant mathematician possesses brilliance accidentally. She could be tired and write a bad proof. God possesses omniscience essentially. There’s no possible world in which God communicates and fails to exercise omniscience, as God without omniscience is not God.⁵⁰

This distinction is important. In his treatment of the divine attributes, John Feinberg argues that all of God’s attributes are essential predicates, “Remove or change any of God’s attributes and there would be no God.” He distinguishes these essential attributes from relational properties, such as being-thought-about, being-worshiped, and being Israel’s deliverer from Egypt. Those are accidental. They’re properties God might lack without ceasing to exist. These relational properties “don’t actually specify the constituents of God’s very being” but instead “reflect how we describe the various relations that creatures have with their creator.” It’s the permanent attributes of God’s being, not these relational properties, that constitute his essence.⁵¹

The AIT’s mechanism depends on this distinction. It’s the essential attributes of God’s being, not his contingent relational properties, that serve as the exemplar cause determining the text’s intrinsic formal character. The entailments from divine attributes to textual properties are necessary because the attributes are essential, not accidental.

The essentiality claim is strengthened by the doctrine that God is a necessary being. Feinberg argues that God exists in every possible world and that any attribute God possesses is part of his essential nature, “He could not be the being he is without those attributes.” If God is a necessary being whose attributes are all essential predicates, then in every possible world where God communicates, every essential perfection is operative. The entailments from perfections to textual properties hold across all possible worlds, not just in the actual one.⁵²

A Word on Divine Simplicity

The claim that God’s communicative perfections are essential properties is sometimes confused with, but is distinct from, the stronger claim of the classical Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS). The classical doctrine, as articulated by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, holds that God is radically without composition. God doesn’t just have his attributes but is his attributes, such that each attribute is identical to every other attribute and to the divine essence itself. Augustine’s formula is that God “is what he has” (quod habet hoc est).⁵³ DDS is a key commitment of Thomistic theology, and it has sophisticated contemporary defenders.⁵⁴ But it’s also highly contested. Significant theistic philosophers argue that DDS generates incoherence, especially the problem that if God is identical to each of his properties, and his properties are all identical to each other, then God is a single abstract property, which is incompatible with his being a concrete personal agent.⁵⁵

The AIT doesn’t require the strong identity thesis of classical DDS. It requires only the weaker claim that God’s communicative perfections are essential properties of God. They’re properties God possesses in every possible world in which he exists. This weaker claim is compatible with, but doesn’t depend on, the stronger identity thesis. A Thomist who affirms full DDS can embrace the AIT. If God is his omniscience, then omniscience is essential to God, and the entailments from divine attributes to textual properties hold with necessity. A Reformed epistemologist like Plantinga, who denies DDS while affirming that God is essentially omniscient, essentially truthful, and essentially good, can equally embrace the AIT. The argument trades on the essentiality of the perfections, not on their mutual identity.

To put things more precisely, the AIT requires there’s no possible world in which God communicates and any of his communicative perfections fail to be operative. Whether those perfections are identical to each other and to the divine essence, as Thomists hold, or are really distinct essential properties of a divine being who isn’t identical to any one of them, as many Reformed and analytic theists hold, or are formally distinct but really identical, as Scotists hold,⁵⁶ doesn’t affect the mechanism. What matters is that the perfections aren’t accidental, not defeasible, not contingently operative. They are essential. And because they are essential, the entailments from divine communicative attributes to textual properties are necessary entailments, not defeasible generalizations.

This is what distinguishes the AIT from older Protestant views that ground scriptural properties in descriptions of what God happens to do rather than in essential features of what God necessarily is. The grounding is in the doctrine of God, not in a contingent divine decision.⁵⁷

The doctrine of God gives us what we need. The question now becomes: how, exactly, do essential divine communicative attributes produce textual properties? The answer turns on a mechanism well established in contemporary analytic philosophy.

How the Mechanism Works

Here’s the move that makes the argument tick. It’s not a mysterious claim. It’s something we accept for every other type of communicator. Then we apply it with full rigor to the divine case. The mechanism is supervenience.

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form: “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference.”⁵⁸ Supervenience has been invoked across nearly all areas of philosophy. It’s been claimed that aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, that moral properties supervene on natural properties, and that mental properties supervene on physical properties.⁵⁹ The AIT applies this philosophical relation to a new domain: the communicative properties of a text supervene on the communicative attributes of its author.

Communication is a species of intentional action, and the qualities of any intentional action are determined, in large part, by the qualities of the agent performing it. When a brilliant mathematician writes a proof, the proof bears the marks of mathematical brilliance, not because brilliance was injected into the paper but because a brilliant mind expressed itself through the act of writing. When a deceptive person writes a letter, the letter bears the marks of deception, not because deception was poured into the ink but because a deceptive agent expressed himself communicatively. The relationship between communicator and communication isn’t one of mysterious transference. It’s one of expression. A communication bears the character it does because of the character of the communicator. The brilliance of the proof supervenes on the brilliance of the mathematician. No two proofs can differ in their quality of brilliance without differing in the intellectual qualities of their authors, as exercised in that proof. This is a supervenience relation, and it holds as a conceptual truth about what communication is.⁶⁰

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes an important observation about supervenience claims, they “do not merely say that it just so happens that there is no A-difference without a B-difference; they say that there cannot be one.” Supervenience claims have modal force.⁶¹

The kind of modal force matters. Weak supervenience holds in a single possible world. In this world, no two texts with the same author differ in communicative properties without differing in the author’s communicative attributes. Strong supervenience holds across possible worlds. In every possible world, no two texts with the same author differ in communicative properties without differing in the author’s attributes.⁶²

The AIT involves strong supervenience. And God’s essential perfections guarantee it. Because God’s communicative attributes are essential rather than accidental, the supervenience of textual properties on those attributes holds with metaphysical necessity, not mere nomological regularity. There’s no possible world in which God communicates and the resulting text fails to bear the communicative qualities that supervene on his perfections. The entailments hold across all possible worlds. This is because the base properties (God’s essential perfections) are present in all possible worlds in which God exists and communicates.

Applying Supervenience to Divine Communication

Now apply this to divine communication. If God is the primary communicator of a text, then the communicative character of that text will supervene on God’s communicative attributes, as the communicative character of any text supervenes on the attributes of its author. The text will be free from error because an omniscient being can’t communicate falsehoods through ignorance. The text will be truthful because a perfectly truthful being can’t deceive. The text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates exactly that. The text will be clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own purpose. The text will carry ultimate authority because a sovereign being’s speech carries the normative weight of sovereignty. The text will be self-authenticating because a self-existent being’s communication doesn’t depend on external validation for its standing. The text will be unified because a simple God whose perfections aren’t competing parts produces a coherent, non-contradictory canonical whole. And the text will be perpetually authoritative because an immutable God’s communicative act doesn’t diminish in authority or sufficiency over time. None of these are mysterious transfers. Every one is a logical entailment of what it means for a being with that attribute to communicate. If you grant the antecedent, the consequent follows by the ordinary logic of intentional action and expression. If you grant that God, with these attributes, is the primary communicator of this text, then the text necessarily bears these communicative qualities.

Supervenience, Not Reduction

A clarification is needed. Supervenience is related to but distinct from reduction. Reduction claims that A-properties just are B-properties, or that A-properties can be translated without remainder into B-properties. Supervenience makes a weaker but still powerful claim, namely A-properties are determined by and dependent on B-properties without being identical to them.⁶³ This matters for the AIT because I’m not claiming that textual properties reduce to divine attributes in a way that would collapse the text into God or make the text a piece of divinity. The text is a creaturely product. Its properties are creaturely properties. But those creaturely properties are determined by and dependent on the divine attributes of the Author whose essential perfections serve as the exemplar cause of the text’s inherent character.

Supervenience preserves the creator-creature distinction while maintaining the necessary connection between the character of the divine Author and the character of the text. The inscripturated properties are in the text as its causa formalis. But they’re there because of, and in dependence on, the essential perfections of the God who inscripturated them.

Why the Divine Case Is Unique

Now I need to mention the key point that separates the divine case from every human case. A brilliant mathematician can write a bad proof when tired or distracted. Human brilliance is a contingent and defeasible quality. But God’s perfections are essential, not accidental. God can’t fail to exercise his omniscience when he communicates, as omniscience is essential to God. He can’t fail to exercise his wisdom, as wisdom is essential to God. There’s no possible world in which God communicates and any essential perfection fails to be operative.⁶⁴ This is why the entailments from divine attributes to textual properties are necessary. And this is also why the many-to-many structure I’ll describe in Part 3 holds. It holds because the divine perfections can’t be exercised in isolation when God communicates. When God communicates, all of his essential perfections are operative together, and the textual properties they produce interpenetrate and mutually implicate one another.

The Objection from Human Authorship

An objection naturally arises, “But human authors wrote these texts. Their limitations should determine the communicative character, not God’s perfections.” The answer turns on the distinction between primary and secondary authorship. When we say God is the primary author of Scripture, as Dei Verbum, Trent, Vatican I, and the Catechism all affirm, we’re saying God’s communicative intentionality is the governing intentionality of the text. The human authors are genuine authors, not stenographers. They contribute real authorial personality: vocabulary, style, literary form, emotional texture, historical perspective. But God as primary communicator ensures that his communicative attributes govern the communicative character of the result.

Think of it as analogous to how a master composer works through an orchestra. Each musician contributes genuine artistry, such as their particular tone, phrasing, dynamics. The resulting performance bears the marks of each individual musician. But the governing communicative intention is the composer’s, and the performance as a whole bears the character of the composer’s musical vision. The musicians are real agents, but their agency operates within the composer’s primary communicative intention.

Similarly, Paul still writes like Paul, John still writes like John, but their communicative agency is taken up into God’s primary communicative act so that the final product bears the communicative qualities that flow from God’s nature. This isn’t the dictation theory. The human authors’ limitations aren’t erased. But they’re governed by the primary communicator’s attributes so that the communicative character of the text is determined by God’s nature, not by human limitations.

In the terms of the Reformed scholastic theory, the human authors are the causa efficiens instrumentalis: the instrumental efficient cause through whom God as causa efficiens principalis produces the text, whose resulting causa formalis is its inherent divine authority and truth.⁶⁵

The Objection from Human Instrumentality

A Thomist might object with the axiom quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur: whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. Human language is finite, culturally embedded, and ambiguous. Even if God’s perfections serve as the exemplar pattern, human language can only receive the resulting form according to its own capacity. The objection misunderstands divine concursus.

God as omniscient and omnipotent doesn’t merely use human instruments. He determines their adequacy. God providentially prepared the human authors, their languages, and their literary conventions to serve as adequate receivers of the communicative form he intended. The Reformed scholastics consistently maintained that divine providence includes particular, immediate concurrence with secondary causes. The quidquid recipitur principle is satisfied. The instruments received the divine communicative form according to their mode, and their mode was providentially fitted to the task.

The human authors contribute genuine formal dimensions (genre, rhetoric, literary structure), but God as primary efficient cause governs the instrumental causes with respect to the full communicative intention. An omniscient primary Author who selects, prepares, and concurs with his instruments doesn’t allow the instruments to introduce deficiencies that frustrate the communication. The instrumental formal contributions are real. They don’t, and can’t, override the exemplar pattern.⁶⁶

Inscripturation and the Incorporeality of God

A natural worry arises about how an incorporeal God inscripturates perfections into a material text. Feinberg’s treatment of God as pure spirit addresses this directly. Though God’s essential nature is immaterial, “that does not preclude him from making his presence known through some physical phenomenon that manifests his presence.” God as creator of matter and spirit “certainly ought to be able to supply whatever matter he needs on any occasion to manifest his presence.” Physical manifestations of God don’t alter or diminish his being. The physical things “do not become part of God’s permanent essential nature.”⁶⁷ The same logic applies to inscripturation. When God produces a material text through human instrumental authors, the text bears inscripturated perfections without those perfections being “used up” or altered by the process. The divine perfections serve as the exemplar cause determining the text’s intrinsic formal character, just as God’s presence is communicated through physical manifestations, without diminishment of the divine being. The text is a creaturely medium bearing divine communicative properties, not a piece of divinity detached from God.

Conclusion: The Foundation Laid

The mechanism is now identified. Communication by a divine agent with essential perfections necessarily produces a text bearing communicative qualities that supervene on those perfections. This isn’t a magical leap. It’s the ordinary logic of agent-expression applied to a unique agent.

I’ve done three things in this article. I’ve presented the Canon Conundrum at full strength, showing that the Catholic challenge has three distinct fangs, each pressing a different consequence of the same observation that canonical identification required extra-Scriptural resources: the logical priority claim, the fallible collection problem, and the institutional fact thesis. I’ve looked at Gavin Ortlund’s gambit, his argument from ontological uniqueness to normative ultimacy, and identified the gap, which is the missing mechanism that explains how God’s nature produces the specific textual properties that make Scripture fit to serve as the supreme normative perspective for theological inquiry. And I’ve introduced the Attribute Inscripturation Thesis, grounded it in Turretin’s causal theory and the doctrine of God, and identified the supervenience mechanism by which essential divine communicative perfections produce necessary textual properties, distinguishing the AIT’s exemplar-causal claim from the bare efficient causality of standard inspiration doctrine.

As we’ll see, the AIT generates a single diagnostic question that can be put to every Catholic objection to Sola Scriptura, “Which divine perfection failed?” Every time the Catholic denies one of Scripture’s textual properties, whether sufficiency, perspicuity, self-authentication, or any other, that denial requires the implicit assertion that one or more of God’s essential communicative perfections failed in the inscripturation process. That’s a claim with huge theological cost, and it’s a cost the Catholic must bear on their own metaphysical commitments.

The foundation is laid. But the thesis has a further structural feature that gives it its distinctive power. The entailments aren’t one-to-one. They’re many-to-many. Part 2 deploys the AIT against the Canon Conundrum. Part 3 develops the full mapping. And that’s where the argument goes to the next level.

Notes

1. Patrick Madrid, “Sola Scriptura: A Blueprint for Anarchy,” in Robert A. Sungenis, ed., Not by Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura, 2nd ed. (Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, 2013), 20.

2. Joe Heschmeyer, “The Protestant Canon REBUTTED (Gavin Ortlund, Cleave to Antiquity and Javier Perdomo),” Shameless Popery (podcast), July 3, 2025.

3. Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Canon Press, 2001); John C. Peckham, Canonical Theology: The Biblical Canon, Sola Scriptura, and Theological Method (Eerdmans, 2016); Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Crossway, 2024).

4. Council of Trent, Session IV (April 8, 1546), “Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures.”

5. Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (Basilica Press, 1997 edition), 419.

6. Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 420.

7. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” in Sungenis, ed., Not by Scripture Alone, 246-47.

8. Madrid, “Sola Scriptura: A Blueprint for Anarchy,” in Sungenis, ed., Not by Scripture Alone, 21.

9. Philip Blosser, “What are the Philosophical Problems of Sola Scriptura?” in Sungenis, ed., Not by Scripture Alone, 48.

10. R. C. Sproul, “Sola Scriptura: Crucial to Evangelicalism,” in Don Kistler, ed., Sola Scriptura! The Protestant Position on the Bible (Soli Deo Gloria, 1995), 66.

11. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 254.

12. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 254.

13. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 254 n. 96.

14. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 255.

15. Philip Blosser, “What are the Philosophical Problems of Sola Scriptura?,” 57.

16. Philip Blosser, “What are the Philosophical Problems of Sola Scriptura?,” 57.

17. Philip Blosser, “What are the Philosophical Problems of Sola Scriptura?,” 57.

18. For a key philosophical view of institutional facts, see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995), especially chapter 2 on constitutive rules and the formula “X counts as Y in context C.”

19. Patrick Madrid, “Sola Scriptura: A Blueprint for Anarchy,” 20.

20. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 257.

21. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” 258.

22. Philip Blosser, “What are the Philosophical Problems of Sola Scriptura?,” 48.

23. Hermann Ridderbos, as cited in David Dunbar, “The Biblical Canon,” in D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (Zondervan, 1986), 359-60, and referenced in Sungenis, Not by Scripture Alone, 256.

24. Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Crossway, 2024).

25. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 76.

26. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 76-77.

27. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 78.

28. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 78.

29. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 79.

30. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 81.

31. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 73.

32. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 84-85.

33. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 72.

34. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 88.

35. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 88.

36. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 89-90.

37. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison Jr. (P&R Publishing, 1992), Second Topic, Questions 2-4 and 6.

38. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 3, Section III.

39. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 4, Section III.

40. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 4, Section IX, point 4.

41. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 6.

42. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 6, Section VI.

43. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 6.

44. Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2003), esp. Section 4.1.

45. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book V, lect. 2, no. 764; Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 8 (including ad 1); I, q. 44, a. 3; I, q. 44, a. 4, ad 4.

46. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 4, Section VI; cf. Question 6, Section XVIII.

47. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 4, Section IX.

48. Turretin, Institutes, Second Topic, Question 6, Section III.

49. Turretin treats the affectiones Scripturae across his Second Topic, including authority (Q's 4, 6), necessity (Q's 1-2), sufficiency (Q. 16), and perspicuity (Q. 17), with efficacy appearing as an internal mark in Q. 4, Section IX.

50. See Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Clarendon Press, 1974), chap. 5.

51. John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Crossway, 2001), 234-235.

52. Feinberg, No One Like Him, 211.

53. Augustine, De Civitate Dei XI.10.

54. See Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, "Absolute Simplicity," Faith and Philosophy 2, no. 4 (1985): 353-82; Jeffrey E. Brower, "Making Sense of Divine Simplicity," Faith and Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2008): 3-30; Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992); James E. Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).

55. Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Marquette University Press, 1980), 47. See also Thomas V. Morris, "On God and Mann: A View of Divine Simplicity," Religious Studies 21, no. 3 (1985): 299-318; Christopher Hughes, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God (Cornell University Press, 1989).

56. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, d. 8; Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God (Ashgate, 2005), esp. 111.

57. This is the AIT's distinctive contribution.

58. Brian McLaughlin and Karen Bennett, "Supervenience," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2021 edition). Cf. Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 53-78.

59. McLaughlin and Bennett, "Supervenience."

60. This is my application of the supervenience relation to communicative action. Such a move stems from considering speech acts as intentional acts. For more on intentional action, see Donald Davidson, "Agency," in Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, 1980), 43-61. Davidson broadly supports my extension to communicative action.

61. McLaughlin and Bennett, "Supervenience."

62. See Kim, Supervenience and Mind, 58, 65; McLaughlin and Bennett, "Supervenience."

63. McLaughlin and Bennett, "Supervenience."

64. See Turretin, Institutes, Third Topic, Question 1.

65. See Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2017), s.v. "causa efficiens," 55-56; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 62, a. 1.

66. On divine concursus, see Turretin, Institutes, Sixth Topic, Question 5; Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (Allen and Unwin, 1950), chap. 11. On the quidquid recipitur axiom, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 5; I-II, q. 1, a. 2.

67. Feinberg, No One Like Him, 220.