Did Heschmeyer Misread the AIT?

5 Distinctions That Put the AIT Back on the Table (Part 1 of 2)

Joe Heschmeyer put out a thoughtful video wrestling with my Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT).¹ He calls it a “brand new” argument that surprised him. He raises serious questions. And he closes graciously, applauding what he calls my honesty in admitting holes in Protestant theories, while saying he doesn’t think the AIT gets Protestants any closer to filling those holes.

I think it does. And I think most of Joe’s questions about how it works are aimed at a simplified version of the argument rather than the actual one. The compression is understandable. Joe’s summarizing a multi-part series for a popular audience. But the simplifications cost the argument its modal precision, its causal mechanism, its scope-restriction, and its kind-correspondence principle. Once those features are back in view, the questions Joe raises start to find their answers.

This article is the companion to my Part 1 video reply.² Three concessions before the pushback. First, I framed one part of my original AIT video too strongly. I called the connection between divine attributes and textual properties a logical gap that nobody had bridged. The Reformed scholastics gestured at the connection, even if they didn’t formalize it. Bavinck, Vos, Webster, Muller, Ortlund, Mathison, Kruger, Peckham. They’ve all done real work in this territory.³ What’s distinctive about the AIT is not that it’s the first to see the connection, but that it specifies the metaphysical mechanism (exemplar causation) and modal force (conditional necessity) that the prior work pointed to without formalizing.

Second, my published version didn’t make the audience-scope condition explicit enough.⁴ The maximalist scope is operative in the argument’s antecedent, but I should have stated it as a premise rather than letting it ride implicitly.

Third, when I said “nobody questioned” the application of the inference pattern, I overstated. Joe questioned it. So have others. The AIT survives the questions, but the framing was too strong.

With those concessions on the table, here are the five distinctions.

Below is the video version of this article.

Distinction 1: Logical Gap vs. Metaphysical Gap

Joe opens his video by playing a clip from my original AIT video, which is simplified version of the full argument. He summarizes the gap I was pointing to as a “logical gap.” Reasonable shorthand for popular consumption. But it sets up an expectation that what’s needed is a missing logical inference. That’s not the gap I had in mind.

What I actually said in the original video was different. I talked about a missing mechanism, an inference asserted but never fully explained. The gap is metaphysical. It’s about what causal pathway connects God’s nature to Scripture’s properties.⁵

Even granting everything Gavin Ortlund’s empirical elimination argument delivers,⁶ three things remain that the AIT delivers and existing arguments don’t.

Property-Grounding

Why does Scripture have the textual properties that fit it for ultimate normativity? It has properties such as sufficiency, perspicuity, self-authentication, and so on. Gavin’s elimination argument shows no rival has comparable infallibility. It doesn’t ground the constellation of textual properties Scripture itself possesses.

Modal-Grounding

With what modal force does the conclusion hold? Empirical elimination delivers a contingent conclusion. It depends on the historical record holding up under scrutiny, which Catholic apologists dispute. The conclusion holds, but with empirical-historical force, not metaphysical necessity. AIT offers that necessity.

Mechanism-Specification

What mechanism connects God’s nature to Scripture’s properties? Gavin says Scripture is “correspondingly unique in authority” because it’s “unique in nature.”⁷ That asserts a connection but doesn’t specify the causal pathway.

The AIT delivers all three. Property-grounding through the perfection-to-property mapping. Modal-grounding through necessitas conditionata, the conditional necessity Aquinas develops.⁸ Mechanism-specification through exemplar causation operating with kind-correspondence on a theopneustic communicative act. The existing arguments do real work, especially Gavin’s empirical elimination. But none delivers all three contributions.

An Internal Critique

The AIT offers what philosophers call internal critique. It works from premises Catholics already affirm. Classical theism on essential divine perfections. Dei Verbum 11 on God being the primary author of Scripture.⁹ Thomistic exemplar causality made foundational by Aeterni Patris.¹⁰ The rejection of the Almarician heresy at Lateran IV.¹¹ The first three are de fide. The Catholic can’t deny them without abandoning dogmatic commitments. So while many of Joe’s moves engage the AIT on biblical and historical grounds, the core mechanism isn’t biblical or historical. It’s metaphysical. Even if every biblical and historical exchange ended in a draw, the AIT’s metaphysical engine keeps running, as that engine is built on premises both sides affirm.

Distinction 2: Positive vs. Negative Argument

Joe describes the AIT as trying to prove sola scriptura. He’s partly right and partly off. He’s right that I’m working toward a defense of sola scriptura. He’s off on what the AIT itself does within that defense. The AIT proper isn’t the whole argument for sola scriptura. It’s one piece of a two-piece architecture.

The AIT is a metaphysical thesis. It’s the positive mechanism that goes from who God is to the character of what he’s authored. The output is a list of textual properties Scripture possesses, such as sufficiency, perspicuity, self-authentication, supreme authority, necessity, and perpetuity. These are properties Scripture has. They aren’t yet claims about Scripture being the only normative authority.

What gets you to the “alone” part is a separate argument. Sola scriptura is a universal-negative claim. 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.¹²

Three distinct things are happening. The positive qualification is the claim that Scripture is ontologically unique, namely that it alone is God-breathed. Catholics affirm this. The AIT’s textual properties are claims about what follows from that uniqueness through exemplar causation. Catholics affirm some of these, such as inerrancy, material sufficiency, and supreme authority in some sense. They deny others as the AIT specifies them, particularly formal sufficiency, perspicuity in the salvation-relevant Reformed sense, and self-authentication. The negative exclusion is the universal-negative claim that no other source shares Scripture’s supreme normative role. Catholics deny this too.

The AIT addresses the first issue directly regarding the textual properties. The second issue concerning the universal negative)needs a separate argument, which is what the disqualification argument handles. The disqualification argument shows no rival possesses the same exemplar-causal grounding because no rival has the theopneustos relation. The “sola” comes from the disqualification argument, not from the AIT alone.¹³

This matters for how you read the rest of Joe’s video. Several of his questions assume the AIT is doing the whole job. Once you see it’s doing only the positive half, those questions find their answers.

Distinction 3: Wide vs. Narrow Scope Necessity

Joe’s gloss of the AIT says, “Since God is the author of Scripture, then Scripture will necessarily reflect certain divine attributes.”¹⁴ Notice where the necessity sits. In Joe’s gloss, it attaches to the consequent only. “If God authors Scripture, then necessarily the text reflects divine attributes.” That’s narrow scope.

The AIT doesn’t claim the narrow-scope reading. It claims the wide-scope reading. The necessity operator, the box, sits at the front of the whole conditional. Necessarily, if God authors Scripture, then Scripture has these textual properties. The whole conditional is metaphysically necessary, not just the consequent.¹⁵

This isn’t logic-chopping. It’s where Joe’s question-begging charge comes from, and the wide-scope reading is what dissolves it.

On the narrow-scope reading, the necessity attaches to the consequent. The question becomes which possible worlds count when we evaluate the antecedent. There’s no operator specifying that we range over all possible worlds. Joe reads the narrow-scope claim as only holding if you implicitly restrict the worlds to ones where God communicates with the Bible alone. If a possible world includes the Magisterium alongside Scripture, you don’t get sola scriptura out of the conditional. So to get sola scriptura out of a narrow-scope reading, you have to assume what you want to prove. Joe is right that, on the narrow-scope reading, the inference begs the question. The problem is the narrow-scope reading isn’t what the AIT claims.

The AIT has the modal operator taking wide scope. The whole conditional is necessary. The modal range isn’t determined by which worlds I select. Wherever the antecedent obtains in any world, the consequent follows by metaphysical necessity through exemplar causation. The whole conditional is grounded in metaphysics Catholics share. Those grounds hold independent of the conditional. They don’t presuppose sola scriptura.

Connecting this back to Distinction 2, the wide-scope reading doesn’t try to give you sola scriptura. It gives you sufficiency, perspicuity, self-authentication, and the other textual properties. The “sola” part comes from the disqualification argument showing no rival could possess the full range of positional properties. The “alone” part doesn’t come from restricting modal ranges in the wide-scope claim. It comes from showing no rival has the same exemplar-causal grounding.

Distinction 4: Generic Supervenience vs. Exemplar Causation

The modal piece is one half of the misreading. The other half is what the conditional actually says. Joe’s gloss compresses four things that matter. Once those are back in view, the actual claim looks very different from the one Joe is targeting.

The word generating the problem in Joe’s gloss is “reflect.” It makes the AIT sound like a generic supervenience claim, namely that effects reflect their causes in some loose family-resemblance way. The actual AIT isn’t generic supervenience. It’s a specific claim with four pieces.

First, let’s look at the antecedent. It isn’t just “God authors Scripture.” It’s “God freely chooses to author a canonical communicative act for the salvation of fallen humanity.”¹⁶ The audience-scope is built in. The salvific purpose is built in. The conditional isn’t about every text God might produce in every possible world. It’s about a specific kind of communicative act, namely the canonical written deposit God authors for fallen humanity’s salvation across redemptive history.

Second, let’s focus on the consequent. It isn’t just “Scripture reflects divine attributes.” Two tiers of perfections do two different kinds of work. The kind-corresponding Tier 1 communicative perfections (i.e., omniscience, truthfulness, faithfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, holiness, righteousness) determine the act’s communicative properties (i.e., sufficiency in both material and formal senses, perspicuity, inerrancy, infallibility, completeness, efficacy, unity). The kind-corresponding Tier 2 metaphysical perfections (i.e., aseity, immutability, simplicity, omnipotence, sovereignty) determine the act’s positional standing (i.e., necessity, supreme authority, self-authentication, perpetuity). The mapping between perfections and properties is many-to-many.¹⁷

Third is the mechanism. It’s exemplar causation specifically, not generic supervenience. Aquinas develops exemplar causation as a precise kind of formal causality where the agent’s nature serves as the pattern in whose likeness the product is made.¹⁸ The product bears properties whose character is determined by the pattern, without becoming the pattern. Generic supervenience says effects reflect causes. Exemplar causation says how.

Fourth is kind-correspondence. It restricts which perfections transfer to which dimensions of the product. Communicative perfections determine communicative properties. Metaphysical perfections determine positional standing. A turnip isn’t a communicative act, so the communicative perfections don’t apply to it along the relevant dimensions. I’ll come back to this in Distinction 5.

A more accurate version of the AIT reads:

AIT: Necessarily, if God freely chooses to author a canonical communicative act for the salvation of fallen humanity, then via exemplar causation the kind-corresponding Tier 1 communicative perfections determine the act’s communicative properties, and the kind-corresponding Tier 2 metaphysical perfections determine the act’s positional standing.

That’s a sentence with specific perfections doing specific work on specific properties through a specific mechanism with a specific scope-restriction principle.

The collapse into generic supervenience isn’t accidental. The vague gloss does work for Joe later in the video. He grants the gloss as a claim Catholics can affirm. Then he uses the vague claim to set up his next moves, including the turnip parody. The turnip parody works against generic supervenience. It fails against the actual AIT.

Distinction 5: Kind-Correspondence vs. Literal Transcription

Setting Aside the Aquinas Worry

A quick note on a methodological worry first. Joe charges that I’m misusing Aquinas because Aquinas in Summa Theologiae I, q. 44, a. 3 is talking about creation in general, not Scripture specifically. The reply is brief. The question isn’t whether Aquinas wrote about the Bible in this particular passage. It’s whether the theory Aquinas developed applies to the Bible. That’s how applied metaphysics works. A philosopher develops a general account of how some kind of causation operates. Other philosophers apply that account to particular cases the original philosopher didn’t address. The application can be evaluated on its own merits.¹⁹

The Turnip Parody

Now to the substantive engagement. Joe’s deepest worry, which comes up in the turnip parody, is that the AIT collapses divine perfections into properties of created things. That worry would be correct against a view I reject. It doesn’t apply to the AIT.

God’s attributes aren’t literally transcribed into Scripture. That would make God’s essence part of Scripture and run afoul of the Almarician heresy. Aquinas explicitly condemns that view at Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 8. As Aquinas puts it, “The Godhead is called the being of all things as their efficient and exemplar cause, but not as being their essence.”²⁰

The AIT respects this distinction. The result is a text whose inherent character reflects the essential perfections of the Author, not because those perfections become part of the text, but because they determine what kind of text the efficient cause produces. 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.²¹

So the AIT isn’t claiming Scripture is omniscient, or omnipotent, or self-existent. It’s claiming Scripture has the textual analogues of those perfections. Sufficiency for what omniscience knows is needed. Perspicuity for what omnipotence can effect through wisdom and love. Self-authentication for what aseity grounds. Kind-correspondence means the form of Scripture’s properties tracks the kind of thing Scripture is, while the source of those properties is the divine perfections operating as exemplar cause.

This is also where Joe’s turnip example gets answered. Joe says, “God is the exemplar and efficient cause of all things, of Scripture, yes, but also of a turnip. So if you believe my arguments, they seem to prove too much. You’d have to say not only that the Bible must be self-authenticating, but also that a turnip must be.”²²

The turnip parody removes the kind-frame. Exemplar causation transfers properties from agent to product along the dimensions appropriate to the kind of product it is. The architect’s blueprint shapes the building’s geometry, not the architect’s biography. The composer’s musical conception shapes the symphony’s harmonic structure, not the composer’s height. A turnip isn’t a communicative act. The communicative perfections don’t apply to it because turnips don’t have a communicative-act dimension. Turnips bear other divine perfection correspondent properties along the dimensions appropriate to turnip-kind, such as biological order. organic integrity, etc.. But not sufficiency, perspicuity, self-authentication, or the other AIT properties. Those are properties of communicative acts.

The Diagnostic Question

Once these five distinctions are on the table, the AIT generates a single diagnostic question for every Catholic objection. Which divine perfection failed?

If you deny perspicuity, you’re saying wisdom and love failed to communicate clearly on what matters most. If you deny sufficiency, you’re saying wisdom and goodness failed to include everything needed in the act they fully determined. If you deny self-authentication, you’re saying aseity failed to produce a text with intrinsic authority. Each denial carries a real cost in the doctrine of God, and the costs compound when multiple denials are made.²³

Conclusion

Each of these five distinctions is independent, and each speaks to a specific question Joe raises. Together they put the AIT back on the table. The gap is metaphysical, not just logical, and the argument that closes it works from premises Catholics already affirm. The argument is two-piece, with the AIT doing only the positive half. The modal scope is wide, not narrow. The conditional is specified, not generic. And the kind-correspondence principle blocks the parodies, with the application of Aquinas to Scripture being methodologically standard.

With all of that in place, the substantive question becomes the diagnostic one. When the Catholic denies one of Scripture’s textual properties, which divine perfection do they say isn’t operating as essential? That’s the question I press in Part 2 of the video reply, where I work through Joe’s specific objections one by one.

Notes

1. Joe Heschmeyer, “This Brand New Sola Scriptura Argument Surprised Me...,” Shameless Popery (YouTube), May 5, 2026.

2. Christopher Cloos, “Part 1: Five Distinctions Clarifying What the AIT Actually Claims,” The Protestant Philosopher (YouTube), 2026.

3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2003); Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. (Lexham Press, 2014); John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2003); Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Crossway, 2024); Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Canon Press, 2001); Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Crossway, 2012); John C. Peckham, Canonical Theology: The Biblical Canon, Sola Scriptura, and Theological Method (Eerdmans, 2016).

4. Christopher Cloos, “Part 1: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis,” The Protestant Review (Substack), March 10, 2026, sec. “What the AIT Requires from the Doctrine of God.”

5. Cloos, “Part 1: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis,” sec. “Ortlund’s Gambit and Its Gap”: “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?”

6. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, esp. ch. 4. Ortlund’s empirical elimination argument runs through four grounds for thinking no other authority possesses comparable infallibility.

7. Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant, 78: “Sola Scriptura is simply the position that, as the Bible is unique in nature, so it is correspondingly unique in authority.”

8. On necessitas conditionata in Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 3; cf. III, q. 14, a. 2. The conditional necessity holds when, given the antecedent, the consequent follows by metaphysical necessity grounded in essential properties of the agent.

9. Vatican II, Dei Verbum §11: “Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”

10. Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (August 4, 1879), establishing Thomism as the foundational philosophy of Catholic theology and education.

11. Lateran IV (1215), Constitutions §2, condemning the Almarician position that God is the formal principle of all things. Aquinas develops the orthodox alternative at Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 8.

12. Cloos, “Part 1: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis,” sec. “Ortlund’s Gambit and Its Gap”: “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... A universal negative can’t follow from a positive qualification claim alone.”

13. The full elimination sub-derivation operates through joint distinctiveness of theopneustos exemplar grounding, uniqueness of theopneustos predication, and theorems in the integrated argument.

14. Heschmeyer, “This Brand New Sola Scriptura Argument…” Shameless Popery.

15. For the wide-scope vs. narrow-scope distinction in modal logic, see Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Clarendon Press, 1974), ch. 1. The standard treatment distinguishes the necessity of the consequence (□(p → q)) from the necessity of the consequent (p → □q).

16. The antecedent is fully specified at P11 as the canonical communicative act, namely the completed canonical deposit considered as a single integral whole composed of constitutive parts, with the individuation grounded in covenantal closure rather than Magisterial recognition.

17. For the full many-to-many mapping between thirteen divine perfections and twelve textual properties, see Cloos, “Part 3: The Full Mapping,” forthcoming. The two-tier perfection structure follows Aquinas’s account of the divine ideas at Summa Theologiae I, q. 15, a. 2; q. 44, a. 3.

18. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 44, a. 3, c.: “God is the first exemplar cause of all things.” On the distinction between causa formalis intrinseca (the form actually inhering in a thing) and causa formalis extrinseca or causa exemplaris (the pattern in the agent’s mind), see Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book V, lect. 2, para. 764. For the Doolan reconstruction of the exemplar-causal architecture, see Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Catholic University of America Press, 2008).

19. Applied metaphysics is methodologically standard. Aquinas himself develops his theory of substantial form in the abstract and applies it to angels (ST I, q. 50ff), plants and animals (ST I, q. 75ff), human beings (ST I, q. 75-89), sacraments (ST III, q. 60ff), and resurrection bodies (Suppl. q. 79ff), none of which Aristotle’s original development addressed.

20. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 8, ad 1: “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).

21. Cloos, “Part 1: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis,” sec. “Supervenience, Not Reduction”: “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.”

22. Heschmeyer, “This Brand New Sola Scriptura Argument…” Shameless Popery.

23. The compounding-cost claim rests on the many-to-many structure of the perfection-to-property mapping. Most textual properties are grounded in multiple perfections operating jointly, so denying any single property typically requires denying the joint operation of multiple perfections. See Cloos, “Part 2: The Canon Takes Care of Itself,” The Protestant Review (Substack), March 25, 2026, sec. “From Perfections to Properties to Marks.”