Did Heschmeyer Refute the AIT?

Responding to Heschmeyer on the AIT (Part 2 of 2)

In my first reply to Joe Heschmeyer, I clarified my Attribute Inscripturation Thesis (AIT) by introducing five distinctions Joe’s gloss on the AIT overlooked. In this final reply to Joe, I’ll work through his main objections.¹ Most of them go wrong in the same place. They treat the AIT’s mechanism as raw causation when it’s something narrower. One distinction does most of the defending and a second handles the rest.

Here’s the answer to the title up front and the road map. No, Joe didn’t refute the AIT, but he wasn’t shadowboxing either. He lands two genuine hits, my overstatement about Hebrews and the Luke preface, and I’ll grant both and show why they fall on the biblical-historical surface and leave the metaphysical engine untouched. The rest of his objections miss, and they miss for one recurring reason, they’re aimed at the AIT with its distinctions stripped off. So I’ll reassemble the real AIT, then take main objections in turn. I’ll also be clear about what this reply doesn’t do. It establishes Scripture’s properties, not the “alone,” which is the separate disqualification argument’s job, so where Joe presses hardest, on whether a Spirit-protected Church could share Scripture’s standing, he’s found where that next piece works, not a hole in this one. I’ll close with the five objections that recurred most under Joe’s video, since they show the same pattern from the other side. Once the distinctions are restored, the case thins to the one question: Which divine perfection failed?

Note: Above is the video version of this article.

Will the Real AIT Please Stand Up?

Let’s start by getting the real AIT back on the table. The AIT fills a gap in Protestant defenses of sola scriptura (SS). Apologists like Gavin Ortlund and Wes Huff argue that since Scripture is ontologically unique, as it is God-breathed, it is correspondingly unique in authority.² It’s uniquely fit to serve as the ultimate norm of Christian faith and practice. But what’s the mechanism that bridges that gap? God is the cause of Scripture, but God being what philosophers call the efficient cause of Scripture doesn’t quite capture it. God is the efficient cause of rocks, and rocks don’t have normative ultimacy. God is also the formal cause of Scripture, in that he causes it to have the character it has. But God is the formal cause of humans too, since we’re made in his image and likeness, and that doesn’t make us normatively ultimate.

That last case is worth pausing on, as it leads to a parallel claim about the Church. If divine likeness were enough to ground supreme authority, then humanity as the bearer of the imago Dei, and the Church as Christ’s Spirit-indwelt body, would seem to qualify right alongside Scripture. So why don’t they?

The answer is that the imago Dei is God’s likeness placed in a creature, while the property I’m after in Scripture comes from God’s authorship of a communicative act. Those are different relations, and they hand down different things. The image makes humans rational, moral, and relational, a likeness along the dimensions proper to persons. It doesn’t make a human’s words God’s words. A human is a secondary agent who himself speaks, and errs, and stands under judgment. Scripture’s distinctive feature isn’t that it is God-like. It’s that it is theopneustos, God-breathed, with God as its primary author. No human, and no council, is that. I’ll come back to the Church specifically, since it’s the harder case.

In setting out the AIT, we start with who God is (i.e., the doctrine of God). God possesses certain perfections. Those perfections include things like omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, wisdom, and love. Scripture is a communicative act. It involves God doing things with words to accomplish a particular goal, and that goal is ultimately the salvation of fallen humanity. God uses language to communicate and achieve that purpose. When God freely chose to communicate through a text, he put into Scripture what he wanted to communicate. He didn’t put himself literally into Scripture, since Scripture isn’t divine.³ Rather, when God acts, he acts from all of who he is. His attributes are the pattern after which Scripture bears properties that are the analogue of those attributes. God is the exemplar cause of Scripture.⁴ It’s patterned after who God is, and there’s a mapping from God’s attributes to the corresponding textual properties. For instance, given that God is wise and loving, he doesn’t withhold content necessary to communicate his salvific purpose for fallen humanity. It wouldn’t be wise or loving for him to do so. God is perfectly and essentially wise and loving, so Scripture is materially sufficient. It contains all the content necessary to achieve his communicative purpose. God’s attributes map onto many textual properties, including formal sufficiency, self-authentication, infallibility, and so on.

The full inventory is thirteen textual properties, eight of them intrinsic and five of them positional. Intrinsic properties describe what the text is in itself. The intrinsic eight are inerrancy, infallibility, material sufficiency, formal sufficiency, completeness, perspicuity, efficacy, and unity. Positional properties describe where Scripture stands in relation to other possible authorities. The positional five are sole sufficiency, supreme authority, self-authentication, perpetuity, and indefectibility.

I’m going to keep this section short on the inventory itself, since the full mapping from divine perfections to each property is the work of Part 3, and what I need here is just that the inventory exists and is structured. Joe’s objections engage a few of these directly, namely material sufficiency, perspicuity, supreme authority, and self-authentication. And the diagnostic question applies to each of them.

A picture will help anchor the structure before the chain proper begins, since the perfections-to-properties relation can sound abstract on its own. Think of a seal pressed into wax. The wax doesn’t become the seal. But the wax bears, at its own level, an impression that corresponds in kind to the seal. The seal’s shape is reproduced in the wax as the wax’s shape, and only the shape, because shape is the kind of property a wax-impression can bear at its own creaturely level. That’s kind-correspondence in a physical analogy. Now substitute God’s perfections for the seal and Scripture for the wax. God’s perfections operate as exemplar in the theopneustos act of breathing out the text. The text doesn’t become God. But the text bears, at its own creaturely level, kind-corresponding marks of those perfections.

To mention a few connections, though not exhaustively. God’s wisdom patterns the text’s perspicuity. God’s truthfulness patterns the text’s inerrancy. God’s aseity patterns the text’s self-authentication and its underived supreme authority. God’s omnipotence and sovereignty pattern the text’s indefectibility. Joe’s objections, when framed around the seal-and-wax image, are objections to whether the wax actually bears the marks the seal would produce. The diagnostic question is whether the seal was operative. If it was, the marks are there, and Joe’s job is to name which perfection was not operative or which mark failed to take.

Here a further restriction does work. It’s the one that keeps the imago Dei and the Church from sliding into the picture. Exemplar causation hands down properties along the dimensions appropriate to the kind of thing the product is. I call this kind-correspondence. The communicative perfections, such as truthfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, determine the communicative properties of a communicative act. They have nothing in, say, a turnip to characterize. A turnip isn’t a communicative act. And they don’t transmit to a person or an institution the way they transmit to God’s own speech. A person’s words are his speech and an institution’s teaching is its teaching, ministerially exercised. By contrast, Scripture is God’s speech, authored by him as primary agent. So the mapping isn’t “anything God causes inherits divine standing.” It’s “a communicative act God authors bears the communicative and positional properties its Author’s perfections determine for an act of that kind.”

This is also why it matters that Scripture comes to bear these properties intrinsically. Scripture doesn’t merely reflect, or possess by participation, these properties the way a creature images God. It bears them as properties of the act itself, determined by exemplar causation, possessed in virtue of who authored it. That’s the difference between the image and theopneustos authorship, again. The image is a likeness God places in a creature. The textual properties are features the communicative act simply has, in itself. That’s why the Church’s authority, though real and Christ-given, is derivative rather than coordinate or on-a-par. The Church exercises authority on a deposit whose properties it does not confer and can’t revoke. Its authority is relational to Scripture. Scripture’s authority is not relational to it.⁵ Two things can both be genuine authorities and still be ranked, as one bears its standing intrinsically and the other is conferred to steward what it did not author.

That ranking is the key. Scripture possessing all of those properties explains why it has unique authority over faith and practice, and why Scripture alone possesses that constellation of properties such that it alone is suited to serve as the norm that norms but isn’t itself normed,⁶ which is to say it’s normatively ultimate over faith and practice. Other norms, like Church and tradition, have authority, but they don’t possess the properties that would make them normatively ultimate. Their authority is subordinate to Scripture’s. This is the way the AIT is the foundation for sola scriptura. It bridges the gap from Scripture being uniquely God-breathed to Scripture being uniquely authoritative over faith and practice.

To say the imago Dei and the Church bear God-correspondent properties in their own kind, while only Scripture bears supreme normative standing, leans on a claim I’m defending and not merely asserting, namely that supreme normative standing is grounded specifically in theopneustos authorship, not in Spirit-assistance or divine likeness in general. As William Lane Craig explains:

“The Scriptures are said to be ‘God‐breathed’ (theopneustos), to proceed, as it were, ‘from the mouth of God’ (Mt 4.4). ‘The point of the adjective here is surely to emphasize the authority of the Scriptures as coming from God and to indicate that they have a divinely‐intended purpose related to his plan of salvation.’”⁷

A Catholic will want to contest here, holding that a Spirit-protected Magisterium can carry coordinate authority. That’s the right place to push, and it’s the burden of the elimination argument, which the disqualification piece handles separately. It isn’t a gap in the setup. It’s where the real disagreement lives.

Joe Mischaracterizes the Mechanism

With this understanding of the AIT on the table, let’s turn to Joe’s video. The first thing to point out is that Joe mischaracterizes the key causal mechanism I explained in my video on the AIT and the corresponding Substack article. Here’s what he says:

“The fact that the Bible, or indeed any part of creation, reflects divine attributes and reveals them is not the same as saying that the created things possess those divine attributes. Think of it this way. A sculpture reveals something about the genius and intelligence of the sculptor, but that doesn’t mean the sculpture is itself self-aware and intelligent.”⁸

I agree with Joe that Scripture doesn’t literally come to possess, say, God’s omniscience. As Aquinas points out, that would be to fall into heresy. It would be to say created things possess divinity. Instead, God is the extrinsic formal cause that Scripture is patterned after by coming to possess properties suited to the kind of thing it is. It comes to intrinsically possess communicative attributes like material sufficiency. Scripture bears all the necessary content given its salvific purpose. When we say Scripture cannot possibly err because it’s the product of a perfectly good and truthful God, we aren’t saying Scripture literally possesses God’s goodness and truth. Rather, it possesses the textual analogues of those attributes (e.g., infallibility and inerrancy).

Notice the word carrying Joe’s objection is “reflects.” It makes the AIT sound like a loose family-resemblance claim, which is the sort of thing a sculpture does for its sculptor. But the AIT doesn’t run on reflection. It runs on exemplar causation restricted by kind-correspondence.

Joe’s sculpture example actually makes my point rather than his. The sculptor’s intelligence doesn’t transfer to the statue. That’s true because a statue isn’t the kind of thing that bears intelligence. But the sculptor’s conception of the form does determine the statue’s shape. This is because shape is the dimension proper to a statue. That’s exemplar causation working exactly as kind-correspondence says it will. The form transmits along the dimension that fits the product. So with Scripture we get that God’s communicative perfections determine the communicative properties of a communicative act. This isn’t because the act becomes divine. It’s because those are the properties an act of that kind bears when its Author is essentially truthful, wise, and good.

Joe rightly points out that Aquinas thinks God is the exemplar cause of all things, and he rightly points out that Aquinas isn’t, in the passage I cite, directly talking about Scripture. Yet Scripture is one of the things God created. And as I argued in the first video, it’s fine to apply a metaphysical theory of causality to something that falls under that theory’s purview. What Joe neglects is to explain how exemplar causation works in the AIT. He neglects kind-correspondence, the connection between God’s attributes and the textual analogues, and which attributes hand down which properties to which kinds of things. And that omission leads him into trouble as he begins objecting, as you’ll see.

Joe’s Objection to ‘Sufficiency’ is Misguided

The first main objection involves sufficiency, and it’s Joe’s strongest, because it’s the one that quietly attacks his own side. It also runs straight into Distinction 4, the specified antecedent. Right off the bat we have an issue, as Joe says:

“Let’s turn to the first of Cloos’s arguments, the idea that Scripture must have everything we need for salvation. This is what is sometimes called the formal sufficiency of Scripture.”⁹

This conflates material and formal sufficiency, and the conflation matters. Recall the taxonomy from Distinction 2 in the first reply. Catholics already grant a great deal about Scripture, inerrancy, material sufficiency, supreme authority in some sense, while denying formal sufficiency, perspicuity in the salvation-relevant Reformed sense, and self-authentication. Joe’s objection lands on exactly that seam, and on the wrong side of it. As I mentioned earlier, material sufficiency is the claim that Scripture has all the content in it necessary to achieve its salvific purpose. Most Catholics throughout history have embraced the material sufficiency of Scripture. But that’s not the same thing as formal sufficiency, which holds that we can reliably access that materially sufficient content through ordinary means. A regular person can read Scripture and get that content out of it in an intelligible way. Most Catholics deny this in the face of persistent interpretive disputes. They think you need an official teaching office to authoritatively interpret and clarify Scripture. Hence the need for the Magisterium.

Joe continues, citing my video:

“Cloos claims that if God is wise, he’s required to make Scripture formally sufficient, ‘The text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated, and communicates just that.’ Over on his Substack, Cloos goes further. He claims the sufficiency of Scripture is also required by God’s love. In his words, the text gives you everything you need for salvation because a loving God wouldn’t withhold it. So to put his argument bluntly, Cloos is saying that either Scripture alone has everything in it you need for salvation, or else God is not wise and loving. And he’s insisting on this being true in all possible worlds in which God communicates.”¹⁰

Joe is correct that I argue: necessarily, if God freely chooses to communicate via inscripturation, then his essential attributes will be exemplar causes, which entails that Scripture will possess the corresponding textual properties. So if you deny that Scripture is, say, materially sufficient, that’s tantamount to saying one or more of his divine perfections failed to produce that property. It’s tantamount to saying God acted, but somehow acted without one of the essential attributes that make him who he is. So far, roughly so good, setting aside some minor quibbles with Joe’s phrasing.

Then Joe tries to break the entailment. He says it doesn’t hold in the actual world:

“In one of the defenses he makes of this position, Cloos brings up 2 Timothy 3:15, a popular verse, in which St. Paul reminds St. Timothy how “from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” Protestants will sometimes argue from this verse that since God gave us the Scriptures for our salvation, therefore they’re all we need for our salvation, or else God failed. But that’s like saying that since God gave us beets for our nutrition, therefore we should be able to live on a diet of beets alone, or else God failed. That conclusion doesn’t logically follow at all.”¹¹

There’s a key difference that undoes Joe’s analogy. Scripture isn’t like a single dietary item. Scripture is a closed canonical act. It doesn’t need ongoing replenishment the way your body needs ongoing nutrition. It’s the full, complete, closed nutritional staple, not a single dietary item covering a narrow slice of your nutritional needs. This isn’t to say Scripture is all you need. It’s to say it contains the content sufficient for your salvation. It’s nutritionally complete as a canonical deposit for that end. Beets aren’t the full deposit for the end of satisfying your dietary needs.

Then Joe makes some comments about how the OT was incomplete, how God doesn’t reveal everything by writing, and how the full revelation of God isn’t in a book but in Jesus. First, yes, the OT at the time of writing was incomplete. The AIT isn’t indexed to just the OT. It’s indexed to the full canon. Second, that God reveals himself in many ways, say through miracles and prophets, doesn’t mean he hasn’t put in Scripture everything necessary for salvation. You’d need an argument for that, and Joe doesn’t provide one. Third, it’s compatible with Scripture’s sufficiency, as containing all the content necessary for communicating God’s salvific purpose, that Jesus Christ is the full revelation thereof, and that Scripture is a testimony to the incarnate Word. This scope-limitation isn’t a dodge invented for Joe. It’s standard Reformed teaching. As Beeke and Smalley put it:

“The sufficiency of Scripture is limited to the Bible’s purpose in revealing truth for our salvation and obedience (Ps. 19:7–11; John 20:31). The doctrine does not assert that the Bible is sufficient to guide all human activities in every respect.”¹²

Sufficiency was always sufficiency for the salvific end, which is exactly the antecedent Distinction 4 specifies in my first reply to Joe.

Then Joe introduces a supposed counterexample. He raises the case of a Roman living in Judea around the year 50 AD. Granting that God authored Deuteronomy for our salvation and is the exemplar cause of the text, this person discovers a scroll of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is written for our salvation, but Joe asks:

“Does it follow that you can rely on Deuteronomy alone, that it has everything you need to be saved, and that you can ignore the rest of the Old Testament and ignore those Christian preachers orally proclaiming the gospel? Absolutely not, and obviously not. But this creates a problem, because according to Cloos, “the text will be sufficient because a perfectly wise being knows exactly what needs to be communicated and communicates just that.”¹³

I admit I fail to see the force of the case, and the reason is Distinction 4. The Roman encountering Deuteronomy at that time is living in the apostolic age. The apostolic deposit that was eventually inscripturated was still playing out in the early Church. As I said in my first reply, in Distinction 4, the correct gloss on the antecedent in the entailment “isn’t just ‘God authors Scripture.’ It’s ‘God freely chooses to author a canonical communicative act for the salvation of fallen humanity.’”¹⁴ I restate this in the closing summary: “Necessarily, if God freely chooses to author a canonical communicative act for the salvation of fallen humanity, then...” The canonical communicative act isn’t just Deuteronomy. It includes the preachers “orally proclaiming the gospel.” That the gospel was being proclaimed orally before being put down into a text doesn’t undermine the AIT. It’s one thing to say the full canonical deposit is sufficient. In fact, the Canonical Act premise in the AIT explicitly says, “Scripture is the canonical communicative act, individuated by covenantal closure.”¹⁵ It’s another thing entirely to say one text a person discovers prior to covenantal closure is sufficient all by itself for our salvation.

Next, Joe raises a kindergartener example meant to show that wise communication is calibrated to the audience’s capacity to understand. As Joe explains:

“A wise communicator doesn’t often communicate everything all at once, or even everything in writing alone. We don’t hand kindergarteners a book with everything they’re going to need to graduate college and leave it at that. That’s not wise communication. Similarly, at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his apostles, “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Notice he’s explicitly telling them there’s more information he wants to share. He’s going to do it by telling them, not writing it to them, and he’s not going to do it now because they’re not ready.”¹⁶

Again, it’s unclear how this cuts against the sufficiency of Scripture. Jesus is holding back on what he tells them because the Father didn’t tell him to. And it’s true that there’s much the disciples will face in the course of their mission for which they aren’t prepared, and for which it would be premature to try to prepare them. But the reason Jesus doesn’t go into this in John 16:12 isn’t just that the disciples aren’t ready to receive it. It’s also that the Holy Spirit, the Advocate of verses 7–11, will continue Jesus’s revelation. So, read in context, Jesus isn’t telling them because, as the next verses say, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth... He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13–14). We know the Spirit comes at Pentecost, as Acts reveals. So Jesus is saying more canonical content will be revealed by the Advocate, who is “not only his interpreter, but also his ‘successor,’ who will continue his revelation.”¹⁷ Connecting this back to the point that the AIT applies to the canonical communicative act individuated by covenantal closure, this is wise communication, as Christ is acknowledging there’s more revelation yet to be given. That full deposit, once the apostolic age closes, is sufficient for salvation. This isn’t about sufficiency for my purposes. It’s about sufficiency for the purposes of the Father who sent Jesus and the Holy Spirit to fulfill his salvific mission. And Scripture gives us all we need to know about that mission and how we ought to respond to its being fulfilled.

There are two more things worth mentioning about Joe’s arguments against the AIT. First, Joe doesn’t actually argue that God is perfectly loving and wise yet leaves things out of the scriptural canonical deposit. He doesn’t really go into God’s love and wisdom at all. To break the entailment, you’d need to establish that God’s wisdom and love are consistent with his leaving out of Scripture things necessary for communicating his salvific purpose for fallen humanity. I just want to flag that Joe hasn’t done that. Second, Joe’s conflation of material and formal sufficiency, arguing against material while claiming he’s arguing against formal, sets him at odds with his own tradition.

Patrick Madrid is a Catholic apologist who contributed to the edited volume Not by Scripture Alone. Madrid states the historical Catholic commitment on sufficiency:

“Many eminent Catholic theologians and doctors down through the centuries, most notably the Church Fathers, have taught that Scripture is materially sufficient (i.e., it contains all the material or “stuff” of divine revelation, either in explicit or implicit form). In fact, to gain an authentic understanding of the Fathers, it’s crucial that one recognize their virtual unanimity on the issue of material sufficiency.”¹⁸

Catholic apologist Robert Sungenis echoes the same point:

“Catholic theologians, by and large, do not have much of a problem with material sufficiency, but they will always deny formal sufficiency, and, in fact, claim that Scripture is formally insufficient.”¹⁹

As I briefly mentioned earlier, formal sufficiency is the claim that Scripture isn’t just complete in content but self-sufficient in function. It contains everything needed for doctrine and can be rightly understood and applied without an external interpretive authority supplying what’s missing. In that same book, Mark Shea gives a brick analogy to illustrate material versus formal sufficiency.

“The Catholic Faith can agree that Scripture is sufficient. But…it also warns that there is a distinction between material and formal sufficiency…,[which] is the difference between having a big enough pile of bricks to build a house and having a house made of bricks. Material sufficiency means that all the bricks necessary to build doctrine is there in Scripture. However, it also teaches that since the meaning of Scripture is not always clear and that sometimes a doctrine is implied rather than explicit, other things besides Scripture have been handed to us from the apostles: things like Sacred Tradition (which is the mortar that holds the bricks together in the right order and position) and the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church (which is the trowel in the hand of the Master Builder). Taken together, these three things—Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium—are formally sufficient for knowing the revealed truth of God.”²⁰

So, material sufficiency says all the bricks needed to build every doctrine are present in Scripture, that every truth necessary for salvation is contained there “in one way or another,” explicitly or implicitly. Formal sufficiency says more: that Scripture also supplies its own mortar and trowel, and that it’s clear enough and ordered enough to be assembled into sound doctrine without Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium doing the assembling. On the Catholic account, Scripture is materially sufficient (the bricks are all there) but formally insufficient (you need Tradition as the mortar and the Magisterium as the trowel to build the house correctly). The Protestant claim is that Scripture is formally sufficient, that it doesn’t need an external authority to cash out its true meaning.

Material sufficiency, that Scripture contains, in one way or another, all truths necessary for salvation, is, per Congar, a permissible Trent-compatible Catholic position, held by Newman, Scheeben, Ratzinger, and others. The passage as it actually reads in Congar:

“We can admit Scriptura sola in the sense of a material sufficiency of canonical Scripture. This means that Scripture contains, in one way or another, all truths necessary for salvation. This position can claim the support of many Fathers and early theologians. It has been, and still is, held by many modern theologians.”²¹

What Congar does just two pages later is even more telling for the dialectic with Joe. He names the actual hinge between Trent-compatible Catholics and Protestants. It isn’t material sufficiency. It’s formal sufficiency. Congar grants that the Geiselmann reading of Trent’s “partly in Scripture, partly in tradition” as a “in both Scripture and tradition,” with material sufficiency in Scripture is “historically correct” as a reading of what Trent actually claimed. The remaining disagreement is over whether Scripture is formally sufficient. It’s whether the materially sufficient content can be reliably accessed through ordinary means without the Magisterium supplying the structuring and definitive interpretive office.

So the dialectic now looks like this. Trent’s decree leaves material sufficiency open as a permissible Catholic view. A long line of major Catholic theologian has occupied that permissible space. Material sufficiency is therefore not the live disagreement between the AIT and confessional Catholicism. The live disagreement is over formal sufficiency, where the AIT says '“yes” and the Magisterium-bound Catholic says “no.”

Now look at what Joe attacks in the sufficiency section of his video. The Deuteronomy thought experiment, the Last Supper “I have yet many things to say to you,” the kindergarten analogy, the “progressive revelation, the OT was incomplete on its own” point, the beets analogy. Every one of these is an argument that Scripture, or a portion of it, does not contain everything needed, that content is missing, distributed across time, or held back to be supplied later by oral preaching and the apostles. That’s a denial of material sufficiency. It’s a denial of the claim that all the bricks are present in the text. He’s saying the bricks aren’t all there in the deposit at a given stage, that more had to come from outside the text, from the living apostles preaching orally, the later books, the “many things” Jesus deferred.

So Joe has aimed his sufficiency objection at a target Congar himself has already conceded to the Reformed side. He hasn’t undermined the entailment from God being loving and wise to his including in his canonical communicative act every truth necessary for salvation, explicitly or implicitly. His argument cuts against his own Catholic tradition’s permissible position. And it doesn’t even touch the actual core, formal sufficiency, where the disagreement lives.

Joe’s Objection to ‘Clarity’ is Confused

Next, Joe targets the clarity, or perspicuity, entailment. He does it by reading the Bible at me: hard texts, parables, and the eunuch, as if the doctrine had never met them. It has. Every text he lists was anticipated by the way perspicuity is scoped. Once you see the scope, the hard cases stop being counterexamples and start being confirmations. He quotes me saying, “The text will be clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose.”²² As I explain in the video:

“If God is a primary communicator of a text, then the communicative character of that text will supervene on God’s communicative attributes. That is, no change in the communicative character of the text without a change in God’s communicative attributes... None of these are mysterious transfers. Every single one is a logical entailment of what it means for a being with those attributes to communicate. So if you grant the antecedent, that God with these attributes is the primary communicator of this text, the consequent follows by the ordinary logic of intentional action and expression. Those textual properties follow by logical entailment.”²³

Clarity is primarily connected to God’s goodness. A perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose, so a God who communicates a saving message for fallen humanity doesn’t leave that message unintelligible to its intended audience. Wisdom also plays a role, since a wise communicator fits the communication to the receiver, and love plays a role, because a loving God doesn’t withhold what’s needed.

It’s worth clarifying what Scripture’s clarity means, because most objections to it, including Joe’s, are aimed at a stronger version than anyone holds. The clarity of Scripture is the claim that Scripture’s saving message is clear enough to be understood by ordinary believers without requiring an infallible external interpreter.

Perspicuity does not claim that every passage of Scripture is equally clear, that nothing in it is hard, or that anyone can understand everything without effort, study, or help. The Reformers and the confessions were explicit about this. The Westminster Confession’s formulation is the standard one: not everything in Scripture is “alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all,” but “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”²⁴

So the claim is restricted in three ways. It’s restricted to the saving message, not every topic. The things necessary for salvation are clear. The timing of eschatology, the meaning of the more obscure prophecies, the harder bits of Paul that even Peter admits are “hard to understand,” those need not be plain, and the doctrine never said they were. It’s restricted to clarity somewhere in Scripture, not in every individual passage. The Confession’s “in some place of Scripture or other” matters. A hard verse in one place can be illumined by a clear verse elsewhere. Perspicuity is a property of the canon’s teaching on the essentials, not a guarantee that no sentence is difficult. And it’s restricted to clarity “in a due use of the ordinary means,” which explicitly includes teachers, study, preaching, and the ministerial help of the church.

This last point is the one Joe’s objection misses totally. Perspicuity has never meant “no one should ever explain Scripture to anyone.” It means the necessary interpretive help is ordinary and ministerial. A teacher, a pastor, or a study aid are all themselves correctable by Scripture, rather than infallible and magisterial. They’re not an interpreter whose pronouncements are themselves irreformable and stand above the text. The Ethiopian eunuch needing Philip isn’t a counterexample to perspicuity. Philip is exactly the ordinary ministerial means the doctrine builds in. The question perspicuity poses isn’t “do you need help?” but “do you need an infallible help whose authority rivals the text’s?”

That third restriction is the key one here, so let me make the distinction sharp. Perspicuity contrasts two interpretive models, not “Bible alone in a vacuum” versus “Bible plus help.” It contrasts a ministerial model and a magisterial one. On the ministerial model, Scripture’s saving content is clear enough that fallible, correctable helps, teachers, the believing community, ordinary study, suffice to bring the unlearned to a sufficient understanding, and every such help remains under and answerable to the text. On the magisterial model, Scripture’s saving content is not clear enough on its own, so an infallible interpreter is required to fix its meaning, and that interpreter’s reading binds the conscience with an authority the text cannot correct. Perspicuity affirms the first and denies the necessity of the second. Joe’s parables-and-eunuch arguments only touch the strawman version, that no help is ever needed, which no confessional Protestant holds. They don’t touch the actual claim, which grants help freely and only denies that the help must be infallible.

Joe critiques the entailment from God’s attributes to Scripture’s clarity as follows:

“Consider how St. Peter describes the writings of St. Paul in 2 Peter 3. He tells us that Paul’s writings have ‘some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.’ Notice he’s told us two different things. First, that ignorant and unstable people misinterpret the text in a way that leads to their own destruction. But don’t miss the other thing he told us, that Paul’s writings are actually hard to understand.”²⁵

First, Joe is right that 2 Peter 3:16 says some of Paul’s writings are hard to understand. Perspicuity doesn’t deny that. Westminster admits not all things in Scripture are “alike plain.” But there are three things the verse doesn’t say. Joe needs them, and he doesn’t establish them.

First, 2 Peter 3:16 doesn’t say the saving message is what’s hard. It says some things in Paul are hard. Perspicuity is restricted to what’s necessary for salvation. Peter doesn’t locate the difficulty there. Bauckham’s commentary says these are “passages which are liable to be misunderstood unless they are interpreted in the light of the rest of Paul’s teaching and of the apostolic teaching generally, rather than to passages which are simply obscure.”²⁶ So Joe would need to show the hard things and the saving things are the same things, and the verse doesn’t say that.

Second, the verse locates the failure in the readers, not the text. The ones who come to grief are “the ignorant and unstable.” Bauckham says this means “not simply ‘ignorant’ but ‘uninstructed,’” and that there’s “an element of condemnation…these people are ignorant because they are unwilling to learn, and unstable because they allow themselves to be misled.”²⁷ A text can be clear in what matters and still be twisted by someone not ready to read it rightly. Joe slides from “people misread it” to “the text is unclear,” but those aren’t the same. Peter makes the first claim, not the second.

Third, the verse prescribes no infallible remedy. The implied cure for being unanchored is to become established, grounded, instructed, which is the point of Peter’s closing salvo. Bauckham says the author “does not intend to imply that exegesis of Paul should therefore be limited to the church’s official teachers.”²⁸ The standard commentary says the text doesn’t support the move Joe is making. Instruction is needed, but instruction is ministerial and ordinary, not a magisterial monopoly in which an infallible interpreter’s reading binds the conscience above the text.

Joe continues:

“Or consider Jesus’s own teaching. Rather than state doctrines plainly, he typically prefers to teach in parables, a choice that confused the disciples enough that they approached him privately to ask about it. And Jesus explained his behavior with a cryptic reply: ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn again and be forgiven.’ Even the disciples were confused by the parables, which is why Jesus then adds, ‘Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?’ That doesn’t sound like someone committed to communicative clarity in everything he says and does.”²⁹

It’s true that parables can conceal, but there are key things Joe’s reading misses.

First, the concealment in Mark 4 isn’t Jesus failing at clarity. It’s judgment. The “so that they may not perceive” quotes Isaiah 6, and the hina expresses, in Lane’s words, “not the purpose of Jesus but that of God.” The parable “describes the fate of revelation faced with the understanding of the man whose heart is hardened.” The obscurity is located in unbelief, not in the word. Jesus’s presence, as Lane says, “releases both grace and judgment,” revelation to the receptive, veiling to the hardened.³⁰ That’s a communicator succeeding at a discriminating purpose, not one who can’t make himself clear.

Second, Joe is reading the bare oral parable as if it were the finished text. It isn’t. Mark doesn’t leave the sower parable hanging. He records Jesus explaining it in the very next verses. In the Gospel, the riddle comes with its key on the same page. The disciples were confused, asked, and were taught, which is exactly the perspicuity dynamic. The saving meaning is made available to those given ears to hear, through ordinary instruction, not through an infallible magisterium standing over the text.

So which divine perfection failed? None. A good and sovereign God reveals to faith and conceals from hardened unbelief, and the inscripturated Gospel hands the reader both the parable and its explanation. That’s not Scripture being unclear. That’s revelation that discriminates by the heart of the hearer, which is exactly what the doctrine of perspicuity predicts.

Joe continues:

“And that doesn’t even touch on the prophetic writings, from Isaiah to Daniel to the book of Revelation. These books are filled with rich spiritual imagery that has confused many a reader. In Acts 8, when St. Philip asks the Ethiopian eunuch if he understands the scroll of Isaiah he’s reading, he doesn’t reply, ‘Of course I do. The text is clear because a perfectly good communicator doesn’t frustrate his own communicative purpose.’ He instead answers accurately and humbly, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ That line, to me, is the key. Modern Protestants often assume the Bible is meant for an individual to pick up on their own, read it for themselves, and then come away knowing everything God wishes to communicate and reveal. But what if that individualistic assumption is the thing that’s wrong? What if God wants you to turn to other people to make sense of the meaning of the text? What if he wants you to turn to the church, the pillar and foundation of truth? Does that really prove that God is not good, as Cloos claims? Remember, Jesus doesn’t enlighten the crowds listening to the parables. He enlightens the disciples. The Holy Spirit doesn’t fill the Ethiopian’s mind with a perfect individual understanding of Isaiah. He sends him St. Philip to explain it to him and to baptize him. For Cloos’s AIT to work, he’d have to show that Jesus cannot desire this in any possible world, because it would be somehow contrary to divine goodness.”³¹

The eunuch is Joe’s best image, so let me grant what’s true in it. God gives teachers, and the lone-reader-with-no-help caricature of clarity is wrong. Mark Thompson, in the standard modern treatment, says exactly that, namely faithful teachers “are resources provided by God,” and Acts 8 shows “that legitimate, God-given, corporate dimension to a Christian reading of the Bible that need not be seen to compromise the accessibility or intelligibility of the text.”³² Clarity was never individualism. That’s not in dispute. This is the mainstream Reformed position, not a concession I’m improvising under pressure. Beeke and Smalley state it plainly: the church’s teaching helps “are not to be rejected, but welcomed as means that the Holy Spirit uses,” even as “they are subordinate to the Bible.” Or, in Matthew Barrett’s phrase, “‘Scripture alone’ doesn’t mean ‘me alone.’”³³ Perspicuity grants the helper and only denies that the helper must be infallible.

But look at what the eunuch actually needed. Not an infallible institution to unlock an obscure text, but the gospel announced to a man who’d never heard it. His question is who Isaiah 53 is about, himself or someone else. That’s a question of reference, not obscurity. As Vanhoozer puts it:

“That was precisely the Ethiopian eunuch’s problem: he could understand the words and follow their grammar, but he could not say what the text was about. He knew the sense, but not the referent.”³⁴

And as F.F. Bruce puts it in the standard Acts commentary:

“the prophet himself might not have known, but Philip knew, because the prophecy had come true in his day.”³⁵

Philip “told him the good news about Jesus,” and the man believed and was baptized on the spot. That’s an evangelist presenting the gospel, not a magisterium adjudicating a text. There’s no teaching office anywhere in the scene, just a messenger on a desert road and a convert.

So Joe’s challenge, that the AIT would need to show God “cannot desire this in any possible world,” misses. The AIT doesn’t say God can’t want teachers. It affirms he does. Perspicuity claims something narrower, namely a good communicator doesn’t make the saving message so inaccessible that an infallible interpreter becomes necessary. Acts 8 is the opposite of evidence for that. A man hears the gospel from a traveling evangelist and grasps it at once. “God uses messengers” was never the question. Whether those messengers must be infallible is, and a roadside conversion doesn’t supply it.

As for the prophetic imagery, in Daniel and Revelation, I grant it freely. Perspicuity never claimed the seventh seal is plain. It claims the saving message is clear, not that every vision is. Hard apocalyptic is precisely the material the doctrine always set aside.

Joe's Objection to ‘Ultimate Authority’ Misfires

Next, Joe targets a claim I make about ultimate authority, and here he scores a point I already conceded, then mistakes the concession for a refutation. This whole section is Distinction 2 doing its work, namely the positive piece grounds Scripture’s properties, and the “alone” comes from a separate negative piece. Watch what happens when that two-part structure is kept in view. He quotes me:

“The text will carry ultimate authority because a sovereign being’s speech carries the normative weight of sovereignty.”³⁶

And he responds:

“But the dispute between Catholics and Protestants about sola scriptura isn’t really on the ‘scriptura,’ the Scripture part. It’s on the ‘sola,’ the ‘alone’ part. It’s all well and good to say Scripture carries the normative weight of sovereignty. We can agree on that. It doesn’t follow that therefore only Scripture has this authority. That is simply begging the question. In fact, Cloos’s argument, if anything, works better against the Protestant position. The church is created by our sovereign, Jesus Christ the King. Jesus is the one who says, ‘I will build my church,’ and Jesus is the one who does so, creating a church that St. Paul calls the household of God and the pillar and foundation of truth. Why isn’t that enough to bestow the normative weight of sovereignty upon the church built by Christ?”³⁷

Here Joe is right, and I want to grant it plainly, because the concession is the setup. “Scripture carries the normative weight of sovereignty” does not by itself entail “only Scripture does.” He’s correct. And that’s not a problem for the AIT, because the AIT never claimed the authority property yields the “alone.” I said this in Part 1, before the video, namely sola scriptura “is a universal negative claim,” and “a universal negative can’t follow from a positive qualification claim alone.”³⁸ The AIT is the positive piece. It grounds Scripture’s properties. The “alone” comes from a separate negative piece, the disqualification argument, which shows no rival possesses the same grounding. Joe is faulting the positive half for not doing the negative half’s work. But I never asked it to. Charging “that begs the question” against the positive piece misses that the question is answered by the other piece, which Joe didn’t have when he recorded.

So take his own example, as it’s the right test case. The church is built by Christ the sovereign King. Why doesn’t that bestow the normative weight of sovereignty on the church? Here’s the answer, and it’s the key point of the AIT. Sovereignty isn’t a free-floating stamp the King presses onto whatever he makes. On the AIT, the textual properties arise by exemplar causation. God’s essential perfections serve as the pattern that determines the character of the communicative act he authors. Scripture’s supreme normative standing traces to the metaphysical perfections, aseity, sovereignty, immutability, operating on a theopneustos communicative act of which God is the primary author. That’s the antecedent. The church is not a theopneustos communicative act of which God is the primary author. The church is a creature Christ builds and indwells, real, Spirit-protected in its mission, genuinely authoritative in a ministerial sense, but not God-breathed. So the very mechanism that grounds Scripture’s supreme authority doesn’t transfer it to the church, as the church isn’t the kind of thing the mechanism operates on. This is kind-correspondence again. The perfection that grounds supreme authority does so for a divinely authored communicative act, not for everything the sovereign happens to create. As Vanhoozer frames the relation, “Tradition is but the moon to Scripture’s sun: what light tradition casts, and what authority it has, is secondary and derivative—ministerial—though it is nonetheless real light.”³⁹

tradition has no independent authority.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2016), 139.

That’s also why Joe’s “works better against the Protestant” line actually runs the other way. He’s assuming sovereignty distributes its weight to anything the sovereign makes, including the church. But that goes too far. The King makes the cosmos, the angels, the apostles’ sandals, and none of them carry supreme normative authority over faith. Sovereignty doesn’t dispense authority by manufacture. It dispenses it through God’s own speech, which is why the King’s word binds in a way the King’s artifacts don’t. Scripture is God’s speech. The church is not. So the question isn’t “why doesn’t the church get the same weight,” it’s “which divine perfection would have to be operative in the church the way it’s operative in God’s inscripturated speech for the church to share that ground?” And the answer is none. The church isn’t a communicative act God primarily authored. It’s the recipient and herald of one.

Joe leans on 1 Timothy 3:15, the church as “pillar and foundation of truth,” to carry the sovereign weight. But the verse won’t bear the architectural reading. Turretin walked through this in the seventeenth century. The church is the pillar “not in an architectural sense (as pillars are used for the support of buildings), but in a forensic and political sense,” the way magistrates’ edicts “were usually posted against pillars... so that all might be informed of them.”⁴⁰ A pillar that displays the law isn’t the source of the law’s authority. The church publishes the truth. It doesn’t ground it.

Now the part Joe is right to press. This is where the real work happens, namely showing that no rival, the church included, possesses the full set of qualifying positional properties. That’s the disqualification argument, the negative piece. It’s the second half of the case, and it’s coming. The fuller treatment of “pillar and foundation of truth” belongs there. The question isn’t whether the church supports and proclaims the truth. It does, ministerially. This question is whether it bears truth’s ground the way God’s own speech does. That’s the line my project draws. It’s the same line Rome itself draws between what is God-breathed and what is Spirit-protected. So I welcome Joe’s challenge. He’s identified the place where the second piece of the argument does its work. Yet he has mistaken its absence from the first piece for a hole in the argument as a whole, which it is not.

Joe's Objection to ‘Self-Authentication’ Asks Why a Vegetable Isn't a Sentence

The fourth attribute is self-authentication. This is where Joe brings out his showpiece, the turnip. The parody is genuinely aimed at the wrong target. It only works against a version of the AIT that drops Distinction 5, kind-correspondence, which is the version Joe is working from. Some context may be helpful here. Catholics and Protestants agree that the inspiration of Scripture comes from God, not from the church. The church doesn’t turn ordinary writings into divine Scripture. Vatican I explicitly points this out, so the Catholic side is very clear about this, as are Protestants. But here’s where we differ. In Joe’s framing:

“As Catholics regularly point out, one of the glaring problems with sola scriptura is that you can’t use Scripture alone to know which books belong in the Bible. That is neither explicitly nor implicitly taught anywhere in Scripture. And so the Protestant reformers invented this doctrine of self-authentication to try to explain why we don’t need tradition or the church to know which books belong in the Bible and which books don’t. Cloos attempts to defend this theory as somehow coming from God by saying that: ‘The text will be self-authenticating because as a self-existent being, [God’s] communication doesn’t depend on external validation for its standing.’ Cloos is arguing here from what is sometimes called God’s aseity... But Cloos reasons that since God is uncreated, therefore his creation will reflect this by not needing external validation for its standing. But you can’t get from the fact that God is uncreated to ‘therefore his creation is uncreated.’ That doesn’t make any sense... God is the exemplar and efficient cause of all things, of Scripture, yes, but also of a turnip. So if you believe Cloos’s 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.”⁴¹

Joe raises four distinct objections in this section. Let me take them one at a time.

First, the turnip. This is the heart of it, and it’s where the simplified version of the AIT gets attacked rather than the actual one. The whole parody dies on Distinction 5. The AIT doesn’t say “God is the exemplar cause of X, therefore X inherits God’s incommunicable attributes.” It says the perfections operative in a communicative act determine the communicative properties of that act. That’s kind-correspondence, and it’s not a patch I’m adding now. It’s how exemplar causation works in Aquinas. The architect’s exemplar shapes the building’s geometry, not the architect’s biography. A turnip isn’t a communicative act, so the communicative perfections have nothing in it to characterize. Turnips bear divine-perfection-correspondent properties along the dimensions proper to turnip-kind, biological order and the rest, but not self-authentication. This is because self-authentication is a property of communications, not vegetables. Asking why the turnip isn’t self-authenticating is like asking why a vegetable isn’t a sentence. The category is what’s missing, not the perfection. So the parody only works against a version of the AIT that drops kind-correspondence, and that version isn’t mine.

Notice this also disposes of Joe’s “you can’t get from God is uncreated to his creation is uncreated.” Correct, and I never said it. Scripture isn’t self-authenticating because it’s uncreated. It’s a creaturely product, as I say explicitly in Part 1. It’s self-authenticating because it’s a communicative act whose primary author is the self-existent God, and, as a result, it doesn’t depend on a higher external authority to certify its standing as that author’s speech. The analogue is creaturely. The grounding is divine. That’s supervenience, not transfer. And I spent a section of my Part 1 reply to Joe distinguishing the two precisely so this wouldn’t get read as “the Bible is a piece of divinity.” Owen put the self-evidencing point in five words: the Scriptures, “being what they are, declare whose they are.”⁴²

And the charge that the Reformers invented self-authentication gets the history backward. Self-authentication (autopistos) is the settled Reformed account of how the Spirit works through the text’s own marks. Calvin says:

“that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated; hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit. For even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of genuineness upon which our judgment may lean; but we subject our judgment and wit to it as to a thing far beyond any guesswork! This we do, not as persons accustomed to seize upon some unknown thing, which, under closer scrutiny, displeases them, but fully conscious that we hold the unassailable truth! Nor do we do this as those miserable men who habitually bind over their minds to the thralldom of superstition; but we feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there. By this power we are drawn and inflamed, knowingly and willingly, to obey him, yet also more vitally and more effectively than by mere human willing or knowing!”⁴³

The deeper point answers Joe’s worry structurally. Every ultimate authority is self-authenticating. As Beeke and Smalley note:

“One might object that this is a circular argument: we know that the Bible is God’s Word because it is God’s Word. We answer this objection by noting that all arguments for an ultimate authority must be circular because one can appeal to nothing higher.”⁴⁴

The live question was never whether someone rests on a self-authenticating authority. It’s where it lands. I locate it at Scripture. Rome locates it at the church, which must authenticate its own authority to function as the final court. So self-authentication isn’t a Protestant novelty. It’s a feature of any ultimate norm, Rome’s included.

Second, regarding the ontological/canonical slide. Joe says:

“So to have a canon of Scripture, we need more than the ontological inspiration of Scripture. We also need some way to know which books are and are not inspired by God... There is some need for an external source to tell us which books are the right ones.”⁴⁵

Here Joe and I are closer than he thinks. The disagreement is narrower than “you need an external source.” I agree with the ontological fact that these books are God-breathed. I agree it’s distinct from the epistemic question of how the faithful come to recognize them. The AIT’s textual properties aren’t the whole canon argument. They’re the positive piece. How recognition works, and why it needs no infallible external authority, is the canonical-epistemology piece, which is Part 2 of the Substack series, which Joe had access to, not the original video. So “there’s nothing in the text that tells you the table of contents” isn’t news to me. It isn’t what self-authentication claims. Self-authentication isn’t a claim that a list of books is printed in the text. It’s a claim that the ground on which the divine speech is received is intrinsic to it rather than conferred by an external certifying authority, exactly as Turretin put it. The church is the means through which we come to believe, not the ground on account of which the text is authoritative.⁴⁶ Ministerial recognition, yes. Magisterial constitution, no. Joe has collapsed those, and the whole Reformed account turns on keeping them apart. And this isn’t a uniquely Protestant reading. Vatican I itself locates canonicity in inspiration rather than ecclesial approval, holding the books canonical “not because she subsequently approved them by her authority... but because, being written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author.”⁴⁷ That is the recognition view, in a Catholic dogmatic constitution. Joe’s framing needs the constitutive view, and his own tradition’s highest authority states the other one.

Third, the Hebrews and Luther charge. This one I want to address directly, as Joe has a point and I’d rather own it than dodge it. He writes:

“Luther’s own assessment was that the epistle we have today was a compilation of various documents of varying quality, and he concluded that we cannot put it on the same level with the apostolic epistles. So I don’t really know what Cloos means in saying that nobody questioned whether the theology was deficient... because Martin Luther questioned exactly those things.”⁴⁸

Joe is right that my “nobody questioned” was overstated. I flagged this as the third of my concessions in Part 1, and here is where it gets paid out. Luther did raise concerns about Hebrews 6 and 10, and that’s a real counterexample to a flat “nobody.” What I should have said is more precise, namely the sustained, central dispute over Hebrews in the patristic and conciliar period was about authorship, whether it was Pauline and therefore apostolic, not about whether its content rang true as divine teaching. That’s the documentable historical pattern, and it’s the claim the AIT actually needs.

And Luther’s hesitation wasn’t even a uniquely Protestant lapse. As Muller observes, “Luther and Cajetan were in substantial agreement on this point,” both reflecting a view of the canon “understandable, prior to the solidification of the canon at the Council of Trent.”⁴⁹ Luther’s later, individual hesitation about two chapters doesn’t overturn the pattern. But my word “nobody” papered over it, and Joe caught a real overstatement. I’d rather fix it than defend it. The corrected claim still does the work, namely the recognition of Hebrews tracked its content’s divine character far more than any settled verdict on its human author, which is why it was retained while the authorship question stayed open.

Fourth, the Luke charge. Joe says:

“If identifying itself as a human digest of prior research is a counter-testimony to divine inspiration, what does that say for the Gospel of Luke, which begins with Luke announcing that “inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative...”⁵⁰

Here Joe has misread the argument, and the misreading is instructive. My point about Tobit was never “any book that mentions using sources is thereby uninspired.” Luke’s preface is a model of exactly the opposite. It features careful investigation offered with confidence, “that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4). The contrast with Tobit isn’t “names its sources versus doesn’t.” It’s the posture toward its own standing. Luke writes as one delivering reliable testimony with settled assurance. The point about counter-testimony was about texts that signal their own distance from the prophetic, not texts that describe an orderly method. Luke claiming careful research and then asserting certainty is the reverse of counter-testimony. It’s a claim to reliable witness.

I’ll grant that if my original framing made “names a research process” the criterion rather than the posture toward divine standing, that framing was loose and invited exactly Joe’s objection. Still, this is the one objection in the set I’ll mark as a genuine hit, and it’s worth being clear about exactly how much it touches. Luke’s preface is the right text to press, and it forced me to sharpen the convergence criterion. But notice the terrain. This is the biblical-and-historical surface, the canon-marker material, which is downstream application of the engine, not the engine itself. As I argued in Distinction 1, the AIT’s core is metaphysical, built on premises Joe and I share. I can lose the Luke skirmish outright and the engine is untouched. That’s the payoff of Distinction 1. The place where Joe lands his cleanest blow is the place the argument doesn’t depend on.

The thread tying these together. Joe’s closing is fair, and I’ll meet it head-on:

“Nothing in God’s nature requires that he do so, and nothing in history or in the Bible itself leads me to believe that he did do so.”⁵¹

That’s the real disagreement, and it’s the right one to have. But notice it’s a metaphysical claim now, not a historical one. It’s whether God’s nature, operating through exemplar causation on a salvific communicative act for fallen humanity, requires the properties the AIT specifies. The Deuteronomy thought experiment, the Luther citation, the Luke preface, those engage the biblical and historical surface. The engine underneath runs on premises Joe and I share, namely classical theism on the essential perfections, God as primary author of Scripture, Thomistic exemplar causality. So even where Joe scores on the surface, and on Hebrews he did, the metaphysical question stands untouched, and that’s the question the diagnostic puts: which essential perfection failed to be operative when God authored this communicative act? Joe’s answer, “none failed, God simply chose not to,” is the move I’ll take up next, because it concedes the perfections were fully operative and then asks me to believe the result lacks the properties those perfections produce. That’s the tension the AIT exists to expose.

The Diagnostic Question

This is the payoff Part 1 promised. The whole first article built toward a single question to put to every Catholic denial of a textual property, which divine perfection failed? Joe saw it coming and tried to disarm it in advance, so this is where the two parts meet. He closes with his sharpest point, so let me give it the care it deserves. He thinks the diagnostic question, “which divine attribute failed?”, equivocates between what God could do and what God did do. He says:

“The question isn’t about what God can do. The question is about what God has done.”⁵²

I agree with that sentence completely. And it’s exactly why the diagnostic works. It’s not a question about divine power at all. Let me show where Joe has misread it, then answer his parody, as the parody is where the misreading becomes visible.

The diagnostic does not ask, “could God have made a self-authenticating Bible?” Of course he could have made many things. It asks something narrower and entirely about the actual world. Given that God did author a theopneustos text, a communicative act of which he is the primary author, does that act bear the properties the authoring perfections produce? That’s a “did” question, not a “could” question. It takes as its premise something Joe and I both affirm as actual, that God authored Scripture, and asks what necessarily follows about the character of the thing he actually authored. So when Joe says my argument assumes “God reveals himself only by writing” or “wants everything governed that way,” it doesn’t. The antecedent isn’t “God communicates only in writing.” It’s “this text is a divine communicative act.” The diagnostic asks what such an act must be like, not whether God is restricted to producing such acts.

That distinction is the whole answer to his parody, so let me take it head-on. Joe says:

“It would be like me saying to a Protestant: ‘an essential attribute of God is that he is all true... So logically I claim anyone he calls to lead his people must be infallible... So why do you deny the truthfulness of God?’”⁵³

This is a good parody, and it dies exactly where the turnip died, on Distinction 5. Look at what the predicate attaches to. My claim attaches a communicative property, truthfulness, clarity, to a communicative act, the text God authored. Joe’s parody attaches a communicative property, infallibility-in-leading, to a person God appoints to an office. Those aren’t parallel, and the disanalogy is the point of kind-correspondence. A text God authors is an expression of his communicative perfections. His speech bears the character of his speaking. A pastor God calls is not God’s speech. He’s a creature given a role. God appointing a leader is not God communicating a text, so the communicative perfections don’t transfer to the leader’s faculties the way they transfer to the properties of God’s own utterance. Joe’s parody only works if “God appoints a man to an office” is the same kind of act as “God authors a communication.” It isn’t. The first produces an officeholder. The second produces divine speech. The perfections govern the speech.

So notice the parody actually proves my point. Joe expects the Protestant to answer, “no divine attribute failed, God simply didn’t choose to make the pastor infallible.” Right, because the pastor isn’t God’s speech. He’s a creature in a role, and nothing about God’s truthfulness requires that every creature he deploys be infallible. The diagnostic doesn’t bite there, and it’s not supposed to. The pastor isn’t a theopneustos communicative act. But Scripture is. That’s the disanalogy. The diagnostic bites only where the thing in question is God’s own communication, and it bites there because a communication does bear the character of its communicator. So the parody, far from exposing the diagnostic as a cheap trick, shows the boundary the diagnostic respects: it applies to divine speech, not to every creature or office God ordains.

Now Joe’s strongest line. This one isn’t a parody:

“The Catholic belief is not that God could not make a self-authenticating Bible. He clearly could have... The Catholic argument is that he didn’t do that, not that he couldn’t.”⁵⁴

Here’s the real exchange, and I want to state it fairly. Joe says God could have made a self-authenticating canon but chose not to. Fine, that’s a coherent position, and it’s the one the diagnostic is designed to press, not by asking about power, but by asking about the actual product. Grant everything Joe wants. God authored these texts, and every essential perfection was fully operative when he did, as the perfections are essential and can’t be switched off. Now the question isn’t “was God able?” It is given that the perfections were all operative in the authoring, does the authored text bear the properties they produce? If Joe says it lacks self-authentication, then he’s saying that aseity was fully operative in the authoring and yet the resulting communication still depends on external certification for its standing as divine speech. That’s not a claim about what God declined to do. It’s a claim about what the operative perfection failed to yield in the thing he did author. That’s the bite. It’s not “God wasn’t powerful enough.” It’s “you’ve granted the perfection was operative and then denied its characteristic effect in the product.”

So Joe’s “could vs. did” is right as a principle and misapplied as a defense. The diagnostic lives entirely on the “did” side. It stipulates the actual divine authoring, stipulates the perfections were operative, which Joe grants, since they’re essential, and asks why the product lacks the properties operative perfections produce. “God chose not to” doesn’t answer that, because the choice in view isn’t whether to make a self-authenticating text in the abstract. It’s whether, having authored this communicative act with all his perfections operative, the act bears their stamp. To deny that, you don’t get to say “he could have but didn’t.” You have to name the perfection that was operative in the authoring and yet failed to characterize the authored speech. That’s not an emotional ploy. It’s just asking what follows from premises Joe already holds.

On his last historical point:

“The real world in the late first century AD is a world in which God has given us the biblical texts, but there are also living apostles preaching binding doctrine orally, and sola scriptura is not true during those times.”⁵⁵

Granted, and it doesn’t touch the AIT. I’ve said throughout that the AIT is the positive piece. It grounds Scripture’s properties, not the “alone.” The living-apostles period is a redemptive-historical stage before the canonical deposit is complete, with inspired oral apostolic preaching alongside the writing. That nobody runs sola scriptura during the apostolic age is something Protestants affirm, and it bears on the disqualification argument and the completeness of the deposit, not on whether the texts God authored bear the properties their authoring perfections produce. Joe has aimed a true historical observation at the one part of the argument it doesn’t reach.

So I’m grateful for the close. Joe put his finger on the exact hinge. The diagnostic isn’t “what could God do.” It’s “what does the thing he actually authored have to be like, given who was authoring it.” Answer that with “no perfection failed, he just chose otherwise,” and you’ve conceded the perfections were operative and then denied their effect in the product. That’s the tension. It’s not manipulation. It’s the cost of the position, stated in the coin of premises we share.

Five Objections from the Comments

When Joe’s video went up, the comment section filled in, and the objections that recurred there aren’t random. Nearly every one is aimed at the version of the AIT Joe was working from, the simplified one that drops the five distinctions. That isn’t a complaint about the commenters. They were answering what was on the table, and what was on the table was a gloss. Joe had the original video and the Substack article. They didn’t have my Part 1 reply to Joe, obviously. So the comments reflect the AIT minus its key distinctions. Once the real AIT is back on the table, most of these objections answer themselves. I’ll state each in its strongest form.

Objection 1: “The same argument works for the Church. Christ built the Church, so it inherits divine attributes too.”

This was the most common objection, and it’s Joe’s own “why isn’t the church enough” multiplied across the thread. It runs straight into Distinction 5. The AIT doesn’t say whatever God causes inherits divine standing. It says the perfections operative in a communicative act determine the communicative properties of that act. That’s kind-correspondence. The Church isn’t a communicative act God authored. It’s a creature Christ builds and indwells, the recipient and herald of the communicative act, not an instance of one. Spirit-protection of an institution’s mission is a different relation from breathed-out authorship, and Rome itself draws that line when it calls the Magisterium assisted and protected rather than inspired. So the mechanism that grounds Scripture’s standing doesn’t transfer to the Church, because the Church isn’t the kind of thing the mechanism operates on. This is the objection Joe pressed in the Ultimate Authority section, and it gets the same answer here. I’ll be honest about where it can still be pressed. The answer leans on one key claim that supreme normative authority requires theopneustos authorship, not just any genuine God-relation. You can grant that the imago Dei and the Church are different relations and still ask why coordinate authority should require authorship of a text rather than a Spirit-grounded institution. That’s the right question. It’s what the disqualification argument defends. It’s where the real disagreement lives, not a gap in the setup.

Objection 2: “You presuppose God communicates only through Scripture. That begs the question.”

This one misreads the antecedent, which is Distinction 4. The AIT doesn’t assume God speaks only in writing. It grants freely that God speaks through prophets, the incarnate Word, creation, and the living apostolic preaching. The antecedent isn’t “God communicates only in writing.” It’s “this text is a divine communicative act.” Given that, the argument asks what such an act must be like. It says nothing about God being restricted to that mode, and it doesn’t need to. So the question isn’t begged. The premise is narrower than the objection assumes, and that narrowness is the thing the gloss left out.

Objection 3: “This is just the Muslim view of the Quran in Christian dress.”

This recurred constantly, so it’s worth answering, and it lands on the simplified version and nothing else. The AIT denies what the comparison imputes. Scripture isn’t divine, isn’t uncreated, and doesn’t possess God’s incommunicable attributes. It’s a creaturely product that bears the analogues of God’s communicative perfections by exemplar causation, which is supervenience, not transfer or divinization. I spent a section of Part 1 distinguishing the two precisely so the view wouldn’t be read as “the Bible is a piece of divinity.” The Islamic claim about the Quran is an ontological claim about an eternal, uncreated text. The AIT is the opposite, a created text whose properties trace to its Author’s act, not to any divinity in the text itself.

Objection 4: “If Scripture were clear, there wouldn’t be thousands of denominations.”

This is the perspicuity objection, and it targets a claim no confessional Protestant holds. I worked through it in the Clarity section above, so I’ll keep it short. Clarity was never the claim that every passage is plain, that no one needs teachers, or that disagreement is impossible. It’s the narrower claim that Scripture’s saving message is clear enough that the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, can attain a sufficient understanding without an infallible interpreter standing over the text. Disagreement about eschatology or church polity doesn’t touch that, as those aren’t the saving essentials the doctrine was scoped to. The question perspicuity poses isn’t whether help is needed. It’s whether the help must be infallible.

Objection 5: “Exemplar causation is limited by the deficiency of the material. Language is semantically indeterminate, so the perfections can’t transfer to ink on a page.”

This was the most serious objection in the thread, and unlike the others it isn’t an artifact of the missing distinctions. It engages the mechanism, so it deserves a real answer. Grant the principle, that an exemplar’s effect is constrained by what the medium can receive. A pianist is limited by the piano. The question is whether linguistic media are too indeterminate to bear the properties the AIT assigns. Two replies. First, the properties the AIT assigns are properties of a communicative act, not properties that require the medium to be metaphysically perfect. Material sufficiency and clarity on the essentials are achievable in ordinary language, which succeeds at determinate communication all the time without being flawless. Second, the indeterminacy claim proves too much. If linguistic media were too indeterminate to carry a recoverable saving message, that would threaten not just Scripture but every magisterial definition, conciliar canon, and catechism, all of which are also language. Pressed all the way, the objection dismantles the teaching office it was raised to defend. The remedy for indeterminacy can’t be an infallible interpreter, because the interpreter speaks in language too. The remedy is a communicator wise and good enough to make the saving message recoverable through ordinary means, which is what the doctrine claimed.

Where the objections land

Behind several of these sits one cleaner version worth naming, that a perfect communicator would secure a single method for arriving at doctrine, and the Magisterium is a better candidate for that method than Scripture read by fallible people. It’s the disqualification question in another key. The AIT doesn’t claim Scripture is a doctrine-dispensing machine that yields the same output regardless of the reader. It claims Scripture bears the properties its Author’s perfections produce, including a saving message clear enough to be grasped through ordinary means. Whether a living office is needed on top of that, and whether such an office could hold coordinate authority, is what the disqualification argument takes up. So this objection doesn’t touch the positive piece. It names where the second piece does its work.

The pattern is the same one that runs through this whole reply, and it’s worth being precise about it. These objections cluster because they share a single error. They read the AIT’s mechanism as raw causation, “God made it, so it should bear the property,” when the mechanism is exemplar causation restricted by kind. So one idea does most of the defending here. Kind-correspondence answers the Church objection, the Quran objection, and the turnip behind both, by locating the property in the kind of act rather than in the bare fact of divine causation. A second idea, the split between the positive piece and the negative one, handles the rest, by showing that the objections about the “alone” are aimed at a piece of the argument that isn’t in this reply. The question-begging objection misreads the antecedent, and the denominations objection misreads the scope of clarity, but both are really the same lesson in another form. The popular version of the AIT had the qualifier sanded off. I won’t pretend all of this is five distinctions marching in step. It’s mostly one engine, with a second to sort what belongs to this reply from what belongs to the next. The deficiency-of-the-material objection is the one that engages the engine rather than the gloss, and it’s answered by seeing that it would dismantle the Magisterium alongside Scripture. Put the real AIT back on the table and the objections thin out to the one question everything here has pointed at. Which divine perfection failed?

Where This Leaves Us

So, did Heschmeyer refute the AIT? On the title’s own terms, no. He landed two clean hits, my flat “nobody questioned” on Hebrews, which Luther’s worry about chapters 6 and 10 plainly dents, and my loose framing of the Luke preface, which let an orderly research method look like counter-testimony. I’ve granted both without flinching. They fall on the biblical-historical surface and the metaphysical engine doesn’t run on them. Everything else he aimed at was the AIT with its distinctions stripped off, and once they’re restored the objections stop landing. What he did do, and did well, is find the exact place where the argument isn’t finished. The “alone” isn’t established here. It’s the work of the disqualification argument, and Joe pressed hardest on precisely that place. That’s not a refutation. It’s a correct map of where the real disagreement still has to be settled.

I’ll end where Part 1 ended, and where every one of these objections eventually lands. The bill comes due in the doctrine of God, on premises the Catholic already holds, and none of Joe’s objections pays it. Which divine perfection failed?

Notes

1. Joe Heschmeyer, “This Brand New Sola Scriptura Argument Surprised Me...” Shameless Popery YouTube, published May 5, 2026. Cited going forward as: Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

2. Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Zondervan Reflective, 2024), on Scripture’s unique nature grounding its unique authority (“as the Bible is unique in nature, so it is correspondingly unique in authority”). Wes Huff argues from Scripture’s ontological uniqueness to its uniqueness in authority in his video explaining why he’s not Roman Catholic.

3. That Scripture’s properties are creaturely, not a transfer of the divine essence, is required by the rejection of the Almarician position. Cf. Thomas 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”). And see the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).

4. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 44, a. 3 on the intrinsic formal cause versus the exemplar (extrinsic formal) cause, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book V, lect. 2, no. 764.

5. That Scripture bears its authority intrinsically while the church’s authority is derivative is standard Reformed teaching. See Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, vol. 1, Revelation and God (Crossway, 2019), ch. 18, on Scripture as self-authenticating (autopistos) and Wilhelmu Brakel’s principle that “the church derives all authority from the Word.”

6. The formula is norma normans non normata, the norming norm that is not itself normed, the standard Reformed designation of Scripture’s place among authorities.

7. William Lane Craig, Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume 1. (Wiley, 2024), 92. Craig cites I. Howard Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, International Critical Commentary (T & T Clark International, 1999), 794–795.

8. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

9. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

10. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

11. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

12. Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God, vol. 1 (Crossway, 2019), 397.

13. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

14. Christopher Cloos, “Did Heschmeyer Misread the AIT,” The Protestant Review.

15. Christopher Cloos, “The Argument from AIT to Sola Scriptura,” The Protestant Review.

16. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

17. J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, New International Commentary on the New Testament (William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 836.

18. Patrick Madrid, “Sola Scriptura: A Blueprint for Anarchy,” in Not by Scripture Alone, ed. Robert Sungenis (Queenship Publishing Co., 1997), 19.

19. Robert Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,” in Not by Scripture Alone, ed. Robert Sungenis (Queenship Publishing Co., 1997), 202. He cites Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 410 for support.

20. Mark Shea, “What is the Relationship between Scripture and Tradition?”, in Not by Scripture Alone, ed. Sungenis, 165-66.

21. Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (Macmillan, 1966), 410.

22. Christopher Cloos, “Gavin Ortlund Is Right About Sola Scriptura (But His Argument Has a Gap),” The Protestant Philosopher YouTube, published March 6, 2026. Going forward cited as: Cloos, “Gavin Ortlund is Right,” The Protestant Philosopher.

23. Cloos, “Gavin Ortlund is Right,” The Protestant Philosopher.

24. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7.

25. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

26. Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 331.

27. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 331.

28. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 335.

29. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

30. William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 158–59.

31. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

32. Mark D. Thompson, A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture, New Studies in Biblical Theology 21 (Downers Grove, IL: Apollos/InterVarsity, 2006), 105.

33. Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 399, citing Matthew Barrett.

34. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Brazos, 2016), 124.

35. F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1988), 177.

36. Cloos, “Gavin Ortlund is Right,” The Protestant Philosopher.

37. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

38. Christopher Cloos, “Part 1: The Attribute Inscripturation Thesis,” The Protestant Review, March 10, 2026, “Ortlund’s Gambit and Its Gap”; restated in “Did Heschmeyer Misread the AIT? Part 1: Five Distinctions,” May 10, 2026, Distinction 2.

39. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel, 139.

40. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992–97), 93.

41. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

42. John Owen, on the self-evidencing character of Scripture, The Divine Original, Authority, Self-Evidencing Light, and Power of the Scriptures (1659), in Works, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 16.

43. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1 & 2, The Library of Christian Classics (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 80–81.

44. Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God, vol. 1 (Crossway, 2019), 340.

45. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

46. Turretin, Institutes, on the threefold distinction: the marks as the argument on account of which we believe, the Holy Spirit as the efficient cause, and the church as the instrument or means through which we believe.

47. First Vatican Council, Dei Filius (1870), ch. 2, on canonicity grounded in inspiration rather than subsequent ecclesial approval.

48. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

49. Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 68.

50. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

51. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

52. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

53. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

54. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.

55. Heschmeyer, “New Argument,” Shameless Popery.