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Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Problems With Citing 2 Thessalonians 2:15 Against Sola Scriptura

When 2 Thessalonians 2:15 comes up in discussions related to the Christian rule of faith, we can begin by going several verses earlier and asking whether the oral teaching Paul refers to in 2 Thessalonians 2:6 has been preserved. It's a disputed passage that different people have interpreted in different ways.

Beyond the specifics of 2:6, 2 Thessalonians in general is in large part about eschatology. When we look at the early oral eschatological traditions, such as the ones found in Papias and Irenaeus, they're largely premillennial, even though the most prominent modern critics of sola scriptura reject premillennialism. Centuries after Papias, Jerome referred to "a very large multitude" of orthodox Christians who were premillennialists in his day (in Thomas Scheck, trans., St. Jerome: Commentary On Isaiah [Mahwah, New Jersey: The Newman Press, 2015], pp. 820-21, section 18:1 in the commentary). Augustine was a premillennialist early in his Christian life. Wasn't the church infallibly maintaining the oral eschatological traditions Paul had given the Thessalonians?

And, aside from the teachings in 2 Thessalonians and its surrounding context, such as eschatology, we could ask about oral information in general. The Thessalonians knew a lot about Paul: what he looked like, what his handwriting looked like (3:17), what sort of work he did when he was among them (3:8), etc. Biographers of Paul and many other people would like to have that information. So, why don't these critics of sola scriptura produce it? Or has so much oral information across so many contexts been lost over time, to the point where critics of sola scriptura have to admit that they've lost a large amount of oral information that was part of the original context of 2 Thessalonians?

These considerations don't prove sola scriptura, and an advocate of something other than sola scriptura could avoid an appeal to 2 Thessalonians 2:15 or supplement it with whatever else. But factors like what I've mentioned above make it evident that appealing to 2 Thessalonians 2:15 alone isn't enough to make a case against sola scriptura, and 2 Thessalonians as a whole poses some difficulties for the most common alternatives to sola scriptura.

1 comment:

  1. People might find my article on this issue to be of interest:
    https://rationalchristiandiscernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-roman-catholic-church-and-apostolic.html

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