Sola Scriptura Fell Out Of The Sky? A Response To Trent Horn

by on June 18, 2025 | Comment

The popular Roman Catholic apologist Trent Horn recently published a video criticizing the Protestant principle of sola scriptura on historical grounds, and arguing that sola scriptura was a novel idea invented by the Protestant Reformers with no basis in the writings of the early church fathers.1 This prompted Dr. Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California to publish his own video from Sola Media, responding to some of the historical claims made by Horn, and offering both a biblical and historical defense of the idea.2 Horn has since posted a rebuttal video in response to Horton’s claims.3

While Horn states in the video that he is going to rebut Horton’s argument, what we get is the typical hyperbolic language and straw man fallacies that are all too common among online Roman Catholic apologists. There is a lot to unpack here, so for the sake of brevity I am going to narrow my response to the historical claims made by Horn and leave the biblical arguments for another time.

Sola Scriptura Defined:

A key part of Horn’s response is a vague or ambiguous definition of the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. Part of the difficulty with addressing videos like Horn’s is the need to distinguish the Reformation’s understanding of sola scriptura from modern evangelicalism’s redefinition and abuse of that term. This lack of distinction typically allows Roman Catholic apologists to attack caricatures of the principle. While Horn does quote from Westminster Confession of Faith 1.1 “On Holy Scripture,” he just dismisses the quote saying, “Where does the Bible say this?” with no further elaboration. Horn’s description of the principle often sounds like biblicism, which the Reformation never taught, and which Reformation traditions like the Reformed and Lutheran traditions have always rejected. In fact, Horn never offers a good definition of sola scriptura that he can be pinned down, and at times this seems intentional (more on that later).

What sola scriptura comes down to is that Scripture is the final or ultimate authority for Christian doctrine and living. In a Reformational context, this assumes an ecclesiology that requires subscription to a confession of faith, as well as the first seven ecumenical councils. Tradition is considered a good thing, but it must always be aligned with what Scripture itself proclaims.

What sola scriptura does not mean is that individuals are to attempt to read the Bible as if no one has read it before them. Nor does it mean that ecclesiastical documents have no authority on the life of the church. This would be an impossible task and separates individual believers from the testimony of the church. This is something Horn does not take pains to clarify, instead implying by sola scriptura a sort of biblicism throughout the video response. What he does not state is that Confessional Protestants believe in the authority of the church, and this is evident by our requirement of subscription to our confessional standards for ordination.

This is a battle that Confessional Protestants encounter repeatedly, and it means that we must clarify time and again to distinguish ourselves from modern evangelicals who typically are the go-to representatives of all things Protestant (more on that later).

Horton’s Views and Historical Method:

Now to some of the main points. To begin, Horton started his video showing the main issue with Horn’s video—namely, the claim that there were no Pre-Nicene Fathers who articulated a principle like sola scriptura. He also addressed some inaccurate comments Horn made about Irenaeus. Horton then went on to draw upon what Scripture itself has to say about the distinctions between Scripture and tradition and then unpacked his main goal behind the video.

Horton raises the historical question: How did Scripture function in the first and second centuries of the church? This is an inductive question that comes from a humanistic approach to texts. It is studying texts, or a body of texts, on their own terms, which includes reading them as primary sources, reading the secondary literature about them, reading them again in light of that literature, and developing arguments based on what the texts says. This is the nature of intellectual history as a discipline, of which historical theology is a subfield.

What often gets lost in these conversations about church history is what constitutes valid historical claims. Online apologists are often not trained in historical methods, and therefore are left to reading certain terms, practices, and ideas back into the ancient church in a way that is highly anachronistic. Horn makes this exact mistake. He assumes that Rome’s understanding of the authority of tradition is what the early church practiced and objects to methods like the one Horton uses which employs inductive readings of texts.

When it comes to the academic discipline of historical theology, historians do not look for cherry picked quotes from the church fathers, or any era of Christian theology for that matter, to make their case. Horton was not asking, for example, which church fathers make statements that affirm the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. He was asking how Scripture functioned in the early church, and he argued that Scripture functioned as the ultimate and final authority in matters of doctrine and practice. Just because someone reads an old text does not mean they are trained in the necessary skills to interpret it properly in its historical context.

Pre-Nicene Sources:

Another point of contention in Horn’s video is with Horton’s reading of 1 Clement and Irenaeus as examples of Pre-Nicene testimonies to sola scriptura. He disputes Horton’s reading of 1 Clement as “absolutely false” with regards to his quote on the “canon of our tradition.”4

Horn then goes on to cite Andrew Gregory, who stated that 1 Clement does in fact cite 1 Corinthians, Romans, and Hebrews in his letter. Horn also cites Gregory arguing that 1 Clement cited the words of Jesus drawing from oral tradition and not on a written source. But Protestant scholars of the New Testament have also affirmed this, something that Horn also denies earlier in the video.

Horn, however, says this is evidence that the “source of apostolic authority . . . was found in the people the apostles chose to carry out their ministry.” Here Horn is appealing to the theory of apostolic succession, that the church as an institution was preserved through a direct succession of bishops going back to the apostles. I want to stay here for a minute because a key part of this theory rests on anachronistically going back and reading terms like bishop in early Christian literature to mean what a bishop means today: a minister who has monarchical authority over a region of churches and the priests who tend them. This, however, is false, and what we know today as a bishop really began to develop in the medieval era and not the first and second centuries.

One scholar Horton has referenced is Peter Lampe, who has shown quite definitively in his book, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians in Rome in the 1st and 2nd Centuries, that the form of church government for these early centuries in Rome was presbyterian government.5 Horn might object to this argument, but, as Horton highlights, Pope Benedict XVI actually affirmed this in his book, Called to Communion (1996), where Benedict argued that the words episkopos and presbyteros were interchangeable in the New Testament and the early church.6

So as far as the authority of the church resting on the succession of bishops going back to the apostles, Horn has yet to answer this point made not only by Dr. Horton, but also by Pope Benedict XVI.

Horn on the Clarity of Scripture:

Another point of bad history comes from Horn’s dispute against Horton’s reading of Tertullian. Horton highlights the fact that in Tertullian’s writings we see that even the heretics in the early church appealed to Scripture, which assumed a kind of special or ultimate authority that Scripture held in the churches that the heretics knew. They appealed to Scripture because Scripture was recognized as the ultimate authority for doctrine and practice. Horn argues against this, stating that “just because you have the Bible doesn’t mean you have a complete theology.” This is a strawman argument. Neither Horton nor the Confessional Protestants have argued that. Again, Horn conflates sola scriptura with biblicism.

It does not help that Horn contends Tertullian taught that the church was not to argue from the Scriptures when dealing with heretics. To make his case worse, Horn cites the historian J. N. D. Kelly in an attempt to bolster his point about tradition and its authority in relationship to the Scriptures. The passage reads, “Tertullian did not confine the apostolic tradition to the New Testament. . . . This unwritten tradition he considered to be virtually identical with ‘the rule of faith’ which he preferred to Scripture as a standard when disputing Gnostics.”7

But this citation of Kelly is disingenuous. The context of this whole treatment by Kelly of the function of Scripture in the early church is far more robust. In fact, Kelly seems to anticipate some of the arguments that folks like Horn make. Kelly explained Irenaeus’ views of Scripture as follows:

Did Irenaeus then subordinate Scripture to unwritten tradition? This inference has been commonly drawn, but it issues from a somewhat misleading antithesis. . . . But a careful analysis of his Adverus haereses reveals that, while the Gnostics’ appeal to their supposed secret tradition forced him to stress the superiority of the Church’s public tradition, his real defense of orthodoxy was founded upon Scripture. Indeed, tradition itself, on his view, was confirmed by Scripture, which was ‘the foundation and pillar of our faith.’ . . . The whole point of his teaching was, in fact, that Scripture and the Church’s unwritten tradition are identical in content, both being vehicles of the revelation. If tradition as conveyed in the ‘canon’ is a more trustworthy guide, this is not because it comprises truths other than those revealed in Scripture, but because the true tenor of the apostolic message is there unambiguously set out.8

Kelly went on to argue that Tertullian followed Irenaeus on this point, while adding some of his own distinctive take in many ways. Tertullian, however, did in fact believe that Scripture was the ultimate authority. Kelly wrote,

In its primary sense, however, the apostolic, evangelical or Catholic tradition stood for the faith delivered by the apostles, and [Tertullian] never contrasted tradition so understood with Scripture. Indeed, it was enshrined in Scripture, for the apostles subsequently wrote down their oral preaching in epistles. For this reason Scripture has absolute authority.9

It is worth noting that Kelly further clarified, in a way that seemed to anticipate claims like that of Horn’s, that some may conclude Tertullian equated tradition with Scripture in terms of authority. In fact, Kelly wrote, “His true position, however, was rather subtler and approximated closely to that of Irenaeus.”10

Conclusion

A final point I have to address is Horn’s contention that the Scriptures are not clear and therefore need an infallible church to clarify it for doctrine and practice. Here he argues the standard position of the Roman Catholic Church. His defense of this idea turns bizarre in his comments on the practice of infant baptism. Horn asks the question of whether or not we are to baptize infants in the church. His answer: “Protestants don’t agree, which shows the Bible is not clear on this issue.” This was one of the more shockingly ignorant statements made by Horn, and I think Horton would also be shocked to learn that Protestants do not baptize the children of their members. All of the Reformers and all of the communions that came out of the Protestant Reformation (Lutheran, Reformed/Anglican) taught and maintained the practice of infant baptism in their churches.

The Anabaptists, who were not Protestants, rejected this practice, and were condemned by all of the Reformers for this. This is one of those things where it appears that Roman Catholic apologists love debating Baptists like James White or Gavin Ortlund precisely because they are Baptists. Because Protestantism is typically defined by the Baptist tradition (an unfortunate and bizarre historical development), and because it can be demonstrably shown that the rejection of infant baptism by the Baptists, and Anabaptists before them, represents a radical redefinition of the church, the sacraments, and the reading of redemptive history that was not seen in the early church, these arguments serve as low-hanging fruit for apologists like Horn. On the flip side of this, Horn also should know better than to make such patently false claims like this when debating scholars of a particular tradition.

Notes

  1. Trent Horn, “The Fallacy of “Sola Scriptura” Church Fathers,” The Counsel of Trent, YouTube, December 18, 2024.
  2. Michael Horton, “Defending Sola Scriptura in the Church Fathers | Michael Horton Responds to Trent Horn,” Sola Media, YouTube, March 26, 2025.
  3. Trent Horn, “Michael Horton’s Response to Me on Sola Scriptura (REBUTTED),” The Counsel of Trent, YouTube, April 2, 2025.
  4. Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 53.
  5. Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians in Rome in the First and Second Centuries, Marshall D. Johnson, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
  6. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 124.
  7. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th rev. (London: Continuum, 2000), 40.
  8. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 39.
  9. Kelly, 40.
  10. Kelly, 41.

©David Mendoza. All Rights Reserved.

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  • David Mendoza
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    David Mendoza an educator at a classical academy in California and a contributor for Young Voices. He holds a B.A. from The Master’s University and an M.A. from Westminster Seminary California. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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