Appeal: self-contradiction
From Jay Dyer vs Pastor P Debate Orthodoxy vs Protestantism, Sola Scriptura and Church History.
- #13881:29:10upheld Pastor P psogos: self-contradiction (+2)
The council upheld the call: Pastor P gave away 2 points.
“So you're saying that you're saying that the council of Carthage was infallible in that case? In that case, yes.”
Diogenes: His opening thesis was that councils and churches err while only the word of God is perfect; here he grants that a council acted infallibly, without acknowledging the reversal.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Pastor P's opening and core thesis is sola scriptura: "the word of God is better than church councils... churches, etcetera, make mistakes," with the qualified exception, self-flagged as possibly "hypocritical," that "the church gets it right sometimes" on particular outcomes like the canon list. The transcript's speaker tags at this passage are unambiguous — S0 poses the question at 89:10 and S1 gives the distinct, separately-timestamped answer "In that case, yes" at 89:14 — so the words belong to Pastor P. Unlike his earlier self-flagged tension at 08:09 ("maybe this is hypocritical of me... gets it right sometimes"), here, pressed directly, he affirms the technical, much stronger claim that a council was "infallible" outright, without any hedge or acknowledgment that this sits in real tension with sola scriptura's core claim that only Scripture carries that unique guaranteed status — a tension the caller immediately seizes on ("so there's something outside of the Bible that's infallible?").
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "self-contradiction". Pastor P's opening thesis was that "the word of God is perfect... but we have an imperfect church," that "churches, etcetera, make mistakes," and that this fallibility of councils is precisely why scripture must outrank them. Here, pressed on the canon's authority, he grants that the Council of Carthage "was infallible" — directly contradicting the church-fallibility premise his whole sola scriptura case rests on, a contradiction the caller immediately exploits ("so sola scriptura is not what you believe then... you do believe in infallible authorities outside of the Bible").
- Plato overturn: On the record: Pastor P's standing, repeated position since early in the debate is that the church errs generally but specific decisions like Carthage's canon were providentially correct; this answer continues that standing (if question-begging) position rather than reversing an unacknowledged prior claim in a single breath. The quote as posed merges two different speakers' turns into a single self-contradicting utterance by Pastor P, but the transcript shows the question ("So you're saying... the council of Carthage was infallible in that case?") is Jay Dyer's (S0), and only the brief answer "In that case, yes" belongs to Pastor P (S1) — so this is not one speaker asking and answering himself in the same breath. Substantively, the answer itself simply repeats what Pastor P had already stated moments earlier at 88:54 ("is the list of books infallible?" "I believe it is") and is consistent with his running, oft-repeated nuanced position throughout the debate that specific council decisions (the NT canon) can be providentially "gotten right" even though churches/councils are generally fallible — the same fallibilist-with-exceptions view I already found, at 08:09, not to be a genuine unacknowledged contradiction of his opening thesis.
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