Any system claiming that Scripture alone is the ultimate norm of authority—strict sola scriptura—is formally self-referential, because no text within the canon can, by itself, establish its own canonical status or delimit the scope of doctrinal authority; the recognition of which texts are authoritative necessarily relies on an extrinsic agent—whether a community, Church, or historical consensus—whose act of recognition both confers and enforces the authority that Scripture is claimed to possess, so that the normative force of Scripture is contingent upon an authoritative judgment that Scripture itself does not provide, creating an inescapable epistemic circularity in which authority is both asserted by Scripture and grounded in an extrabiblical act of recognition.
