Prooftext
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Prooftexting is the practice of using decontextualised quotations from a document (often, but not always, a book of the Bible) to establish a proposition. Critics of the technique note that often the document, when read as a whole, may not in fact support the proposition. It is, essentially, a type of quote mining.
Prooftexting is a technique associated – fairly or otherwise – with ministers and apologists affiliated with conservative Evangelical Protestant churches. One important alleged example of its use is provided by apologetic material purporting to prove that Roman Catholicism is a false religion. A good example of a prooftext used for this purpose is Ephesians 2.8-9, which reads, in the New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible:
- "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast".
This text is often cited in support of the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, and against Catholic teaching on salvation (which holds that for salvation to be effective, people must be willing instruments of God's grace). Within Catholicism itself, mainstream Catholics have accused sedevacantists of adopting prooftexting methods when they have sought to prove their thesis that the Church hierarchy has become apostate by quoting from Church documents such as the Code of Canon Law.
Outside religious discourse, it has been claimed that prooftexting is widely used by Libertarians, and especially Objectivists, to demonstrate that certain historical personalities (usually the Founding Fathers of the United States) would have supported their philosophies and their religion. Aside from any questions of decontextualization, such methods of argumentation have been seen as a fallacious use of appeal to authority.
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