The Scriptures, Part 1

“We believe the Bible is…the supreme authority and guide for all doctrine and conduct.”
North American Baptist Conference Statement of Beliefs

“[T]he Holy Scriptures are the sole source from which all doctrines proclaimed in the Christian Church must be taken...”
Of the Holy Scriptures, LCMS.org

“[T]he Lutheran Church…is a church whose teaching is based on the words written by the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.”
What the Bible and Lutherans Teach, WELS.net

“The Evangelical Covenant Church…confesses that the Holy Scripture, the Old and New Testament, is the Word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct.”
Covenant Affirmations, Page 1

“Moreover, we believe that this Holy Scripture most perfectly contains the whole will of God and that all things are taught in it abundantly…”
Belgic Confession, Article 7

“The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith and Obedience.”
1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, Article 1

“The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”
Westminster Confession, Ch. 1 Article X

“We believe that the Holy Bible…is, and shall remain to the end of the world, the true centre of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.”
1833 New Hampshire Baptist Confession, Article I

“Holy Scripture conteyneth all thinges necessarie to saluation: so that whatsoeuer is not read therein, nor may be proued therby, is not to be required of anye man, that it shoulde be beleued as an article of the fayth, or be thought requisite [as] necessarie to saluation.”
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, 1571, Article VI

I think you get the point.
I could cite hundreds of Protestant confessions, creeds, and affirmations and I’m fairly certain that they would all say basically the same thing: We derive our doctrine and practice from the Bible and nothing else.

In fact, those of my readers who know better can correct me, but to my knowledge, there is not a single one of the more than 30,000 Protestant denominations in this world—who, as we have seen, disagree on nearly every major point of Christian doctrine and practice—that would not claim to derive the entirety of its doctrine and practice from the Bible and nothing else.

Let me say that again: Every one of the tens of thousands of conflicting and contradictory Protestant belief systems in this world is based on someone's interpretation of the Bible.

This is true even for the Roman Catholic Church except that, in addition to the Bible, they also base their doctrine and practice on what they call Sacred Tradition (See Dei Verbum, articles 9 & 10).

There has been much heated debate over the centuries about whether doctrine should be based on Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) or a combination of Scripture and Tradition.

As with most things, however, the Orthodox Church has a completely different take on the matter.

Clark Carlson explains in his book The Truth that

Orthodoxy is in no way based on the Bible. Nor is it based on or derived from a set of oral teachings that run parallel to the Bible. The Orthodox Church is the living Body of Christ—the living experience in history of the union of mankind with God in the divine-human Person of the Only-Begotten. The Word of God is not a book, but a Person. The Prophets, both those of the Old Covenant and those of the New, are those who have seen and heard and touched the Word of Life.* The Divine Scriptures and the writings of the Saints are the written witness to this experience, but they are not the source of this experience.
Thus, true and false doctrines are not discerned by whether or not one can logically deduce them from the text of the Bible or the writings of a particular Church Father—one can “deduce” just about anything from the Bible, as Protestantism has demonstrated several thousand times over—but whether or not the purported doctrine constitutes a faithful witness to or sign of the communion between God and man that is experienced in the Church (pp.186-7).

Remember when I wrote that Orthodoxy was “a whole new paradigm of Christian worship, devotion, thought, and expression”? Well, this is just one example of what I meant by that.

*1 Jn 1.1