Sola Scriptura, Part 1

Sola Scriptura, which is Latin for "Scripture alone," is the belief that the Bible is "the only source of revealed truth concerning Jesus, faith and salvation."

This is a doctrine that, along with Sola Fide (by faith alone), Sola Gratia (by grace alone), Solus Christus (Christ alone), and Soli Deo Gloria (glory to God alone), make up the "Five Solas," which were the driving principles of the Protestant Reformation.

While four of the five Solas have never been troublesome to me, Sola Scriptura is something that I have had difficulty with for as long as I can remember; even before I knew it had a name. How could it be, I wondered, that the God of the universe would choose to restrict the entirety of His revelation to the pages of the Bible? Even while I was a professed Baptist, I began to develop an uncomfortable sense of the confining nature of this doctrine, and started asking questions to which I have never heard any satisfying answers: Where is the divinely inspired Table of Contents? (in other words, someone had to determine the canon of Scripture, because Christ didn't hand over the Bible in its present form); The Pauline Epistles seem to have been written to churches that already knew the Faith. Without the Bible, how did they know?; If the Bible were truly the sole source of revealed Truth, wouldn't it have to say so? It does not.

As my questions about Sola Scriptura grew in number and went years without proper answers, they evolved into misgivings, suspicions, and finally objections to the doctrine. It is partly because of my extreme discomfort with Sola Scriptura, and with what I eventually learned was a deep Lutheran commitment to it, that I ultimately decided to abandon my ambitions of pursuing ordination.

If there is anything on which the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches agree (and there really does not seem to be much), it is that the Bible is not the sole source of revealed Truth. The former places Scripture alongside Sacred Tradition, the latter includes Scripture as a part of Sacred Tradition. The Orthodox Church defines "Tradition" as "That which is handed down, transmitted," which, of course, includes the Bible. The Orthodox Church has immeasurable respect and regard for the Bible, and uses Scripture more than any other church I've ever known; they understand the Bible to be inspired by God, but they recognize that the Bible is a product of the Church, not vice versa. I am not aware of a Protestant tradition that would agree with this last point. That is part of what has gotten me where I am in the Faith.

Through the remainder of the year, I will be posting weekly excerpts from an great article entitled Sola Scriptura: In the Vanity of Their Minds. It was written by Father John Whiteford, who is a former Church of the Nazarene pastor, and it expresses as well as anything I've read what is at the heart of my intense mistrust of Sola Scriptura. It is a long article, so I will be posting it in several parts, but it has a lot of very good information, so I recommend that my readers take the time each week to read it through thoroughly. Here is the first section (all emphases in this and subsequent installments are my own):


AN ORTHODOX EXAMINATION OF THE PROTESTANT TEACHING
Introduction: Are Protestants Beyond Hope?
Despite all that stands in their way, there definitely is hope for Protestants. Protestants in search of theological sanity, of true worship, and of the ancient Christian Faith are practically beating on our Church doors. They are no longer satisfied with the contradictions and the faddishness of contemporary Protestant America.

Perhaps the most daunting feature of Protestantism — the feature which has given it a reputation of stubborn resiliency is its numerous differences and contradictions. Yet for all their differences there is one basic underlying assumption that unites the amorphous blob of these thousands of disparate groups into the general category of "Protestant." All Protestant groups (with some minor qualifications) believe that their group has rightly understood the Bible, and though they all disagree as to what the Bible says, they generally do agree on how one is to interpret the Bible — on your own! — apart from Church Tradition. If one can come to understand this belief, why it is wrong, and how one is rightly to approach the Scriptures, then any Protestant of any stripe may be engaged with understanding. Even groups as differing as the Baptists and the Jehovahs Witnesses are really not as different as they outwardly appear once you have understood this essential point — indeed if you ever have an opportunity to see a Baptist and a Jehovahs Witness argue over the Bible, you will notice that in the final analysis they simply quote different Scriptures back and forth at each other. If they are equally matched intellectually, neither will get anywhere in the discussion because they both essentially agree on their approach to the Bible, and because neither questions this underlying common assumption neither can see that their mutually flawed approach to the Scriptures is the problem. Herein lies the heart of this Hydra of heresies — pierce its heart and its many heads at once fall lifelessly to the ground.

Why Scripture Alone?
If we are to understand what Protestants think, we will have to first know why they believe what they believe. In fact if we try to put ourselves in the place of those early reformers, such as Martin Luther, we must certainly have some appreciation for their reasons for championing the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura (or "Scripture alone"). When one considers the corruption in the Roman Church at that time, the degenerate teachings that it promoted, and the distorted understanding of tradition that it used to defend itself -along with the fact that the West was several centuries removed from any significant contact with their former Orthodox heritage — it is difficult to imagine within those limitations how one such as Luther might have responded with significantly better results. How could Luther have appealed to tradition to fight these abuses, when tradition (as all in the Roman West were lead to believe) was personified by the very papacy that was responsible for those abuses. To Luther, it was tradition that had erred, and if he were to reform the Church he would have to do so with the sure undergirding of the Scriptures. However, Luther never really sought to eliminate tradition altogether, and he never used the Scriptures truly "alone," what he really attempted to do was to use Scripture to get rid of those parts of the Roman tradition that were corrupt. Unfortunately his rhetoric far outstripped his own practice, and more radical reformers took the idea of Sola Scriptura to its logical conclusions.

Continued next week in Part 2 - Problems with the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura