Philosophical and Practical
Problems with Sola Scriptura
by Philip Blosser
[The
following article was first published in Robert A. Sungenis, ed., Not By Scripture Alone
(Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Co., 1998).]
In this
chapter, I will (1) set the stage for my discussion with some remarks on
historical context, (2) clear a path through a number of immediate
misapprehensions stemming from sola
scriptura that have continued to cloud Catholic-Protestant dialogue
concerning Scripture, and (3) offer a detailed analysis of several philosophical
and practical problems with the Protestant theological tradition of sola scriptura. This
analysis falls broadly into two parts: (a) philosophical problems related to
coherence and historicity and (b) practical problems of hermeneutical
subjectivism, factionalism, and the undermining of pastoral authority and
discipline.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
First,
the historical context. One of the
most urgent needs among the various Christian traditions in our time is for an
honest accounting of the issues stemming from the “Great Divorce” of the
16th century. After nearly five
centuries it has become possible to see that the issues over which Catholics and
Protestants divided were not black and white.
There was truth in the claims and accusations made by both sides, and
there were disastrous errors of judgment on both sides, which all converged to
produce what Lutheran historian Jaraslov Pelikan has called the “tragic
necessity” of the Reformation. What
is needed today more than ever is a mutual sorting out of what was really
“necessary” from what was “tragic” in the movement of the Protestant
Reformation, as well as the good from the bad in the life of the Catholic Church
in and since the 16th century.
The
urgency of this need is now beginning to be felt within those traditions that
have been most vocal about the “necessity” of the Reformation but silent
about its “tragedy”—most happily, by a number of solidly conservative,
evangelical and Reformed Protestants. This
is attested not only by such practical fraternal ventures as Charles
Colson’s and Richard Neuhaus’s book, Evangelicals
and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission,
but by theological reassessments of agreements and
differences by fair-minded evangelicals who, refreshingly, seem sincerely
willing to try to understand the position of their Catholic “separated
brethren.” Among the latter, one
of the most even-handed treatments to appear recently has been Norman
Geisler’s and Ralph MacKenzie’s Roman
Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences.
But even many
of the more polemical defenses of classic Protestant positions by such men as
James White, R.C. Sproul, John Armstrong, and others,
have demonstrated an increased willingness to wade out into the “strange
divine sea” of Catholicism and to attempt, as far as differences of
perspective permit, to be fair. More
specifically, some have shown a new appreciation of the importance of traditions
of the ancient Church and have conceded that at least some of the common
Protestant fears have been groundless or misguided.
James White, for example, warns his readers against the common
anti-Catholic paranoia about making the sign of the cross, crucifixes, candles,
liturgy, and Catholic “conspiracies”; and, following Geisler and MacKenzie,
who dedicated their book to J. von Staupiz—Luther’s father confessor, who,
like others in the Catholic tradition, “kept alive the Pauline and Augustinian
doctrine of salvation by grace”—White concedes that Luther and earlier
believers like Wyclif and Hus “found the truth of the Gospel” even while
they were Catholics.
This is significant. Other
conservative Protestants, faced with the widespread historical oblivion,
individualism, and experiential immediatism of much of modern-day
evangelicalism, demonstrate a renewed appreciation for the importance of at
least (lower-case) “catholic” tradition, such as R.C. Sproul, who readily
acknowledges that the N.T. Canon, for example, rests upon a “tradition,”
even though this word “is often viewed by a jaundiced eye among
Evangelicals” because of “guilt by association”; or John Armstrong, who
chides the attitude of those who choose to ignore the contributions of
extrabiblical traditions as the “height of contemporary arrogance.”
The
oft-rehearsed practical abuses that provoked the Protestant Reformation have
been readily acknowledged on all sides—certainly by the Catholic Church
(though this comes as news to many Protestants).
As Sheldon Vanauken observes in a sequel to his celebrated A
Severe Mercy, “In the very year that Henry VIII’s obedient Parliament
named him head of the English church, Pope Paul III went through the streets of
Rome in sackcloth and ashes for the sins of his predecessors ....”
Luther was right about Tetzel and his abuses.
Someone clearly was not minding the store in the offices of the Church.
Discipline was slack. Reform
was necessary. Rome acknowledges
this. Yet, as Louis Bouyer argues
in his sympathetic study of The Spirit and
Forms of Protestantism, the well-intended assumption that the only way of
securing the needed reforms was by recourse to sola scriptura spelled tragedy by effectively cutting off
Protestantism from that living and normative community of memory in which alone
her positive reforms could be sustained.
The positive intent was plain enough: if the Church and her human
traditions were corrupt, she could be reformed only by being subjected to an
external authority, and what else could this possibly be but Scripture,
unmediated and alone? The tragic
consequences implicit in this reasoning were not immediately apparent, and today
they are so covered over by centuries of distorted, unhistorical discourse about
“churches,” “denominations,” “ministers,” “the Word,” “human
traditions,” and the like, as to be virtually lost from view.
This itself is part of the tragedy.
Protestantism is no longer in a position to see how Christ meant the
Church to be an essential part of his Gospel.
Instead, the Gospel is experienced as communicated to individuals by the
Spirit through Scripture, and only circumstantially as connected to “the
church of one’s choice,” whatever choice that may be—as long as it is a
Protestant and relatively conservative one!
The tragedy
of sola scriptura is that it cuts off
Protestants from sacred history after New
Testament times—from the living, sacred memory of the Church.
Suspicion is inevitably roused in the Protestant mind by the any notion
that an earthly, human institution such as the Church could have anything
“sacred” or “divine” about it. It
is usually of little help to note that the New Testament refers to the Church as
the “Body of Christ” (Eph 1:23; 1 Cor 12:27); or to point out—as the Catechism
of the Catholic Church does (citing Gal 3:27-28)—that Christ is “the
head of the body, the Church” (792) and “lives with her and in her” (807),
and that the Holy Spirit may be described as her “soul” (813).
None of this language generally impresses the Protestant as applying to
any specific, earthly, historical, or humanly administered body, but rather to a
generic, transcendent, ultimate and spiritual reality embracing “all true
Christians”; and the suspicion that Catholics want to identify that reality
exclusively with their own “denomination” only raises the hackles of most
Protestants. This reaction betokens
the depth of the problem at issue: it is almost as difficult for the Protestant
to fathom the Catholic notion that the all-too-human Church of history could
have anything like a divine nature or a real divine authority, as it is for an
agnostic to fathom that the all-too-human Jesus could also be God Incarnate, or
for the secular critic to fathom that the all-too-human Bible could also be the
revealed Word of a living God. The
reason for this is that Protestantism has cut itself off from its historical
sources of authority (author’s rights) and understanding in the divine life of
the Church.
SOLA
SCRIPTURA SEVERS
ONE FROM LIVING TRADITIONS OF THE CHURCH
One
consequence of being thus cut off from the sacred memory of the divine life of
the Church—by this “sola scriptura
schism”—is the immediate difficulty residing in the Protestant’s general
of lack of acquaintance with the orthodox Catholic’s actual experience and
understanding of Scripture. Peter
Kreeft, in an appendix to Fundamentals of
the Faith, compares how Protestants experience and understand the Bible with
how they think Catholics experience and understand it, as a matter of principle.
(1) Protestants experience the Bible as sacred (God’s Word), certain (a rock, a
sure anchor), as truth (not merely as logical correctness, but as spiritual
food), a place where we meet Christ. (2)
They believe it is inspired and
infallible. So far, as Kreeft
notes, this all seems quite Catholic.
Only the “Protestant additions” of belief in the Bible’s
“sufficiency” (sola scriptura) and
their misplaced suspicions about what Catholics really experience and believe
concerning the Bible, separate them from Catholics.
(3) How do Protestants suppose we experience
the Bible? They suspect that
Catholics have always feared it and kept it from the laity, lest it expose
Catholic doctrines as unscriptural. (4)
What do they think we believe about
the Bible? That it is less
important than the Church, which teaches things quite independent of it; that,
like the Pharisees, we confuse human tradition with divine revelation,
“teaching as doctrines the precepts of men,... making the word of God void
through tradition” (Mk 7:7, 13).
Such
grievous misunderstandings stem from the tragic effects of the “sola
scriptura schism,” by which Protestants have effectively cut themselves
off from the past and present truth about the Catholic experience and
understanding of Scripture. Even
granting the growing encouragement of a biblically literate Catholic laity and
shift to the vernacular following the Second Vatican Council (1963-65), most
Protestant statements about the modern Catholic “rediscovery of the Bible”
come off sounding, to the historically informed, like patronizing nonsense.
Suffice it here to observe that if ever there was a safe truth, it is
this: no higher view of Scripture and its authority exists in all of
Protestantism than that which is to be found in the Catholic Church.
It was never the lack of a sufficiently high view of Scripture that
produced the “necessity” of the Reformation.
This can be amply shown from the Catholic Church’s (1) official
teaching, (2) history of Bible translation, (3) practice of Bible-reading at
Mass, (4) Bible interpretation, and (5) strict Catholic adherence to the
Bible’s moral teachings.
First,
official statements and teaching of the Catholic Church have always affirmed and
continue to affirm that Scripture is written wholly and entirely in all its
parts at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and that it is absolutely inerrant.
For example, Pope Leo XIII insisted in his encyclical, Providentissimus
Deus (1892), that “it is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow
inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred
writer has erred.”
Pope Pius XII, in Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), declared: “For as the substantial
Word of God became like to men in all things, ‘except sin’ [Heb. 4:15], so
the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in
every respect, except error”; in the same document Pius quoted St. Jerome’s
words: “To ignore the Scripture is to ignore Christ.”
The Second Vatican Council reiterated these positions—against the
aberrations, not only of Protestant Liberalism, but of Catholic dissidents
flirting with it—in Dei verbum
(1965), which declared that the sacred writers “consigned to writing whatever
[God] wanted written, and no more,” and that the “books of Scripture,
firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake
of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.”
Thankfully, this high Catholic view of Scripture is coming to be
acknowledged to some degree, gradually, by some evangelical scholars, such as
Geisler, MacKenzie, Sproul, Roger Nicole, and the late great John Gerstner.
Second,
although this is seldom known or recognized among Protestants, this high view of
Scripture is attested by the impressive historical record of Catholic
translations of Scripture. While it
is true that the illiterate peasant populations of the middle ages learned the
Gospel primarily through the spoken word, illustrated in stained glass and
enacted in ritual, the Catholic Latin Bible was itself a translation into what
was once the common “vulgar” tongue (hence: Vulgate)
of the Church in the West. Furthermore,
as Henry Graham points out in Where We Got
the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, an abundance of vernacular
Catholic translations of Scriptures existed (in Spanish, Italian, Danish,
French, Norwegian, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and English) well before the time of Wyclif.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia,
in its discussion of pre-Reformation German versions alone, says that there was
“no want of early German translations of Scripture,” and that “some 18
German editions of the whole Bible were printed prior to Luther,” the first
“at Strassburg in 1466.”
In its article on Pre-Reformation English Versions, it has sections on
Anglo-Saxon and Middle English translations of the Bible (463f.), and its entire
discussion of translations runs the gambit of European languages from Spanish to
Russian. In fact, little about
Luther’s celebrated translation may have been original.
The Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, is quoted as having declared to
Luther: “You are unjust in putting forth the boastful claim of dragging the
Bible from beneath the dusty benches of the schools.
You forget that we have gained a knowledge of the Scriptures through the
translations of others. You are
very well aware, with all your blustering, that previously to your time there
existed a host of scholars who, in biblical knowledge and philological
attainments, were incomparably your superiors.”
Third,
the high Catholic regard for Scripture is attested in the role played by Bible
reading during Mass. A cycle of
prescribed lectionary readings—always including a reading from (1) a book of
the Old Testament, (2) a Psalm, (3) an Epistle, and (4) one of the Gospels,
whose pages are symbolically kissed after the reading—takes the practicing
Catholic through major portions of Scripture on a regular basis, assuring a
steady diet of Bible-reading uninfluenced by the pastor’s whim, pet
theological hobby horse, or disinclination to preach on certain topics.
David Currie, in his book Born
Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, describes an experiment he conducted in
measuring the average clock time spent in actual Bible reading in different
churches.
He chose two Protestant churches—one evangelical, the other
fundamentalist—both with an average Sunday attendance well into the thousands.
He found that the evangelical church, in the northwestern suburbs of
Chicago, spent less than 6 percent of its Sunday service in Scripture, while the
fundamentalist church in northwest Indiana spent 2 percent of its mornings in
Scripture. By contrast, he found
that Catholics spend an average of more than 26 percent of their time at Mass in
Scripture. This should tell us
something.
Fourth,
the Catholic Church’s high view of Scripture is attested, ironically, at those
points where her strict and literal interpretation is disputed by Protestantism.
Despite what conservative Protestants may think about “Catholic
additions” to the “simple Gospel” of Scripture, most of the Catholic
distinctives that they criticize are rooted in taking Scriptures at face value.
As James Akin points out in his contribution to Surprised by Truth: Eleven
Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic, it
is not the Catholic Church, but the various factions within Protestantism that
clamor over alternative interpretations and spiritualizing metaphors for the
straightforward meanings of the text, and it is the Catholics who take Scripture
at face value.
In nearly every case where Protestant interpretations of scripture has
diverged from official Catholic interpretation, the latter has taken the more
conservative, even literal, view—whether it is the matter of eating the flesh
and drinking the blood of Jesus (Jn 6:53), his Eucharistic declaration, “This
is my body” (Lk 22:19), our being saved or regenerated by baptism (Jn 3:5, Rm
6:3, 1 Pt 3:21), the indissolubility of marriage and prohibition of remarriage
(Mk 10:11; Lk 16:18; Mt 5:32; 19:9; 1 Cor 7:10, 33), Christ’s delegation of a
real power of binding and loosing (Mt 16:18, 18:18), his transmission of real
authority to forgive or retain sins (Jn 20:23), his building of his Church upon
Peter the “rock” (Aramaic: kepha)
and giving to Peter (whom Jesus specifically named “Cephas,” Aramaic: kepha)
the keys of the kingdom (Mt 16:18-19; cf. Is 20:20).
Fifth,
the Catholic Church’s high view of Scripture is attested by her steadfast
adherence to the moral teachings of our Lord in Scripture.
No matter how far afield her most vocal and dissident theologians have
strayed, like disobedient children from their mother, she has stood by her
magisterial definitions of what is to be believed (de
fide). After all, whose voice is it that, as the spiritual leader of
nearly one fifth of the earth’s recalcitrant inhabitants, still dares to
condemn as sin the now commonplace practices of contraception, masturbation,
abortion, divorce, remarriage, homosexuality, and to retain a literal reading of
Scripture and insist on an exclusively male and celibate clergy?
The voice of the Pope. Where
else do you hear such a voice? From
Canterbury? Lutheranism? Presbyterianism?
Methodism? Evangelicalism? All of Rome’s official teaching and reasoning is based,
directly or indirectly, on the Bible—even her position on celibacy (1 Cor
7:32, 35; Mt 19:11-12). Further,
with the exception of celibacy, Protestantism traditionally shared Rome’s view
of all these practices, including contraception.
Yet contemporary Protestant teaching has, to one degree or another,
relinquished its traditional positions and sought rationalizations for more
permissive views—even in evangelical circles.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that in a world where nearly one out of
five persons (or nearly a billion people) is Roman Catholic, the Church takes
such a clearly biblically-based stand on these issues.
This clearly says: we don’t vote
on what we’re going to let God’s Word tell us.
To
repeat: the tragedy of sola scriptura
is that it cuts off Protestants from sacred history—the living memory of the
Church. To the
philosophical and practical problems resulting from that schism and separation,
we now turn.
PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF
COHERENCE
The
sola scriptura thesis suffers from two
sets of broadly philosophical problems. These
derive from the fact that it is (1) incoherent, and (2) unhistorical.
It is incoherent in two ways: it is (A) unbiblical, and (B) logically
inconsistent.
A.
It is unbiblical.
Why is it unbiblical? It is
unbiblical because the Bible (1) nowhere teaches or assumes it; rather, the
Bible assumes (2) a larger context of delegated ecclesiastical authority and
normative tradition; and (3) the continued normativity of extrabiblical
traditions of divine instruction.
First,
for a Catholic to say that the Bible nowhere teaches or assumes sola
scriptura is not to be disrespectful of the Bible’s authority, but to
defer respectfully to its authority in precisely what
it says. Scripture does claim
divine authority for itself. It is
“God breathed” in the profoundest sense, as B.B. Warfield so compellingly
argues in his magisterial work on The
Inspiration and Authority of the Bible.
Jesus is seen constantly appealing to its authority.
But nowhere does Scripture or Jesus (or anyone in Scripture) assume that what is written is the only
source of continuing divine authority and guidance. In order to prove sola
scriptura, it is not enough to show that Scripture has divine authority, or
even that it is the ultimate material deposit of divine revelation.
One must show from Scripture that God’s will throughout history has been to commit
wholly to writing all revelation and instruction that He intended as an
ongoing authority for the His people and their salvation.
But even the best texts typically adduced to support sola
scriptura—2 Tim 3:16f.; Acts 17:10-12; 1 Cor 4:6; Dt 4:2; Rev 22:18f.,
etc.—simply do not say this; nor can
they be made to imply this, without
assuming in advance what is proper to one’s exegetical conclusions. Typical is the statement, “While 2 Tim 3:16-17 does not use
the word ‘sufficient’ it does use the equivalent in the phrase ‘competent,
equipped for every good work.”
But this merely begs the question, for the terms of the comparison are not
clearly equivalent. One could
arguably say that all of Billy Graham’s books “are profitable for teaching,
reproof, correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may
be complete, equipped for every good work”; but this would hardly warrant the
claim that his books alone are a sufficient authority for the ongoing life and
instruction of the Church. What the
Bible says is that Scripture is inspired by God, infallible, useful for
instruction, and shouldn’t be tampered with.
It does not say that it is the only standard by which God intends to
administer the ongoing life of His Church.
Second,
God is never seen conferring his authority on Scripture in an historical and
social vacuum. Scripture is always
found, rather, within a community in which God has conferred authority also upon
lawfully ordained human leaders. These
leaders are always either (1) appointed by God Himself, and publicly confirmed
in their appointment by a miraculous ministry, or (2) appointed in legitimate
and lawful succession by authorities having their ultimate origin in the first
category.
Moses, for example, was rejected when he first tried to deliver Israel
before God had called and confirmed him; but afterwards, God confirmed his call
with miraculous signs. Nowhere in
Scripture is any member of the laity—or those who lacked the lawful authority
of Jesus, the apostles, prophets, or priests—ever praised for rebelling
against lawfully-ordained authority on the basis of his private reading of
Scripture.
In fact, in Moses’ later ministry, when some rose up against him,
claiming that God is not only with him but with all the people, God dealt very
harshly with them (Num 16; 12:1-10). Jesus
and the apostles are seen demanding obedience not only to the written Word of
God, but to the living decisions of the Church (Mt 18:12-20; cf. Acts 15, 16:4).
Paul demands that his readers “stand firm and hold to the traditions”
they have received “either by word of mouth or letter” (2 Th 2:15), and
calls the Church the “pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Tim 3:15).
These verses can be tailored to a Protestant pattern, but the resulting
fit is never quite natural. As
Kreeft says, “We are not taught by a teacher without a book or by a book
without a teacher, but by one teacher, the Church, with one book, Scripture” (Kreeft,
275).
Third,
sola scriptura is self-defeating,
because it rests on a presupposition that cannot be proved from Scripture (let
alone from history)—namely, that the whole
content of God’s revealed will for the ongoing instruction of His Church
was committed “wholly to writing,” so that no
unwritten residue of divinely inspired instruction survived from the oral
teachings of Jesus and His apostles that remained binding on God’s people
after the New Testament (NT) was written. This
assumption, stated more or less audaciously, is ubiquitous among Protestants.
But where does Scripture say
this? How could one claim to know
this? The data of history and the
Church Fathers weigh heavily against it. It
does not even make good sense. First,
if all bindingly authoritative oral instruction ceased with the death of the
last apostle, and if the early churches did not have copies of all the NT books
until well after that time, who spoke for the Lord Jesus and the apostles in the
interim? Second, how is one to
plausibly imagine the transition from
the partially oral framework of
authoritative instruction (OT + teachings of Jesus and apostles) to a wholly
written framework (OT + NT) required by this hypothesis?
Gregory Krehbiel offers a wry scenario: “One imagines all the churches
dutifully obeying Paul’s oral instructions on the Eucharist [1 Cor 11:34] and
anxiously awaiting the publication in the Antiochian
Post of the last apostle’s obituary, at which point they are to rewrite
their book of church order and eliminate everything based on oral
instructions.”
The whole idea, of course, seem ridiculous, but scarcely more so than
some of the assertions commonly made in this connection (see n. 30).
But
then, in all seriousness, what is the partisan of sola scriptura to say about those who remembered the oral
instructions of the apostles—concerning, say, the Eucharistic liturgy—who
perhaps even wrote down and preserved these, even though they never made it into
the NT canon? The writings of the
early Church are filled with extrabiblical sayings of Jesus, practices of the
Christian community, liturgical and Eucharistic formulas, and so forth, which
presuppose the divine origin and authority of these things.
On the Catholic view, there is no problem here, since the writings of the
NT are viewed as fragments of a larger normative tradition, not as a complete
set of catechetical instructions for new believers, but as occasional writings
with an “eye to the situation in the churches,” often intended to correct
abuses.
But what is the Protestant Partisan to do with instructions and practices
that claim to be apostolic but were never put in writing in the NT?
Again, Krehbiel offers an imaginative scenario:
Imagine,
if you will, John Calvin, Bible in hand, visiting the church of Corinth in the
year 125. Calvin notices some
practices in the church of which he has never read specific mention in
Scripture, and he rebukes the church for “adding to God’s word.”
One
of the presbyters approaches Calvin and says, “Have you not read in Paul’s
first epistle to this church, in the passage about the Lord’s Supper, ‘And
the rest I will set in order when I come’? (1 Cor 11:34) Dear brother, I was a young man when the apostle visited this
church. These church practices you
condemn came from the apostle’s very lips.
Are you greater than Paul? We
also have in our possession Paul’s letter to the church of the Thessalonians.
He commands them to continue in the traditions, whether delivered by word
of mouth or by epistle. (2 Thes 2:15) Are
we to obey you or the apostle?” (Krehbiel, 6).
By
means of this simple historical fiction, Krehbiel illustrates the unbiblical and
unhistorical nature of the assumptions required by sola scriptura. There
is no reason to suppose that early Church practices are contrary to apostolic
teaching or were intended to be only temporary, simply because we can find no
explicit description of them in Scripture today. In fact, Krehbiel offers an interesting biblical refutation of this supposition from 2 Chronicles 29:25 and
35:4, where both Hezekiah and Josiah used extrabiblical teachings in their
reforms, from prophets who had been dead for hundreds of years, in violation of
the assumption that only those teachings preserved in canonical Scriptures are
authoritative.
What is interesting about the first verse (29:25) is that the
instructions of David, Gad and Nathan followed by Hezekiah are described as
being the command of the Lord through His prophets, even though (1) they were
long dead by the time of Hezekiah and (2) there is no record in canonical
Scripture that serves as a basis for Hezekiah’s actions.
The same is true of the writings of Solomon whose instructions Josiah is
cited as following in the second verse (35:4).
What is also remarkable is the altogether unexceptional manner in which
these actions are described. As
Krehbiel observes, “In no case did the believing community rebuke Hezekiah or
Josiah for violating sola scriptura.
On the contrary, they accepted the fact that divine instruction, through
the mouths of God’s prophets, had been preserved for the church’s use for
hundreds of years apart from Scripture.”
B.
Sola
scriptura is also logically inconsistent. It
is illogical in at least two ways: it is (1) self-referentially inconsistent,
and (2) involves a tacit violation of the principle of causality.
1. It is self-referentially inconsistent. How?
In several respects. First,
as Kreeft notes, “it is self-contradictory, for it says we should believe only
Scripture, but Scripture never says this! If
we believe only what Scripture teaches, we will not believe sola
scriptura, for Scripture does not teach sola
scriptura” (Kreeft, 275). This
is analogous to other self-refuting hypotheses that fail to conform to their own
criteria, such as the famous “verification principle” of the logical
empiricist, A.J. Ayer.
Second,
it assumes that the “essential” teachings of Scripture are sufficiently
clear to be understood by anyone, but is not itself sufficiently clear even to
be considered a scriptural teaching by all.
In fact, sola scriptura
represents a minority position among Bible-believing Christians; and
historically it is a relative novelty, entertained by nobody explicitly prior to
Wyclif in the 14th century.
Third,
it claims that the Bible is the ultimate authority, but in fact subordinates the
Bible to the extrabiblical (traditions of) interpretation of this or that
individual, or group, about what the Bible says. This means, practically speaking, that sola scriptura leads to hermeneutical subjectivism.
The claim that Scripture is “self-interpreting” is self-serving and
sophistical at this point, because conflicting interpretations make this claim.
Recourse to what the Church (or “historic Christianity”) has
traditionally taught would be a Catholic option, but not consistent with sola
scriptura. The caveat that the
advocates of sola scriptura respect
tradition insofar as it agrees with Scripture is empty, since their criterion
for what is “biblical” remains their extrabiblical (tradition of) private interpretation.
The
retort that Catholicism is also circular is beside the point and misses its
mark, but calls for a brief excursus. Sometimes
the claim is made that the Catholic Church is circular in appealing to Scripture
to support her authority and then claiming the final say in how to interpret
Scripture.
But there is no circularity here, first, because she does not claim sola
scriptura; and, second, because if she has the authority she claims, the
case is no different logically from that of the NT writers appealing to the Old
Testament (OT) for support while claiming divine warrant for their NT
interpretations.
Others
mistakenly claim the Church’s position is circular because it boils down to
saying: “we must believe Rome because Rome says so.”
The concern here for avoiding self-serving abuses by those in authority
is legitimate, but misplaced. The
Catholic is not asked to submit to the Church because the Church says so, but
because God says so, and because God has appointed the Church and her lawfully
ordained leaders as administrators of His commission.
The Church is subject to the
Word of God (including the message of
the Bible), even while she guardian and master (as Magisterium)
of the Bible’s text and interpretation.
Her authority is not an “enabling” one but a “restraining” one,
which prevents any reigning Pope from arbitrarily inventing heretical new
doctrines by binding him to an infallible tradition (including Scripture)
traceable to the “apostolic deposit of faith.”
Still
others mistakenly claim that Catholicism is circular because it bases our
conviction of the Bible’s inspiration on the Church’s infallibility and the
Church’s infallibility on the word of an inspired Bible.
But it does not. While it may appeal to the Church’s infallible teaching in
support of our conviction that Scripture is inspired, it does not have to argue
for the Church’s infallibility from the Bible alone. It can argue this from other sources of early Church
tradition as well. Hence there is
no logical circularity.
There
is a larger sense, as John Frame argues, in which circularity cannot be avoided
in arguing for the ultimate criterion
of a system.
This is what Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas meant by saying that first
principles are indemonstrable. Why
should one be logical? Because it
would be illogical not to be! Why
should one believe God’s Word? Because
it is the Word of God, of course! Every
system is based on presuppositions that control its epistemology, argument, and
use of evidence; therefore ultimate
circularity is philosophically inescapable.
But this does not mean that circularity is permissible in other
(penultimate) sorts of arguments. “The
Bible is inspired because the Bible says its inspired” is a circular argument
whose circularity is not justified.
It lacks cogency. A document’s self-attestation is insufficient warrant for
accepting its claims. The argument
can gain cogency only by enlarging its circle to include also the attestation of
the Church and data of sacred and secular history. By contrast, “The Bible means what the Church says it
means” is not circular in this way, since the Church’s interpretation is not
closed off from history, but empirically testable for fidelity and coherence
both against Scripture and the other traditions of the Church.
Fourth,
sola scriptura is self-referentially
inconsistent also because the Bible contains no inspired index of its own
contents and cannot even be identified as a Revelation except on extrabiblical
grounds of tradition, in violation of sola
scriptura. As James White
concedes: “The single best argument presented by Roman Catholicism against the
concept of sola scriptura is based on
the assertion that without some kind of extrabiblical revelation it is not
possible for us to know the canon of Scripture” (Roman,
92). The most ambitious attempts to
answer this objection have tried self-consciously to preserve the integrity of sola
scriptura, but with less than stellar results.
Some
have suggested that Scripture is “self-attesting,” either in the sense that
it is self-evidently inspired or in the sense that some books of the Bible can
be seen citing other books as “Scripture.”
But the argument of self-evidence begs the question by overlooking the
distinction between evidence as an objective property and as a subjective
perception. Scripture is
self-evidently inspired in the first sense, but not in the second.
The argument that some biblical texts cite others as “Scripture” is
credible as far as it goes; but it does not go far, and it certainly does not
provide the means by which to identify the entire canon.
White
himself argues that the “difficulty of the question is that it views the canon
as a separate entity from Scripture,” as a distinct “object of
revelation”; whereas it is actually “a function
of Scripture itself,” as defined by
God’s inspiration, so that the “Roman error lies in creating a dichotomy
between two things that cannot be separated, and then using that false dichotomy
to deny sola scriptura” (Roman,
93). As compelling as this may seem at first, it fudges the issue:
what is at issue is not (1) the property
of being canonical (inspired), which Catholics would agree is “a function
of Scripture,” but rather (2) the identification
of the canon. The argument begs the
question: the ontological property of being canonical (inspired) does not answer
the epistemological question at issue (how we identify the canon).
Other
Protestant approaches to identifying the canon, while avoiding the Catholic
answer of an infallibly guided Church, have admitted various extrabiblical
criteria and made no pretense of maintaining the adequacy of sola
scriptura at this point. Some
have suggested criteria that cannot be measured objectively and seem to confuse
the question of the motive of faith
with the question of objective evidence
for it, such as the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
Others, like Luther, have suggested tests such as “what preaches
Christ” (was Christus triebet), but
then faced the dilemma of books in the canon that seemed to fail the test.
Still others have suggested criteria that seem incapable of being applied
to all the books in the present canon, or epistemically inverifiable in most
cases, or otherwise debatable—such as apostolic authorship, imposition by the
apostles as law, propheticity, or unanimity of testimony.
The
difficulty is worth dwelling on momentarily, because it illumines one of the
chief difficulties of sola scriptura
at this point. How do you establish
the canon? Do you leave it to each
individual to weigh the merits of the contested books for himself, such as the
Epistle of Barnabas, or Shepherd of Hermas?
Do you trust the Holy Spirit to witness in the heart of each individual
to the inspiration of each book—say, Jude, Philemon, or 2 John?
Or do you avoid the anarchy of individualism and subjectivism by recourse
to tradition? But how do you do
that without accepting ecclesiastical authority?
Do you let each individual sort out Church history for himself?
The Protestant quandary at this point is nowhere more compellingly
illustrated than in Luther’s refusal to number Hebrews, James, Jude, or
Revelation among the canonical NT books in his translation of the Bible, because
in his opinion they failed to “preach Christ” in the manner of the Pauline
epistles, and contradicted his understanding of the relationship between
“justification by faith” and “works of the law.”
Where did Luther get his criteria? Clearly
not from sola scriptura, for they resulted in “taking away” from
Scripture (Dt 4:2, Rev 22:19). Luther’s
arbitrary “canon reduction” constitutes a prima
facie case against the distinctive Reformation doctrines it was designed to
support, and dramatically illustrates the perilous implications, inherent flaws,
and inadequacy of sola scriptura in
defining the canon of Scripture.
2. Sola scriptura also violates the principle of causality. As Kreeft
notes, “it violates the principle
of causality: that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.
The Church (the apostles) wrote Scripture, and the successors of the
apostles, the bishops of the Church, decided on the canon, the list of books to
be declared scriptural and infallible. If
Scripture is infallible, then its cause, the Church, must also be infallible”
(Kreeft, 275).
The
retort that “God determined” the
canon while the Church “merely discovered”
the canon does not make its case (Geisler and MacKenzie, 192f.).
No Catholic would deny this.
But it does not avoid the problem. No
Bible-believing Christian would deny that God determined the canon any more than
that God is the primary author and cause of Scripture.
But God obviously used secondary causes (human authors) to write
Scripture. No Bible-believing Protestant has difficulty accepting the
idea of God guiding fallible human authors to write infallible Scripture.
But when it comes to the idea of God extending His infallible guidance to
the decisions of post-apostolic bishops in deciding the final canon of
Scripture, they suddenly smell Catholicism and balk.
In order to avoid this, they adopt the fall-back position of admitting
that the Bible is only a “fallible collection of infallible books,” thereby
hoping to avoid the consequence of granting the Church’s bishops the divine
authority implicit in the Catholic doctrine of the apostolic succession.
But the move is disingenuous, for it is immediately followed by various
caveats implying that, for all practical purposes, they do believe in an
infallible canon after all; and what they denied to the Church under the heading
of “infallibility,” they quickly restore under the heading of
“providence.”
Protestants
already accept implicitly the principle that God can infallibly guide fallible
humans to teach infallibly, both in the oral teachings of the prophets and
apostles, and in the writing of Scripture.
But there is no more reason why one should deny that God infallibly
guided the process by which the Church “discovered” the canon than the
process by which the Church “wrote” the books contained in it.
The reluctance to accept the same principle in the formation of the canon
is not only an arbitrary and largely an anti-Catholic reflex: it is a violation
of the principle of causality. For
Bible-believing Protestants don’t hold to a doctrine of inspiration and
infallibility in the abstract, but in relation to this
book, the Bible. And to accept the
stamp of divine authority in the effect (the Bible) and reject it in the causes
that led to its formation (not only the primary cause, God, but the secondary
causes—including not only the human writers but the human bishops who finally
agreed on which books belonged in the canon), is to hold the fallacious view
that an effect can be greater than its cause.
Since,
as John Henry Newman notes, “It is very common to confuse infallibility with
certitude,”
it may be helpful to say something here about Protestant arguments that trade on
this confusion. James White, for
example, offers three arguments of this kind against the Catholic claim of an
infallible Church (White, Roman, 49f.,
91, 107). He sets the stage with a
number of ad hominem remarks about how
this claim offers people a false sense of security and lulls them with feelings
of “infallible fuzzies” into seeking “certainty outside of personal
responsibility before God,” in the answers provided by the Church.
Ad hominem remarks are never
more than personal attacks and always cut both ways: if Protestants can accuse
Catholics of “infallible fuzzies,” I suppose theological liberals could
accuse evangelicals of something like “inerrancy fuzzies.”
And, as for “personal responsibility before God,” nobody who has read
Newman on the subject of “conscience” could possibly think that Catholicism
fosters personal irresponsibility.
The real issue here is
White’s tacit confusion of infallibility with certainty, which is already
clear from the fact that his opposition to Rome’s claim of infallibility (an
objective property) begins with ad hominem remarks on certainty (a subjective feeling).
But let the arguments speak for themselves.
First,
says White, the Roman claim of infallibility is illusory because “you have to
make a fallible decision to buy into the plan, and any certainty offered
thereafter rests solely on the first—fallible—choice that was made” (50).
This links the Church’s infallibility to our fallible choices, trading
on the lack of subjective certainty that may attach to the latter.
But one could reply that a person’s decision to follow Christ is also a
decision of a fallible human being. Does
this mean one should feel uncertain about following Christ?
Certitude is a relative thing, as Newman observes: “I may be certain
that two and two makes four, even though I often make mistakes in long addition
sums.... I may be certain that the Church is infallible, while I am myself a
fallible mortal; otherwise I cannot be certain that the Supreme Being is
infallible, unless I am infallible myself.”
The fact that I am fallible does not mean that the object of my belief
(God, the Bible, or the Church) cannot be infallible; or even that I cannot have
a well-grounded certitude in the object of my belief.
Second,
White argues, “Once Rome speaks, the fallible person must still interpret the
supposed infallible interpretation,” so “the element of error remains”
(91). This move is a variation of
the first, but deals specifically with interpretation. Here one could reply by noting that the fallibility of the
evangelical’s interpretation of Scripture does not undermine his confidence in
the Bible’s infallibility. Demonstrating
the infallibility of the Church may be no easier than demonstrating that of the
Bible, but neither difficulty necessarily undermines the certitude of
infallibility.
Just as having an infallible Bible is clearly an advantage over having
none, despite the fallibility of our interpretations, so having an infallible
Church to interpret the Bible is an advantage over having an infallible Bible
alone. The infallibility of the Church’s interpretations does not
depend on a comparable infallibility in her members, or even on their certitude
of her infallibility.
Third,
White argues, “defenders of the Roman Catholic Papacy cannot merely
demonstrate that the Roman position is probably
true, or that it is likely to be true,
but that it is true beyond question”
(107)—clearly an impossible demand. But
what leads him to draw this conclusion? Presumably
the premise that “Rome claims absolute authority” or “infallible teaching
authority.” But this is not only
fallacious but conspicuously misleading. It
simply does not follow that defenders of Rome must provide indubitable,
apodictic proof of their position just because Rome claims infallible authority.
One could reply by pointing out that there is nobody whose claims are
more absolute than God’s. Does
this mean that Christian evangelists and missionaries must be able to offer
philosophical demonstrations that prove the existence of God “beyond
question” before they should be taken seriously?
Of course not. The logic
simply does not follow.
PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF
HISTORICITY
The
second set of broadly philosophical problems derive from the fact that sola
scriptura is unhistorical: it both stems from and reinforces ignorance of Church
history. This results in at least
seven problems: it is (1) improbable, (2) inconsistent with the practice of the
NT Church, (3) overlooks the extrabiblical influences on its adherents, (4)
overlooks the extrabiblical historical influences on itself, (5) assumes
Scripture can be understood apart from tradition, (6) leads to misinterpretation
of the Church Fathers, and (7) leads to unhistorical understandings and
distortions of fact.
First,
it is improbable. The doctrine that
Scriptures alone are sufficient to
function as the regula fidei—the
infallible rule for the ongoing faith and life of the Church—is of highly
improbable orthodoxy since it had no defender for the first thirteen centuries
of the Church.
It does not belong to historic Christianity.
Only in the 14th century did Wyclif first broach the notion, and then
merely as a defense mechanism to justify a specific disagreement he had with the
Pope; but his own university colleagues at Oxford condemned him.
It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation elevated the notion into a
principle in the 16th century that it became widespread.
As Newman put it, “the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.
If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.
And Protestantism has ever felt it so ... in the determination ... of
dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and of forming a
Christianity from the Bible alone.... To be deep in history is to cease to be a
Protestant” (Essay, 7f.).
This
raises an interesting question about burden of proof in connection with sola
scriptura. On whom does the
onus lie in proving or disproving it, and what is the nature of this onus? As a defender of sola
scriptura, Godfrey writes: “Our opponents need to show not that Paul
referred to his preaching as well as his writing as the Word of God—I grant
that; they need to show that Paul taught that the oral teaching of the apostles
would be needed to supplement the Scriptures for the Church through the ages.
They cannot show that because Paul did not teach
that, and the Scriptures as a whole do
not teach that!” (SS, 9f.).
But not only is this untrue—and Godfrey has no way of proving that it
is—it also begs the question. The
onus does not lie on the Catholic to prove the necessity of continuing
extrabiblical traditions from Scripture, because he rejects sola scriptura. All he
must be able to show from Scripture,
at least logically, is that it does not contradict such traditions—though in
fact, as we have seen, he can show considerably more. Further, from history
he must be able to show that a preponderance of the data support such traditions
but do not support sola scriptura—a
task facilitated by the overwhelming testimony in his favor.
On
the other hand, the proponent of sola
scriptura must be able to show from
Scripture that the whole content of God’s revelation for the ongoing
instruction of His Church was committed wholly to writing without residue, as we
have seen. Moreover, he must be
able to show from history, that a
preponderance of the data support sola
scriptura but do not support the extrabiblical traditions of the Church—a
considerably more difficult task. The
onus is clearly on the proponent of sola
scriptura, not on the opponent.
Second, sola
scriptura is inconsistent with the practice of the NT Church.
It certainly was not the belief of the early Church, for it is
contradicted by the historical practice of the first generations of Christians,
who did not have the NT, but only the Church—the apostles and their
successors—to teach them how the New Covenant fulfilled and surpassed the Old
Covenant inscripturated in the OT. It
does not suffice to reply (1) that they had, at least, the OT Scriptures, and
that was enough; (2) that they still had the apostles to teach them and didn’t
yet need the NT; or (3) that the only infallible authority to succeed the
apostles was the NT (Geisler and MacKenzie, 194).
First, the OT does not contain God’s further revelation concerning the
New Covenant, and thus required the supplemental oral teaching of Christ and the
apostles. Second, the apostles died
centuries before the NT was fully canonized, and well before each church had
copies of all the books that would later make up the NT.
Yet someone had to be “in charge” during these years who had the
authority to declare, “This is orthodox,” and “That is heterodox.”
The authorized successors to the apostles were the ones in charge.
Third, to recognize the authority of the apostles’ oral teaching but to
assume that this teaching was transmitted without residue into the NT requires
jiggery-pokery, as we have seen. One
must assume either that everything they ever taught made it into the NT, or
cobble together some sort of arbitrary criterion for explaining why those
teachings and instructions that did not make it into the NT either (a) lacked
authority, (b) ceased to have authority after the apostles died, or (c) may have
had some sort of authority but lacked infallibility, divine inspiration, or the
like.
But then, what sort of criterion could be offered that would avoid the
circularity of arguing that only what is inscripturated is inspired because what
is not inscripturated is not inspired?
Third,
it overlooks the extrabiblical influences on its adherents.
As a philosopher recently noted, there is no “point of view from
nowhere.” Everybody has a
perspective; and perspectives are historically influenced.
It might be a perspective that is “individualistic” or
“communitarian,” American or Continental, contemporary or traditional,
“evidentualist” or “presuppositionalist,” “free-will” or “predestinarian,”
Arminian or Calvinist, “high church” or “low church,” congregationalist
or episcopalian, Baptist or Lutheran. Everyone
is situated in some tradition, which consciously or unconsciously forms his
presuppositions. The important
question is whether or not the tradition in question is the one that Christ
instituted and committed to his apostles to be passed down through His Church.
A
kind of self-reflective historical oblivion fostered by sola scriptura can make its adherents particularly vulnerable to
extrabiblical historical influences on their own thinking.
Especially noteworthy among American evangelicals is the influence of the
intuitivist “common sense” philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Hutcheson, Reid, Smith, Stewart), which combined with American individualism,
led to an outlook of antihistorical immediatism that produced what Mark Noll
calls, in his book by that title, The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Noll shows how evangelicals successfully aligned themselves with national
ideals through the individualism and populism of their Great Awakenings, and
through their embrace of the intuitivist outlook of the Scottish
Enlightenment—but at the cost of producing an ethos which led them to abandon
the universities in the secular post-Civil War climate, to withdraw into
fundamentalist ghettos, and to embrace disastrous and anti-intellectual
obsessions with dispensational millenarianism, speculations about the
Antichrist, and the like. The
ironies of evangelicalism are well illustrated by what Noll calls the
“conundrum” of Jonathan Edwards, one of the profoundest evangelical
intellects of American history. Despite
all his erudition and Christian commitment, the revivalist movement of which he
was a part fostered a populist, charismatic style of leadership that undercut
the traditional authority of churches and planted the seeds of anti-historical
individualism and immediatism that would help undermine the evangelical mind.
The legacy of this influence can be seen in the antihistorical
immediatism with which evangelicals often approach the Bible as a self-contained
repository of revealed facts.
This accounts, in part, for the their susceptibility to the philosophical
currents of evidentialism, positivism, and empiricism, which, in turn, leave
them vulnerable to post-modern philosophical currents of anti-foundationalism
and deconstructionism.
Fourth,
it overlooks the extrabiblical historical influences on itself.
What were the historical influences that contributed to the rise of sola
scriptura? Doubtless there were
many factors, some of them political and economic (like the desire for
independence from Rome’s hegemony and the need to theologically justify
defying her authority), and some of them social and cultural (like the invention
of printing, which not only made Bibles widely available, but reinforced the
individualism of the act of reading, as opposed to hearing, Scripture).
Still other factors were intellectual and spiritual.
It was certainly no accident that the Protestant Reformation began in the
academy (the perfect environment for the consummate individualist: me, my books,
and the Holy Spirit—with the accent on the autonomous academic intellect); or
that the academic setting was that of the slightly skeptical via
moderna schools of the nominalist tradition.
My own hunch is that the most significant influences on sola scriptura stemmed from a profound shift in intellectual and
spiritual climate during the late middle ages, associated with the rising
influence of nominalism.
In
scholastic philosophy, nominalism involved a skeptical dismissal of
“universals” as mere “fictions”—as mere “words” or “names”
(Latin nomena), from which we get “nominalism.”
It drew theological attention only after it was used to interpret the
Eucharist by Berengar of Tours (c. 1000-1088), the first scholastic to insist on
the ultimacy of the evidence of the senses in interpreting the Sacrament, and
the first recorded case in Church history of a theologian denying the real
bodily Presence of Christ in it. His
position both reflected and contributed to a shift away from a world of timeless
universals as the basis for understanding reality, and toward the physical world
of changing individual, empirical facts. It
was a shift that produced, in many quarters, an atmosphere of skepticism about
the rational intelligibility of God’s nature and purposes as defined by the
Church; a skepticism resulting not merely in the rejection of the divine
realities communicated in the sacraments as such, but in a rejection of the
whole outlook of sacramental realism that pervaded the very identity and
self-understanding of the Church and her claim to speak on earth, for God in
heaven. This meant a new
skepticism, not merely about the connection between an “outward sign” (like
baptism) and a real “inward grace” (like regeneration), but about any real,
naturally mediated, intelligible connection between the temporal and eternal,
the earthly and heavenly.
The
resulting atmosphere was one naturally conducive to proto-Protestant
sentiments—a “symbolical” view of the sacraments, a “forensic” view of
justification, and a “spiritualized” view of the Church.
As Christ could be present in the Eucharist only “nominally”; as
sinners could be made just only “nominally”—so the One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church could exist in the world only “nominally.”
The finite could not contain the infinite.
Nature could not serve as a channel for grace.
The authority of God’s Word (in the order of eternity) could be
preserved from the contamination of earthly mediations (in the order of time)
only by sequestering it within a sanctuary of pure propositions by means of sola
scriptura. So, at least, it was
widely thought. But the effect was
quite different. The seat of real
authority was removed from the Church, as the teacher of Scripture, and placed
on the individual interpreter of Scripture alone; where it was never meant to
be.
Thus the extrabiblical influence of late medieval nominalism, together
with various practical exigencies involved in trying to justify revolt against
the Church and the whole ecclesiastical tradition, combined to facilitate the
development of sola scriptura and to make each Protestant, in principle, his own
pope.
Fifth,
sola scriptura assumes that the Bible
can be understood apart from tradition. It
assumes no ultimate need for the larger context of the Church’s tradition and
teaching. However, not only is the
canon of Scripture incapable of being identified apart from tradition, as we
have seen, but the meaning of Scripture cannot be fully grasped.
Protestants argue that Scripture is clear,
but they disagree even among themselves as to what it means.
If they admit that parts of Scripture are unclear, they argue that the essentials
are clear and that the unclear parts can be interpreted in light of the clear.
But their disagreements are not merely over unclear passages, but over
the clear ones—about the very meaning of precisely those things that Jesus
commanded us to do in His name: “Take, eat; this is my body ... do this in
remembrance of me.... Go ...
baptize ... teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
If they admit that Scripture is not expressly clear on an essential
subject, they argue that it can “by good an necessary consequence” be deduced
from Scripture. But they disagree
over what can be deduced from Scripture.
If they admit that Church tradition can help, they annul this help by the
circular argument that it can be trusted only where it agrees with (their
interpretation of) Scripture.
The
fact is that Scripture is only a part of what has been handed down to us in
sacred tradition. By itself it was
never intended to communicate the whole of God’s instruction for the ongoing
life of the Church and is ill-suited to that purpose. It contains many things that were not at first understood,
but took time to become clear through decades and centuries of reflection and
definition, often in contradistinction to emergent heresies.
It contains many references which cannot be understood apart from the
larger context of sacred tradition.
Not only is it multifarious and complex; it does not often clearly
specify what is didactic or historical, fact or vision, allegorical or literal,
idiomatic or grammatical, enunciated formally or occurring obiter,
temporary or of lasting obligation, as Newman notes.
In this sense, it is not “self-interpreting.” As
Newman writes: “We are told that God has spoken. Where? In a
book? We have tried it and it
disappoints; it disappoints us, that most holy and blessed gift, not from fault
of its own, but because it is used for a purpose for which it was not given.
The Ethiopnian’s reply, when St. Philip asked him if he understood what
he was reading, is the voice of nature: ‘How can I, unless some man shall
guide me?’ The Church undertakes
that office.”
The question has nothing to do with whether one is a Christian or Jew,
any more than it has to do with whether the text is from the OT or NT.
What one needs is a teacher (magister)
who can instruct him in what God intends him to understand; that is what the
eunuch received in Philip, and that is what we have in the magisterium
of the Church.
Furthermore,
even while claiming that Scripture is their only standard, Protestants typically
presuppose Church tradition in ways of
which they are often unaware. Mark
Shea, for instance, offers a detailed analysis of certain fundamental
commitments of evangelicals and argues compellingly that some of them—such as
their commitment to the sanctity of human life in the pro-life movement, their
rejection of polygamy, and their adherence to the doctrine the Trinity—are
actually based more on tradition than on explicit Scripture.
In fact, in some cases, such non-negotiable commitments are only weakly
attested in the Bible, he notes, yet treated as revealed doctrines in much the
same manner as Catholics accept sacred tradition as a channel of revelation.
Other examples, cited at random, would include the traditional commitment
of Presbyterians to infant baptism, Methodists to the episcopacy, Lutherans to
baptismal regeneration and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and so
forth—none of which would go uncontested by other Protestant interpretations
of Scripture despite their mutual agreement upon it as their only standard;
whereas, to the Catholic at least, it is obvious that they are all in fact
banking on Church tradition.
Sixth,
sola scriptura leads to
misinterpretation of the Church Fathers. In
fact, the Protestant interpretations are sometimes so far-fetched that they
would be amusing, were they not so misleading.
If there is any truth to White’s accusation that Catholic apologists
are sometimes guilty of “anachronistic interpretation” and “out-of-context
citations” (SS, 52f.), this charge
applies to defenders of sola scriptura
in spades. This should come as no
surprise, since their chief principle is one that ties them to a disembodied
text, and not to the embodying, living and ongoing tradition which gave rise to
it, and of which it continues to be a part.
It is no great task to find a Church Father who affirms that Scripture is
uniquely and divinely inspired, and uniquely authoritative as the supreme
written record of the material deposit of faith. The Church grants that.
The real task is to find a Church Father who affirms that the whole
content of God’s revelation for the ongoing instruction of His Church was
committed wholly to Scripture without residue, so that it serves in that
capacity as a text, apart from the
larger sacred tradition and ongoing community of memory of which it is a part.
But for sola scriptura apologists to produce examples only of the former,
and none of the latter, and then to boldly suggest that the Church Fathers
entertained views even resembling sola
scriptura, is simply ridiculous; for there is no case.
Against such a suggestion, the weight of the patristic evidence stands
like an incontrovertible colossus of steel and bronze.
A
typical example of the Protestant use of the Church Fathers is furnished by
James White, who begins his foray into the patristics in search of evidence for sola
scriptura with a quote from Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical
Lectures, in which he says: “not the least part [of the mysteries of the
faith] may be handed on without the Holy Scriptures.... Even to me, who tell you
these things, do not give ready belief, unless you receive from the Holy
Scriptures the proof of the things which I announce.
Taken in isolation, the passage may seem mildly promising to the
Protestant, but as Patrick Madrid points out: “If Cyril was in fact teaching sola
scriptura [in this passage], Protestants have a big problem. Cyril’s Catechetical
Lecutures are filled with his forceful teachings on the infallible teaching
office of the Catholic Church (18:23), the Mass as a sacrifice (23:6-8), the
concept of purgatory and the efficacy of expiatory prayers for the dead (23:10),
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (19:7; 21:3; 22:1-9), the theology
of sacraments (1:3), the importance of frequent Communion (23:23), baptismal
regeneration (1:1-3; 3:10-12; 21:3-4), indeed a staggering array of specifically
‘Catholic’ doctrines.”
In
case after case—whether the Church Father is Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine,
Basil of Caesarea, or any of the like—the same scenario is repeated time after
time: a quotation is found that looks
like a “smoking gun” in favor of sola
scriptura, but a review of the textual setting confirms that this is not
the case. Moreover, the larger context of the Father’s corpus of
writings invariably reveals a pattern of assumptions that is anything but
Protestant, and cannot possibly have been derived from sola
scriptura. The whole world of
the Church Fathers breathes of Catholicism—whether we look to Irenaeus’ deference to Roman primacy, his transformational view of
the Eucharist, or his Mariology; or to Athanasius’
confidence that God speaks through Ecumenical Councils, his belief in the
perpetual virginity of Mary, his view that bread and wine become Christ’s body
and blood when consecrated by priests, his familiar references to the “sign of
the cross,” to the “archbishop,” to the martyrdom of Peter in Rome, to
“Apostolical tradition” and “Canons” (rules) received from the Apostles;
or to Augustine’s belief in
Mary’s perpetual virginity and sinlessness, his belief in purgatory, his
acceptance of the episcopate, or his practice of praying to Mary; or to Basil of Caesarea’s acceptance of the unwritten sacred traditions
for consecrating the bread and wine in the Eucharist.
After witnessing case after case of Protestant treatments of the Church
Fathers which ignore the overwhelming evidence of their explicitly Roman
Catholic commitments, one cannot help being driven to the inexorable conclusion
that sola scriptura cannot look for
support to tradition. It is not the opponents of sola
scripture who ignore the