Recently, I announced that I had made the decision to become Catholic. Naturally, that raised questions from those around me. After all, it wasn’t but six months ago when I was preaching and teaching at a Protestant church, officiating funerals, performing weddings, and preparing to spend the rest of my life as a Protestant pastor. It’s no surprise to me then that friends and family have appropriately wondered since, “What changed? Why Catholicism?”
I expressed in my previous post the difficulty in knowing where to start when it comes to answering that particular question, given there are 10,000 reasons to choose from. Nonetheless, as hard as it may be, one has to start somewhere. With that in mind, today’s post will be the first in a series of posts where I dissect and discuss one of the major reasons I could no longer remain Protestant, and an issue that ultimately played a pivotal role in me coming home to the Church. To be clear, I want to discuss the topic of Sola Scriptura.
In this first installment, we’ll start by focusing on just one of the many issues with Sola Scriptura. Namely, the trouble in defining it.
What is Sola Scriptura?
In order to address the issues surrounding Sola Scriptura, it’s necessary that we first understand what we’re talking about. After all, when I mention SS as one of the issues that led me to becoming Catholic, oftentimes my Protestant friends and family look at me with a puzzled look.1 That’s because it’s increasingly the case that the regular ‘ole Protestants at your local non-denominational or Baptist church have likely never heard of the concept.
In fact, many of the Protestants I know (in my limited experience, of course) hardly even know they’re Protestant, let alone being familiar with the traditions and historical events surrounding the Reformation. For Protestants, SS is simply the air they breathe. That being said, while many are unaware of the things that are unique to them as Protestants, there’s perhaps few things more unique to Protestants than the doctrine of SS. So what is it?
In simple terms, Sola Scriptura is a Latin phrase meaning “Scripture alone” and was a popular slogan that emerged from the 16th century Protestant Reformation. More specifically, however, it is the uniquely Protestant idea that Scripture is the sole infallible authority on matters of Christian faith and practice. For those newer to the issue, you could say the matter centers around a fundamental question that every Christian denomination/sect is forced to answer by necessity: that is, who/what has the authority to define what’s essential to the Christian faith and what’s not? For Protestants, the answer is Scripture alone.
What does this mean in practice? It means that when it comes to certain disciplines, practices, and doctrines that any one church espouses, whether it’s playing rock music in the worship service or confessing your sins to a priest, a Protestant’s gut reaction is to consider whether or not such and such thing is “biblical.” Where is that in the Bible? is the question a Protestant most typically might ask, and that’s because they’re operating according to the principle of Sola Scriptura, whether they realize it or not.
But the issue in defining it really starts to begin as you seek to clarify what its boundaries are. In classic Protestant fashion, not all Protestant traditions agree on the nature of SS.
Let’s look at a few of the historic Protestant confessions for example. In The Thirty-Nine Articles (what Anglicans use), it states,
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. (italics added for emphasis, Article VI)
For Anglicans, part of what constitutes their idea of SS is the notion that the Scriptures contain everything which is necessary for man’s salvation.
However, the Westminster Confession (what Presbyterians use) takes a slightly different approach in how it words the matter. It builds on the concept. It states,
The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture (italics added for emphasis, Chp. 1, Article 6).
According to Westminster, not only does Scripture possess all things necessary for man’s salvation, but also for faith and life and God’s glory. Of course, it can be argued that this may amount to a minor difference, and the differences between the two confessions may amount to nothing more than something trivial, but the variance is not insignificant. Moreover, the Westminster suggests that, in addition to Scripture’s explicit teaching, certain practices and doctrines may also be “necessarily deduced” from the Scriptures.
One can see how that confuses matters when you have something like the London Baptist Confession of 1689 (what most reformed Baptists use), which modifies the last line of the Westminster confession to say this:
The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture (italics added for emphasis, Chp. 1, Article 6).
That the last line was adapted to “necessarily contained” is a subtle, yet distinct difference from the Westminster understanding of SS. Nor can it reasonably be argued otherwise, given that it copied Westminster word-for-word leading up to that point. It’s clear that something different was being communicated by the reformed Baptists when it came to the way they were defining the nature of SS.2
Yet, those are just a few differences in understanding of SS amongst some major different historic Protestant traditions. The issue in defining it becomes even more confusing when taking into consideration some of the less historic traditions, such as non-denominationalism, which was born out of the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement, and looks to be the fastest growing sect of Protestantism in the US today.
Non-denominational churches tend to adhere to and implement something more closely approximating solo Scriptura, where things like creeds, councils, and confessions are largely disregarded as having little to no authority, and each local church functions autonomously on its own apart from any one particular tradition. In fact, it was out of the Restoration movement that you got the popular slogan, “No creed but Christ.” But, to put it plainly, that form of solo Scriptura is an understanding of SS that other historic Protestant traditions would be repulsed by.
That being said, throughout the various historic Protestant confessions and traditions, it’s nearly impossible to arrive at a clear, concise, and definitive understanding of the boundaries of Sola Scriptura and its nature. And given the fact that there is no overarching magisterial teaching office in Protestantism that can bind the varying traditions together into a single, unified position on the matter, then each Protestant individual is left to his own tradition’s unique (and fallible) interpretation of SS.
Shifting the Goal Post
As you can see, right from the outset, as one attempts to land on a definition of SS that all Protestants agree upon, the cracks begin to emerge, and one can see the difficulty in trying to build a house on an unstable, cracked foundation. It makes having an honest discussion about it all the more difficult. After all, if you’re going to offer any sort of defense for a position or critique against a position, you first have to be able to clearly and faithfully represent what that position is. But how can you faithfully represent a unique Protestant position that differing Protestant traditions have never fully saw eye-to-eye on?
For example, when Presbyterians say that, according to SS, essential doctrines can be necessarily deduced from the Scriptures and that therein justifies the practice of infant baptism, while Baptists say that essential doctrines are necessarily contained in the Scriptures and that therefore does not permit infant baptism, then how does one adjudicate the differing definitions and the resulting conclusions?
And, might I add: these are no small conclusions. These are conclusions related to man’s salvation. That’s a massive problem for a doctrine that purports to speak clearly on essential doctrines related to salvation, wouldn’t one think? Furthermore, who do we turn to as the authority on the matter? If it’s Scripture alone, then we end up right where we started. It’s quintessential circular reasoning.
That being said, it may be good and useful to read books and watch videos from prominent Protestant apologists like Dr. Gavin Ortlund or Dr. James White to hear them parse out their definitions of SS. I certainly sympathize with those who do, given that was me not that long ago. But, at the end of the day, not all Protestant traditions see eye-to-eye with the way White or Ortlund defines it. So whose definition is the authoritative one? As one can obviously see, this presents real, tangible problems for either defending SS or rebutting it.
For instance, early on in my faith journey, when I started to listen to the best and brightest Protestants and Catholics debate this issue, the more I started to notice over time how, when a Catholic would try and critique SS, the Protestant would often respond by claiming that the Catholic was misrepresenting the SS position. At first, I tended to think the same and sided with the Protestants. However, over time, as I continued to listened to various debates, I started to consider that the issue might not be with Catholics misrepresenting the position, but that it might be an inherent feature of SS itself. I started to realize that the nature of SS was a bit fluid and lacked proper borders, and that Protestant debaters were shifting the goal post every time a Catholic offered a sound critique.
Frankly, it reminded me of some of the similar issues I’ve seen with debates surrounding the topic of feminism, where both sides begin the debate by agreeing on a definition of feminism, but as time goes on, whoever is arguing the affirmative position for feminism commits a sort of Loki’s Wager fallacy, where upon being confronted with their interlocutor’s critique, they retreat to suggesting their interlocutor is misrepresenting feminism. Next thing you know, the whole debate consists of the two parties quibbling over what the term “feminism” constitutes, ultimately using up all the time and ending in a deadlock. While the affirmative position for feminism doesn’t “win” by any means, they manage to succeed by “not losing” through derailing the conversation and avoiding having to confront the holes and inconsistencies in their argument.3
Unfortunately, I see Protestants do the same thing with Sola Scriptura. The problem with this is that it only goes as far to demonstrate the weakness and insufficiency of SS. After all, if SS can’t be clearly defined, then it stands to reason that an individual person, or an entire body of people, cannot build a foundation on it without it collapsing in on itself when being stress-tested. The reality is that we need something more solid, more firm. We need something that has stood the test of time and weathered every storm without fragmenting and splintering into tribalism. Simply put, we need both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.
Conclusion
All these things being considered, this is only the first of many issues surrounding SS. Now, it’s certainly not the biggest one. It’s actually quite minor compared to the rest. What I will parse out further in future posts in this series is that, once you grant any one of the Protestant definitions of SS, only then do the real problems with the doctrine start to emerge.
That being said, by the end of the series, I do hope and pray to convince the reader that not only does SS fail when put to the test, but moreover, that the reason it does is because it actually was never what our Lord intended for His one body, the Church. Rather, that Christ our Lord, in His great love and care for us as our Chief Shepherd, actually instituted measures and mechanisms from the beginning to protect His body from the sort of divisions, schisms, and endless amounts of confusion that have threatened it over the course of history, and have resulted from such teachings like SS, and that, ultimately, our Lord actually gave us measures for preserving our oneness.
As our Lord said, “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand” (Mk. 3:24). Ultimately then, the oneness of Christ’s body, the Church–the visible representation of the kingdom of God on earth–is no small thing. That oneness is something worth fighting for.
- From this point on, I will frequently abbreviate Sola Scriptura to SS in order to save time and space. ↩︎
- This was likely, in no small part, due to the Presbyterians seeing Westminster’s definition as grounds for the continuation of the practice of infant baptism. Thus, reformed Baptists disagreeing, likely saw it fit to narrow the definition to “necessarily contained” rather than “necessarily deduced” in order to exclude something they did not see explicitly taught, or necessarily contained, within the Bible. But it’s better to listen to Protestant historians duke that issue out and form your own conclusions. ↩︎
- The same thing happens with atheists and how they often define atheism. ↩︎
Colton Banks 