In the first post on my series on Sola Scriptura, I discussed the issue of defining SS, given the differing conceptions of it amongst the various Protestant traditions, and the fact that there’s no way for them to be bound together on a clear, concise, and dogmatic definition.1 As one might expect, not only does that inherent confusion make it difficult for Protestants to build a foundation upon, but it also makes it difficult to mount a defense against it, given the slippery, shifting nature of it all. But that’s only one issue of many, however, and it’s arguably one of the more minor ones.
With that in mind, in these next few series of posts, we’ll begin to explore some of the more major issues surrounding SS. Today, we’ll focus on one problem in particular that’s invariably interwoven with SS. Namely, the issue of sufficiency.
What does it mean that the Bible is sufficient?
An intrinsic feature of SS is the Protestant notion of the sufficiency of Scripture. When Protestants argue for SS, they argue that the Bible is sufficient on its own to do something. But sufficient to do what? Namely, that Scripture is sufficient to guide the church in all essential matters pertaining to Christian living, doctrine, and salvation. The Belgic Confession of 1561 puts it this way:
“We believe that this Holy Scripture contains the will of God completely and that everything one must believe to be saved is sufficiently taught in it.”2 [italics added for emphasis]
In like manner, the Westminster Confession 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: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”3 [italics added for emphasis]
Stated even more simply, the Westminster shorter catechism summarizes it by saying:
Q. 3. What do the Scriptures principally teach?
A. The Scriptures principally teach, what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.4
According to the paradigm of Sola Scriptura then, Scripture is the inerrant, inspired word of God, and the only final authority for Christians, and therefore sufficient on its own to guide the church in all essential matters of Christian faith and practice. While other forms of authority–such as bible commentaries, creeds, councils, tradition, etc.–may be useful, they are ultimately not necessary for the Christian. That’s because all one needs to know is contained within the Bible either explicitly or implicitly. That is, in essence, the Protestant doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency.
There’s a few major problems with this, however. For the sake of brevity, let’s zero in on just one of those problems for now.
Scripture doesn’t teach Sola Scriptura
There may perhaps be no more glaring flaw within the framework of SS than this mere fact: Scripture itself doesn’t teach the doctrine of SS.
Given the notion of Scripture’s sufficiency, this proposes a glaring, intractable problem: if SS proposes that the Bible contains every essential doctrine of the faith, then what are we to make of the fact that the Bible doesn’t contain the doctrine of SS?
The argument can be presented in this way:
Premise A: Sola Scriptura claims that all essential doctrines of the faith are taught in the Bible.
Premise B: The Bible does not teach the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.
Conclusion: Therefore, Sola Scriptura is not an essential doctrine of the faith.
The logic is simple and the outcome clear: SS refutes itself. It saws off the branch it rests upon. It’s ultimately self-defeating.
One doesn’t need to be Catholic to see this either. Simply viewing it from within the Protestant paradigm, all one has to do is search the Scriptures to discern whether it is so. After all, as a former Protestant, that’s ultimately what I did, and that’s where the rubber began to meet the road. Because when you begin to read the Scriptures carefully within their context, the 16th century Protestant notion of Sola Scriptura simply doesn’t present itself.
So if it’s the case–as Protestants suggest it is–that the Scriptures contain all essential doctrine, then it’s logically coherent to conclude that SS is not an essential doctrine of the Christian faith and should not be accepted as one. That means Sola Scriptura undermines itself. Accordingly, given that SS is a core pillar on which Protestantism rests, then it’s clear that the entire Protestant framework collapses in on itself along with this core pillar.
Conclusion
Of course, Protestants, my former self included, object to this by rejecting premise B (that the Bible doesn’t teach SS) and then proceed to point to passages of Scripture that they think teach, or at least, logically infer the doctrine of SS–perhaps the most oft-cited being 2 Timothy 3:16-17.
But the reality one discovers when examining carefully these flagship verses that Protestants point to as evidence for SS, is that they simply do not teach what Protestants would like them to mean. Such was my experience, and it’s actually ironic, because I had always assumed that the Catholics had reverence and tradition whereas the Protestants had the Scriptures. Surely reading Scripture wouldn’t lead me home to Catholicism. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I came to realize that the only way to make certain passages fit the paradigm of SS is to irresponsibly import my 16th century Reformation biases and anachronisms, all of which would have been foreign to the authors of the Old and especially the New Testament. And, if there’s anything I learned from studying hermeneutics at a Protestant bible college, it’s that a text without context is always a pretext for a prooftext.
That being said, in my next post, we’ll explore some of these passages further, and break down some of the common exegetical errors many people make when attempting to make Scripture conform to Protestant presuppositions. In turn, hopefully it will become just a little bit clearer over time how God’s Word actually points to something more than just the text itself as an infallible guide for Christians. Namely, that it points to an infallible interpreter through which the Holy Spirit has bound Christians together in unity, protected them against heresy, and guided them for millennia: that is, the Catholic Church.
- From this point forward, I will frequently abbreviate Sola Scriptura to SS for the sake of brevity. ↩︎
- https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/belgic-confession#toc-article-7-the-sufficiency-of-scripture ↩︎
- https://thewestminsterstandard.org/the-westminster-confession/ ↩︎
- https://thewestminsterstandard.org/westminster-shorter-catechism/ ↩︎
Colton Banks 