Sola Scriptura: How to Think About It

Let us begin with the Rt. Rev. Stephen Neill on the choice made at Trent:

For years the Protestants had been committing their cause to a General Council of the Church. At last, after endless delays, the Pope’s Council was opened at Trent on 13 December 1545. On 8 April 1546, a small group of about thirty bishops, almost all Italians, changed the whole course of the history of the Church. They affirmed that the Church receives with equal veneration (pari veneratione) the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and the traditions written and unwritten, which have been preserved in the Church since the time of the apostles. This was new doctrine, and involved a rejection of the whole Catholic tradition of the Church from the beginning. The trouble was in the little word pari, equal. Every Church has its traditions and does well to venerate them. But, in every earlier age of the Church, the appeal had always been to Scripture as the supreme and incomparable authority, to which all tradition must conform, and by which it must be tried. At the time of the Council of Trent some of the bishops asked for a clearer definition of these traditions. What are they, and where are they to be found? No clear answer was given then; no clear answer has ever been given.

Probably the single Catholic line of argument that has produced the most conversions away from Protestantism is the one that goes something like “Our Lord left behind a Church, not a book, and the Church made the Bible, not the other way around.”

True!

However, the acknowledgement of this truth may not in fact invalidate Sola Scriptura in its original context.

The right way to think about Sola Scriptura is to start not with whether Our Lord left behind a Church vs. a book, or whether the Christian tradition contains beliefs and practices not explicitly stated in the pages of the Bible.

The right way to think about it is to start with the question: “Is there an unchanging revelation here? Is the content of the Christian faith fixed and constant?”

Of course, both sides of the Tiber are obligated to say yes.

One way to think about the insight of Sola Scriptura is to follow that yes with, “Well why don’t we write it down!” And then to follow that with, “Wait a minute, we already did!”

And this has very practical import when it comes to catechesis. Is it possible to teach someone all the beliefs that are involved in the Christian faith?

The position of Rome is that it is not.

Is it possible for someone to believe all that is involved in the Christian faith?

The position of Rome is that if they do, it may require some good luck, as what is currently a theologoumenon may soon become part of the Christian faith.

This is what John Henry Newman was dealing with when he invented the development of doctrine, which is an attempt to explain how a doctrine can be brand new and two thousand years old at the same time.

Anticipation of Rejoinder

One likely rejoinder is that the trinity is not in the Bible but was introduced at Nicea, likewise with the Chalcedonian definition, and so on with the doctrines of the other early councils.

I would offer a logical distinction between

1. Making explicit that which had always been implicitly believed by the faithful when a new figure comes along teaching a false version.

2. Moving things that were previously understood to be theologoumenon to the status of doctrine.

If one doesn’t hold to this distinction, then the only thing distinguishing Thomas Aquinas’s beliefs about the immaculate conception from Arius’s about Christ’s divinity is timing.