Thanks for your reply.
Let’s take an example: The Holy Eucharist.
This involves both praxis and theology, it is key in both. Catholics believe in the Real Presence, many adherents of sola scriptura do not. So how can scripture rule the Church here?
Or take Sunday worship. Some claim, via scripture that it is wrong.
St. Justin Martyr wrote of it in the second century:
“But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things…”
It is impossible or at least impractical for sola scriptura to rule church doctrine and practice, because it means each individual rules the church with his/her interpretation. And Holy Scripture cannot be put in dock and testify whether Luther is correct or or Zwingly or Calvin - or you.
No, the result of sola scriptura in practice is doctrinal confusion and profusion - not One Lord, one faith, one baptist. As Martin Luther wrote Zwingli:
“If the world lasts, it will be necessary, on account of the differing interpretations of Scripture which now exist, that to preserve the unity of faith, we should receive the councils and decrees and fly to them for refuge.”
Greetings to you both.
D-Fendr, I note that you never responded to my inquiry about so-called private judgment. Did I miss it, or have you just decided to pass up the opportunity to explain how you came to faith in Rome without privately assessing their truth claims?
With respect to Sola Scriptura, I am puzzled that you would use a consequentialist line of reasoning to determine its validity. If the Bible teaches it, then it is true whether we mortals handle it well or not. Whereas consequentialism, as a philosophy, is fundamentally relativistic, judging divine truth by how it plays out in the human theater. It is really right to say that if the consequences are undesirable, it must not be true? Isn’t that just a variation on the ends justifying the means?
Yet Jesus told us his message would bring division, even within families, and that we should expect all manner of false teachers and false prophets. And his word is true.
But that’s not the worst of it. When you assume, without evidence, that Sola Scriptura is responsible for all those divisions, you are making a post hoc fallacy. A post hoc fallacy confuses cause with effect based on time order. There was a breach with Rome based on a wide range of issues, indulgences, a heavily politicized ministry, a lack of piety, as well as a multitude of doctrinal questions. The break was long coming and well deserved. The attempt to use Sola Scriptura to arbitrate the fight was just a legitmate emulation of Athanasius and other fathers, who also appealed to Scripture as the supreme arbiter of the great controversies, as was the case at Nicaea.
But the problem of denominationalism has no demonstrable relationship to Sola Scriptura. Rather, denominations form when the Bible is rejected as the supreme rule of Christian faith, in favor of some contrary external revelation or tradition. In demonstration of this, among the non-Catholic denominations, I think you would find the most diverse group by far is the charismatics of one variety or another, which, by definition, allow for direct extrabiblical revelation, clearly a full rejection of Sola Scriptura.
As for your example of the Eucharist, the fissures were showing up far earlier that the Reformation. If you survey many of the Fathers, you will find reference to the bread and wine as symbols, figures, representation, and other such expressions. One early writer goes further, but even he ends up with something more like consustantiation than anything else. But go to the 9th Centruty, the Benedictine monk Radbertus, and you find the first unmistakable hint of what would later be called transubstantiation. The 4th Lateran Council of 1215 would recognize it by name, and Aquinas would invoke Aristotle’s categories to devise a way to explain it. Trent adopted the Aquinian formulation, and the rest, as they say, is history.
And a very sad history is was after that time. Now one could be anathematized by Rome for not believing a pagan Greek philosopher’s framework for understanding how bread could appear to be bread but really be something entirely different, and therefore the subject of direct, physical worship. Who might be so anathematized? Tertullian, Augustine, Justin Martyr, to name only a few, who discussed the Eucharist variously as a figure, a symbol, a representation, but never as an Aristotelian phantom having one substance before consecration and a different one after, with absolutely no evidence of such change except the priest’s say-so.
Much sorrow and persecution of good and faithful Christians was undertaken over this innovation in doctrine, without one scintilla of evidence from Scripture that it was either true or obligatory on the Christian conscience. A firm adherence to Sola Scriptura would have prevented so much foolishness and senseless loss, it is hard to see how even a consequentialist such as yourself can fail to notice the ill consequences of abandoning the supremacy of Scripture in favor of Greek philosophy or any other subsidiary streams of knowledge.
Peace,
SR
This involves both praxis and theology, it is key in both. Catholics believe in the Real Presence, many adherents of sola scriptura do not. So how can scripture rule the Church here?
And yet, if you look at the entirety of writings of the early church Fathers, what did they do? They never appeal, to the authority of Tradition as a separate and independent body of Revelation.
It is impossible or at least impractical for sola scriptura to rule church doctrine and practice, because it means each individual rules the church with his/her interpretation.
If you had said that in the bishop of Jerusalem's catechism class in the middle of the 4th century he would have flunked you. His Catechetical Lectures constitute an extensive and comprehensive explanation of the faith of that place and time. The following may sound strange to the ears of a modern Roman Catholic, but Cyril was a BISHOP, ok, and yet he actually states explicitly in Lecture 4 that if he were to present any teaching to these catechumens which could not be validated from Scripture, they were to reject it!
Here: Lect. IV. 17
How Cyril could expect them to do that without using their private interpretive faculties is beyond me. But Springfield Reformer has already shown the impossibility of avoiding the fact of private interpretation because even where there is a claimed infallible decree or prophecy, the one who believes the decree is infallible still has to interpret it himself, and even if there were an infallible interpretation of the infallible decree, the infallible interpretation would still have to interpreted, and so on.
But according to Cyril, his very authority as a bishop was subject to his conformity to the written Scriptures in his teaching. Even when he tells his catechumens that they are receiving traditions, and exhorts them to hold to them, what is the sole source of that tradition?
"But take thou and hold that faith only as a learner and in profession, which is by the Church delivered to thee, and is established from all Scripture. For since all cannot read the Scripture, but some as being unlearned, others by business, are hindered from the knowledge of them; in order that the soul may not perish for lack of instruction, in the Articles which are few we comprehend the whole doctrine of Faith…And for the present, commit to memory the Faith, merely listening to the words; and expect at the fitting season the proof of each of its parts from the Divine Scriptures. For the Articles of the Faith were not composed at the good pleasure of men: but the most important points chosen from all Scriptures, make up the one teaching of the Faith. And, as the mustard seed in a little grain contains many branches, thus also this Faith, in a few words, hath enfolded in its bosom the whole knowledge of godliness contained both in the Old and New Testaments. Behold, therefore, brethren and hold the traditions which ye now receive, and write them on the table of your hearts"
Lect. V. 12 (starting at bottom of page 57)
And Holy Scripture cannot be put in dock and testify whether Luther is correct or or Zwingly or Calvin - or you.
Sola Scriptura did not start with Luther, Zwingly or Calvin, or me. Although not with the nickname "sola scriptura", it was, as an operative principle, simply taken for granted by the early church.
"The generality of men still fluctuate in their opinions about this, which are as erroneous as they are numerous. As for ourselves, if the Gentile philosophy, which deals methodically with all these points, were really adequate for a demonstration, it would certainly be superfluous to add a discussion on the soul to those speculations. But while the latter proceeded, on the subject of the soul, as far in the direction of supposed consequences as the thinker pleased, we are not entitled to such license, I mean that of affirming what we please; we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings."
Gregory of Nyssa:
Dogmatic Treatises, "On the Soul and the Resurrection", p. 439
Cordially,