Protestants and Sola Scriptura

Scripture, our Evangelical friends tell us, is the inerrant Word of God. Quite right, the Catholic replies; but how do you know this to be true?

It's not an easy question for Protestants, because, having jettisoned Tradition and the Church, they have no objective authority for the claims they make for Scripture. There is no list of canonical books anywhere in the Bible, nor does any book (with the exception of St. John's Apocalypse) claim to be inspired. So, how does a "Bible Christian" know the Bible is the Word of God?

If he wants to avoid a train of thought that will lead him into the Catholic Church, he has just one way of responding: With circular arguments pointing to himself (or Luther or the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries or some other party not mentioned in the Bible) as an infallible authority telling him that it is so. Such arguments would have perplexed a first or second century Christian, most of whom never saw a Bible.

Christ founded a teaching Church. So far as we know, he himself never wrote a word (except on sand). Nor did he commission the Apostles to write anything. In due course, some Apostles (and non-Apostles) composed the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament. Most of these documents are ad hoc; they are addressed to specific problems that arose in the early Church, and none claim to present the whole of Christian revelation. It's doubtful that St. Paul even suspected that his short letter to Philemon begging pardon for a renegade slave would some day be read as Holy Scripture.

Who, then, decided that it was Scripture? The Catholic Church. And it took several centuries to do so. It was not until the Council of Carthage (397) and a subsequent decree by Pope Innocent I that Christendom had a fixed New Testament canon. Prior to that date, scores of spurious gospels and "apostolic" writings were floating around the Mediterranean basin: the Gospel of Thomas, the "Shepherd" of Hermas, St. Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans, and so forth. Moreover, some texts later judged to be inspired, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, were controverted. It was the Magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit, which separated the wheat from the chaff.

But, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church was corrupt and idolatrous by the fourth century and so had lost whatever authority it originally had. On what basis, then, do they accept the canon of the New Testament? Luther and Calvin were both fuzzy on the subject. Luther dropped seven books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha in the Protestant Bible; his pretext for doing so was that orthodox Jews had done it at the synod of Jamnia around 100 A. D.; but that synod was explicitly anti-Christian, and so its decisions about Scripture make an odd benchmark for Christians.

Luther's real motive was to get rid of Second Maccabees, which teaches the doctrine of Purgatory. He also wanted to drop the Letter of James, which he called "an epistle of straw," because it flatly contradicts the idea of salvation by "faith alone" apart from good works. He was restrained by more cautious Reformers. Instead, he mistranslated numerous New Testament passages, most notoriously Romans 3:28, to buttress his polemical position.

The Protestant teaching that the Bible is the sole spiritual authority--sola scriptura --is nowhere to be found in the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy that Scripture is "useful" (which is an understatemtn), but neither he nor anyone else in the early Church taught sola scriptura. And, in fact, nobody believed it until the Reformation. Newman called the idea that God would let fifteen hundred years pass before revealing that the bible was the sole teaching authority for Christians an "intolerable paradox."

Newman also wrote: "It is antecedently unreasonable to Bsuppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself...." And, indeed, once they had set aside the teaching authority of the Church, the Reformers began to argue about key Scriptural passages. Luther and Zwingli, for example, disagreed vehemently about what Christ meant by the words, "This is my Body."

St. Augustine, usually Luther's guide and mentor, ought to have the last word about sola scriptura: "But for the authority of the Church, I would not believe the Gospel."

What I should have said was "If we reject the Tradition of the Church today...

I hate to pick nits, but I really need to state this with no small emphasis: It is not true that the Catholic Tradition is rejected, but only in part. Much, in fact, probably most, of the Catholic Tradition is embraced by Protestantism, either by inheritance, by parallel discovery, or by simple agreement.

This suggests an urgent need for clarity. What is 'rejection' or 'acceptance'? is there any increment, or is there only full compliance?

So, IOW, if "tradition" wasn't corrupted between the 1st and 4th centuries, why should we believe it would be corrupted after that?

We will find greater comity discussing the the first and second century, as the time of Constantine (c. 300-350 AD) leaves Protestants with suspicions bordering upon certainty. It is largely the power of empire that sparks our criticisms.

It must also be said that the sheer and overweening power of Rome, and the Roman Church, it's sole control over scribes and clerics, and it's nasty habit of crushing all dissent, leaves the Church in a position to alter extant texts from years before it's establishment. If the RCC was inclined toward nefarious purposes, it was certainly in a position to accomplish them.

In that sense, One can make a case against even the earliest works.

Generally speaking, all these facts point to the *equal* importance of tradition with regards to Scripture.

Equal in importance is fine- But *not* equal in authority.

Without Tradition (Jewish) [...] and without Tradition (Christian), we wouldn't have assurance [...].

Your point is recognized and well taken. I am glad you bought this up, because there are such interesting parallels.

I have to admit, this next bit is pure speculation, but one can draw fine points of comparison wrt clerical process between Hebrew and Christian clerics (scribes). One might assume that the Hebrew influences of the Early Church were sufficient to have an impact upon the preservation and duplication processing of documents.

One may then compare the two structured models quite favorably, finding an Hebrew influence there as well. The Hebrew model put forth an unchanging canon and an attached, malleable (can be added on to) tradition which seems to have been duplicated in the Christian model. One wonders what other parallels might be observed...

Of course, one must also visit the ultimate end of the Hebrew model- The Pharisees and Sadducees being berated by Christ because they held their traditions in such esteem that they had changed the nature and purpose of God's message. It is a caution, wouldn't you think?

So again, the "Prophets and the Word" could be both corrupted, if we reject the role of Tradition in preserving their true message, thus, any "self authentication" that one attempts invariably relies on the traditional preservation of the Scripture in question.

As to the purpose of the tradition (in either model) in providing for the preservation of the Scripture, that is well within it's function, and probably the primary reason for it's genesis and continued existence. Likewise, tradition, when used to magnify the Scripture, fulfills it's purpose and should be encouraged.

But it cannot be used to lend credence to concepts that are not well grounded in Scripture. Building a concept of whole cloth, or a meager assembly of cherry picked verses, defies the very purpose of the tradition, that having to be a magnification and up-lifting of the Holy Word of the Lord God Almighty. What silly words of men can possibly assume to stand on par with the Oracles of the Lord, not to mention add to their meaning? How preposterous!

At this point, I'm reminded of the formation of the Canon in the early centuries, specifically the fact that the book of Hebrews was, for a time, rejected by some of the early churches. Perhaps, at some point, Protestants will come to accept the deuterocanonicals as Scripture, the same way some early Churches came to accept Hebrews. ;)

I am afraid that this could not happen without finding an earlier source, as the main objection to the Apocryphal books is a matter of provenance. It is not hard to see that Hellenizing influences have corrupted the books. I am happy to use them as a source of knowledge, but to commit them to the canon in their present state seems to be incautious.

Suffice it to say though, that again, if one has no problem accepting the role of Tradition in preserving (and accurately transmitting) Scripture, I see no reason to reject any of the other dogmatically defined Traditions above. [(the Canon, the Trinity, Theotokos, the Assumption of Mary, etc.)]

That statement seems to be backward to me. The Tradition must serve the Scriptures, not the other way around. To wit: I see no reason to accept any dogma/doctrine that cannot be sufficiently proven upon the Word of God.

Now, as we all know, the word of mouth isn't as reliable as writing something down, *normally speaking*.

I have no reason to doubt oral traditions as defined in the ancient bardic sense. It is proven to be most reliable.

I believe it's reasonable to conclude that during the time of persecution (and relative disorganization of the Church, a period of about AD 100 to AD 300), that after any original documents were lost due to persecution, that the men of the Church kept a "record" of the Gospels and Epistles through word of mouth, that is, through teaching it to new converts, then they taught it to new ones, and so on. Then later, as the Church became more organized and was able to preserve some written history (AD 300-AD 350) the Gospels and Epistles that were committed to memory during all that time were finally written down.

While your position is reasonable, I would suggest that absence of evidence does not equate to evidence of absence. It is unlikely that the Gospels and Epistles (or in fact the entirety of the NT books by c. 100 AD) were not committed to text, as propriety would demand, regardless of circumstance. It is not hard for a band of believers to escape the clutches of the Empire, and my suspicion is that the clerics of the day would have done precisely that, putting the sacred texts beyond the reach of Rome, where the preservation could be completed in peace, in much the same way that RCC monasteries can be found in very remote places.

As an example of such, one might look along the shipping routes. A longstanding friendship with Phoenicia had established Hebrew outposts beyond Roman territory, or in far flung provinces where Rome's grasp was more tenuous. Carthage (the progeny of Pheonicia), the Iberian Peninsula of Spain, The Celtic regions of Western France, the Isle of Brittany, The British Isles, and even Holland. All of these had Hebrew, Carthaginian/Phoenician, or Grecian trading outposts in existence for centuries by the time of the Caesars.

One can also look to the northern land routes. Northward from Antioch into the eastern shore of the Black Sea, into the Caucus Mountains, northward by westward into Northern Europe, or eastward into the Caspian sea regions of Persia. Or perhaps southward to Egypt and Eastward into Ethiopia. There are plenty of places that monasteries could have risen, and then fallen, with documents still to be found.

I might add that a more likely scenario for the absence of early texts is in the ascension of the RCC to empire. The subjugation of the church by the See of Rome allowed Rome the legitimacy and authority to collect documents unto itself in the guise of preservation, or at least those documents that lay within it's territories. As I said before, if there were nefarious intentions, Rome had the ability to pull it off.

In conclusion, to me, this points to the role of Tradition in those times as of equal importance (if not arguably greater importance, although, to be clear, I'm not making that assertion, I conclude it was of equal importance) to Scripture.

Once again, importance is different than authority. Whether spoken, as you suppose, or written, it is the Oracles of God which must hold primacy in all things. They are the WORDS of GOD. What could be more important, or authoritative?

One can argue that this "tradition" became corrupted in later centuries, but the only way one could make such a claim would be to use, IMO, circular logic, i.e. point to Scripture and say, "That Tradition violates Scripture", when it was "that Tradition" that preserved Scripture in the first place

But, the purpose of the tradition is to magnify the Scripture, not to magnify itself.

Many manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures were destroyed with the First Temple, and many of the New Testament scrolls were destroyed by order of the Roman emperors during the Christian persecutions. The oldest known Hebrew manuscript, a copy of the Book of Isaiah written in the 2nd century BC, was found in 1947 in a cave near Jericho.

St. Jerome during the fourth century translated the Bible from the Greek Septuagint into Latin, because at that time most Christians spoke Latin. He used the Septuagint because it was based on the Alexandrian canon, which included the deuterocanonical books, rather than the Palestinian canon which was based on the original Hebrew manuscripts but did not include the deuterocanonicals. The original St. Jerome Bible was called the Vulgate. St. Jerome was the pre-eminent scholar of his day, and his source manuscripts were far better than anything we have today, and so the Church has always given it pride of place among the many translations.

In the fourth century AD, Pope St. Damasas asked St. Jerome, the finest scholar of his day, to gather all the manuscripts then still available and prepare an authoritative new translation in Latin, at that time the most widely spoken language among Christians. The resulting Bible has come to be called the Vulgate, or “People’s Bible.” cf

Ultimately, we have Christ's assurance (Matt. 16:18) that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church. Hence, the Catholic Church cannot commit error. Individual clergy may commit sins but the Church is Christ's bride (Ephesians 5:29) and and has "no spot, wrinkle or blemish" (Ephesians 5:27). We then accept the Bible on faith in the words of Jesus Christ.

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