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Gee, another thread about the need of Christians for more teaching authority than is to be found in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. One might be tempted to think that there is an agenda being put forth by a tag team of apologists.

All efforts to discuss reasonably this matter with them will eventually be out-shouted by them. They will point to the so-called “oral tradition” or “oral teaching” that was supposedly given to the church (here, of course, read Roman Catholic). It goes something like this: What the Scriptures say, while inspired by God and inerrant, is not necessarily complete. That is the RC argument in a nutshell. In support of this certain passages are cited that speak of oral teaching and the handing on of certain traditions as if this meant something other than the oral teaching that of necessity preceded the writing of the New Testament Scriptures or, thereafter, that which naturally accompanied the Holy Scriptures as the duty to which the apostles and their successors were called to by Christ Himself, Matthew 28:18-20. Clearly, the approved teachers, beginning with the twelve, were to go out into the world and make disciples by baptizing and teaching. They in turn were to train up a new generation of teachers/pastors/bishops/elders (call them what you will, Scripture has many names/aspects for this calling), and so on.

In the stead of this simple, contextually clear reading of the various New Testament texts that speak of traditions and oral instruction, the idea is put forth that there is other important, nay, indispensable, material never committed to writing in the time of the apostles that, nevertheless, was passed on in the apostolic succession and only in the course of time revealed as needed by the teaching authority of the church headed by the successor of Peter, i.e., the Roman Pontiff and believed by those who recognize his authority even though they are not as directly under his thumb, e.g., the Greek Catholics of eastern Europe or the Melchite Catholics of the Near East. This is the agenda.

Think of it this way: The Jews have the Tanakh (the written word of God, recorded between c. 1400 and c. 400 B.C.) and the Mishnah together with its supplementary Tosephta (the oral word of God not written down until the time of the Tannaim (roughly 70-200 A.D.). In practice, as the various commentaries and expansions of Tanakh and, especially, Mishnah/Tosephta appear through the centuries, the Tanakh itself (which really is just an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim (the Law (though better translated, the Teaching), the Prophets and the Writings) suffers and is more or less supplanted in authority by the so-called “oral word of God,” the Mishnah. In other words, the traditions become the tail that wags the dog.

The same thing happened with the Qur’an, the supposed word of God given to Muhammad and immediately written down. It too was and still is supplemented by the ahadith, which are basically oral traditions passed on by those who knew and heard Muhammad, and written down only later.

In all these cases, the later so-called oral word or, we could even say, somewhat confusingly, the “oral Scriptures,” in time come to be the lens through which the earlier written Scriptures (yes, I know, redundant) are understood and interpreted.

It was precisely against such well known and well understood practices by the Roman Church, mirrored in the practice of the other so-called religions of the “Book,” Judaism and Islam, that the term SOLA SCRIPTURA arose and, more importantly, the practice of relying on Scripture alone as the final and only authority on all doctrinal matters of Christendom became the watchword of the Reformation of the Catholic (universal) Church.

Where much of the Reformation went off the rails was in connection with the other so-called reformers, properly, the radical reformers (the Reformation associated with Luther was a conservative one). The radical reformers threw out church tradition and understanding completely, as if God had not spoken to every generation through the Scriptures, as if God had not spoken clearly to earlier generations, as if the church of Christ had somehow disappeared at times, even though her Lord said she would never fail, even as she stood before the very gates of hell. So, instead of the twin authorities of Scripture and tradition that Rome was always struggling to reconcile, usually at the expense of Scripture, the radical reformers ended up employing the twin authorities of Scripture and human reason/experience (depending on which branch of the reformed you are talking about). Alas, here too human reason and/or human experience tends to trump the authority of the Holy Scriptures.

In a nutshell, Romanist and Reformed are like two sides of the same coin. The twin authorities are the written word, Holy Scripture, and human judgment, either through time, Rome, or contemporaneous, the Reformed. Or put it another way, human understanding as the second authority is a top down, hierarchical authority for the Romanist, but a bottom up, individual authority for the Reformed (hence why you have apparent, and it is only apparent, unity in the former, and chaotic multiplicity in the latter).

The Lutherans (confessional Lutherans) insist that the Scriptures interpret themselves. That is to say, that God’s word is the final, clearest, and only authoritative commentary on itself. It trumps all human judgment and understanding, whether of the past (tradition) or of the present (reason/experience/emotion).

I for one will rely on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament alone, but without disregarding the teachers and traditions that have come to us, for they, our fathers in the faith, are to be honored (simple 4th Commandment duty) and listened to, unless they contradict the written word.

sola gratia
sola fide
sola scriptura
and solus Christus

I see others have kept you busy, so I’ll just make a few general comments.

Yes, — there is an agenda. We Catholics would like everyone to be Catholic and come to salvation with us. Sola Scriptura is a counterscriptural nonsense on your way. Hence, the agenda.

Our attitude toward the Lutherans is a bit schizophrenic. On one hand, of all Protestant communities of faith the Lutherans and the Anglicans are dogmatically the closest. I can see a day when some continuing in the tradition Lutheran communities come back to the Church in the fashion similar to the Anglicans. The joing declaration on Justification, for example, is grounds for such hope. I do not think that any other Protestant group, all of which you rightly call radicals, would ever reconcile as a group, although individual conversions are happening all the time and surely conversions will accelerate as Protestantism continues to splinter and disintegrate.

But on the other hand, you guys started all this. The cardinal errors were all Luther’s: sola scriptura and sola fide. Neither is scriptural, and together these two errors lead to radical individualism of latter-day Protestantism just as surely as water flows downslope. Further, there is that issue of basic knowledgeability: the expectation that a Catholic holds for a Lutheran is much higher. So if a Catholic acts in an especially punishing way toward the Lutherans, that is the reason. You are Protestantism’s Original Sin.

You painted a symmetrical picture with the Confessional Lutheran community of faith aloft in the center with their, admittedly more sophisticated than the radical kind, notion of Sola Scriptura remaining in purity, whereas the Catholics mix the Scripture with the “human judgment ... through time” and the Radical Protestans, — with “human judgment ... contemporaneous”. The symmetry is fake.

Firstly, the Lutheran version of Sola Scriptura is not at all immune from human judgment. Luther had to ignore and even falsify scripture to make his notions fit. That is hardly “scripture interpreting scripture”. To pick the point that this article argues, nothing in the scripture verifies “sola scriptura” any better than it verifies, for example, the Purgatory, or even sale of indulgences, — the very sticking points for Luther.

Secondly, there is no symmetry. Given a choice between contemporaneous human judgment and historical human judgement who in his right mind would pick against the historical judgment? The scripture after all is a historical document! No wonder the Jews and the Muslims, and the Hindu, and the conservative legal scholars of the US Constitution, — every one with a common sense except apparently the Protestant lunatics — all look for historical context when they try to understand the books dear to them. The rapid radicalizaton of Lutheranism, some occurring even in Luther’s lifetime, is evidence of the folly of this arrogant, self-serving absurdity, which is the rejection of the patristic roots of any valid interpretation of scripture.

And even on your own terms, — by Scripture alone — your doctrines fail their own tests.