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."

The View from Here:

The phenomena include making charges that are demonstrably false, being so imprecise in those charges that the very accusation amounts to a "fishing expedition", "poisoning the well" (e.g.: what you all say doesn't matter as much as what you all do, so your words can be ignored), and judging from the prominent and extraordinary specific case to the so common as to be invisible general. (As in: Teddy Kennedy is bad, so the little old lady in the back pew is bad.)

In Screwtape Lewis describes a kind of ironic attitude or carriage which takes as an assumption that this or that has already been debunked, has already been shown to be worthless. If you look at the attacks, you'll find many of them have an implicit "we all KNOW ...." when the thing we are supposed to all 'know" is the very matter under contention.

They all "know" that the average Catholic is a docile and mind-numbed robot, so our demonstrations of independent thought and our appeals for nuance and discrimination in discussion are merely the result of our programming.

But they also all "know" that Catholics are wily; that we use such demonic and tricky things as — wait for it — LOGIC (horrors!) to deceive, if it were possible, even the elect!

SO, when it suits the adversaries, they can appeal to our well-known stupidity. And when it suits them, they can also appeal to our wiliness, craftiness and facility with thought and words — in other words to our preternatural intelligence.

They know some Catholics, therefore they know ALL Catholics. They have been to Sunday dinner in a Catholic household, so they know what goes on in all Catholic households. Prominent Catholics of dubious standing with the Church are notorious sinners, so all of us are just as sinful, but without the greatness to achieve similar notoriety.

If a Protestant stumbles and is revived, even if he stumbles often and is often revived, that is testimony to the Love of God. If a Catholic does the same, it is a cynical exploitation of the Sacramental system.

Also they judge, not as the Lord judges (while they claim Spiritual warrant to do so) on appearances. A Rosary indeed SHOWS nothing to the observer but rote and repeated verbal formulae. So they "know" that we think that we "will be heard for our many words". They inevitably and persistently ignore what a Rosary actually is, namely: a kind of mental prayer featuring meditations on the events and consequences of the Incarnation and Redemption.

In truth, the facts don't matter in the making of their judgments. We can offer the texts of our worship, of Mass and of the Liturgy of the Hours, with their explicit and implicit use of Scripture and prayer to God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. But because at the end of Night Prayer, after the closing "benediction" we sing or recite an antiphon to Mary, then they "know" that the vast majority of our worship time and effort is devoted to her and not to God.

Let's look at one such antiphon, the Regina Caeli, which I'd like sung at my funeral:
Queen of Heaven, rejoice!
He whom you deserved to bear
Has risen, just as He said.
Pray to God for us.
Rejoice and be glad, Virgin Mary
Because the Lord is truly risen!

WE are told that we see only what we bring to the seeing, but THEY see only idolatry in this song, while we see Joy in the Resurrection.

So what it looks like from here is that, like the dwarfs in The Last Battle, who could only see stable litter when they were offered a feast, our adversaries are so persuaded of what they will find that they cannot see what is there, so devoted to showing that we are wrong that they cannot hear what we say, and so persuaded of the fundamental rightness of their stand that they need neither good evidence (Teddy Kennedy) nor good reasoning (Hogwash!). All they need is vituperation.

And that they have.

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