In other articles in this series I’ll present true Catholic doctrine
on various topics, as opposed to the misinformation offered by Evangelicals. But
first it needs to be established that the very premise on which they base all
of their own doctrine doesn’t stand up. If
I’m wrong in anything that follows about the doctrine of Sola Scriptura I
welcome correction through sound and reasonable argument. In the absence of
such reasonable objection, I’ll assume that what I write here is indeed on the
mark.
Sola Scriptura is one of the central tenets that emerged from the
Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. It means “by Scripture alone,”
and holds that the Bible contains everything we need for salvation.
Protestant denominations interpret Sola Scriptura in various ways.
Many accept that there are other authorities that legitimately govern Christian
life, but see them as ultimately subordinate to the Scriptures, to which there
is no equal.
Evangelical Christians are more extreme. They hold the Bible to be
the sole, supreme authority, exclusive of any others, that Scripture
interprets itself, and that it is sufficient in itself; we need absolutely nothing
more than the Bible.
There are a number of serious problems with Sola Scriptura, particularly
with the extreme interpretation held by Evangelicals. When one reflects upon
this concept in depth it becomes clear that Sola Scriptura, ironically,
contradicts Biblical teaching. We will examine these problems one at a time.
Let’s begin with perhaps its most serious flaw: If you hold to
Sola Scriptura, you necessarily believe that God the Father simply doesn’t care
about the vast majority of His children throughout human history, that He has
revealed His truth to only a relative few, and thus doesn’t care if the
majority don’t know His truth and aren’t saved. This is the conclusion necessarily
drawn when we put the Bible into historical context and still cling to Sola
Scriptura. Here’s why.
The Bible teaches that God created every human being from the very
beginning of time (Genesis 2:7, 21-22; Acts 17:26), and that He made humanity
in his image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27). The Bible also teaches that the
Word of God has always existed, that the Word of God is a person, not a thing,
and, referring to this personal Word, says that all things came to be through Him,
and without Him nothing came to be—that the Word has been present and active from
the very beginning of the human race (John 1:1-3). It tells us that God desires
all people to know Him, and has always made knowledge of Himself available to
all people of all times and places (Romans 1:20, Acts 17:27-28), and wants all
people to come to a knowledge of the truth and to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4).
Even before we go any further, the Biblical truths we just listed expose
a major problem with Sola Scriptura. For it limits the eternal and personal Word
of God—whom the Bible says has been present and active everywhere from the
creation of humanity—to words that were not printed on paper until many thousands
of years later, and made available to a relative few.
Scholars debate just when the human race began, but all agree that,
at the very latest, by 10,000 BC human civilization was alive and flourishing.
But the books that comprise the Bible did not begin to be written until about 900
BC—about 9000 years or more after God created the first people. Many thousands
lived and died long before the first words of Scripture were ever put on paper.
Many people of good will lived during these pre-Biblical times.
The Bible itself tells stories of many of them, especially key figures in
salvation history. Abraham, for example, likely lived around 2000 BC; Moses probably
lived during the second millennium BC. The stories of Abraham and Moses tell us
how God spoke to these men without written Scripture. Though we can now read
these accounts in Scripture, the fact is these events themselves pre-date written
Scripture by many centuries.
The Bible did not exist for these people. And even after the Bible
began to be written, it would still be many hundreds of years before most
people had access to it. What would eventually become the New Testament didn’t
begin to be written until about thirty years after Jesus’ resurrection and
ascension—during the first thirty years of Christianity there was literally no
New Testament on paper. Once the Scriptures were written, and formally declared
to be Scripture in the fourth century, it would not be until the invention of
the printing press eleven centuries later that literacy rates and publishing
technology would make the Bible available to the masses.
So if we hold Sola Scriptura to be true, we necessarily proclaim
that in the broad history of the human race, God chose a relatively small slice
to reveal His Word—only those who lived from roughly 900 BC onward, and most of
those who lived prior to the fifteenth century were practically excluded—though
the Bible itself clearly teaches that from the beginning of time all were
created through His Word and were all created to know God. (In fact, if there
is one Scripture verse that soundly refutes the idea that man can only know God
and His truths through Scripture, it is Romans 1:20—“For since the creation of
the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.”)
In short, if the Bible is the only way God reveals his Word, the
vast majority of human beings who have ever lived on this earth have been shut
out of knowing God. Did God just not care enough about these people to share
his Word with them? Or has God always had other ways to speak his Word to his
children (as Romans 1:20 indicates)? And if so, does He still have other ways
to speak outside the pages of Scripture? The overwhelming evidence from both
Scripture and reason indicate so.
Let’s focus on another key instrument Jesus established as a
powerful vehicle of Himself, the eternal Word: the Church, and especially its
relationship with Scripture. (For while Sola Scriptura can’t really be defended
Biblically, a Church established by Jesus Christ as an inspired instrument
through which He teaches and acts in tandem with Scripture is Biblically sound.)
Mike Gendron’s “Proclaiming the
Gospel” project is aimed at Catholics, an attempt to teach us that our religion
is wrong—even Satanic—and contradicts “Biblical Christianity.” In his video “To
Judge or Not to Judge” he denies that the Church had anything to do with
declaring what constitutes inspired Scripture, saying that when the canon of
Scripture was formally declared by the Church in the fourth century it was
simply a matter of men affirming what God had already declared to be Scripture;
he says the early Christian communities passed these writings around, already recognizing
them as divinely revealed Scripture.
Yet he avoids the elephant in the room
by not addressing the obvious, fundamental question: How did God declare in the
first place what is Scripture, so that men in the fourth century could affirm
it? He tries to present Scripture itself as the authority for what books and
letters constitute Scripture by noting that Peter declared Paul’s writings to
be Scripture in 2 Peter 3:16. That’s not a bad argument, but only in the case of
Paul’s epistles.
For how did God specifically make
known that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are inspired and sacred
Scripture, as well as The Acts of the Apostles, the epistle of James, Peter’s
epistles, and John’s, and the Book of Revelation? How did God make this known to men? The Scriptures do not
specifically name any of these books as Scripture. So when God declared them to
be Scripture prior to the fourth century, as Mike Gendron says He did, how did He
do it?
He clearly didn’t do it through
Scripture, which means He had to use an inspired authority outside the pages of
Scripture to declare what is Scripture. God had to inspire human instruments to
declare which of the many writings of the time were inspired and which were
not, because the Scriptures themselves did not reveal this.
So since Scripture isn’t even the sole
authority on itself, one would be hard pressed to uphold it as the sole authority
on all matters of faith. Nor can one declare that God does not use inspired
human instruments outside the Scriptures to reveal His truth, because He
obviously did to even reveal what works constitute Scripture. And if He has in
the past, He can continue to do so now.
To put it another way: If the Bible is
truly the sole authority on all matters of faith, there has to be an
authoritative source for that very statement in order for it to be true; if
there’s no legitimate authority to cite, then it’s just an opinion of men. It
logically follows that if Scripture is indeed the sole authority, then
Scripture itself has to be the source in order for that claim to be valid. But
it isn’t—there is not a single verse in the Bible that calls the Scriptures the
sole, supreme authority. (Some claim there are; we’ll address that in Part 2.) So
the notion of Scripture as the sole authority is necessarily a tradition of
men. So if you hold it to be true, you necessarily acknowledge Scripture is not
the sole authority, in which case you contradict yourself.
