Of all the solas of the Reformation, critics from both within and without the Reformed tradition have most hesitated and argued over sola Scriptura. With good reason. Depending on how you define it, you can quite handily make the case that either not a single soul in the whole, holy catholic church actually believes sola Scriptura or that in fact everyone does. Some advocates of the slogan seek distinction (or even separation) from the radical Reformation and biblicism/bibliolatry. Other advocates have unconsciously adopted biblicism and radical anti-traditionalism, supposing themselves, quite erroneously, as faithful banner-carriers of the Reformation.

Even ardent advocates of sola Scriptura begin their avowals of support with extended prolegomena explaining what sola Scriptura does and doesn’t mean to them. Critics say such distinctions largely undermine the plain sense of the slogan. One wonders whether a plain sense of the slogan can functionally exist. So, do I believe and affirm sola Scriptura? You have to tell me what it means first. I fully affirm what it meant to the Reformers, as far as can be told. At the same time, I reject a lot of what it has come to mean today, as I think also most of the Reformers and early church fathers would. I think it is at one and the same time a hollowed-out, abused, and misleading slogan, and a desperately neglected and needful doctrine.

Sola Scriptura: Is the Bible Inerrant and Authoritative?

Why does this doctrine of sola Scriptura give us so much trouble? It seems straight-forward enough to define what it means. According to John Woodbridge, any “faithful Protestant definition” of sola Scriptura should include four main components: that the Bible is inerrant, divinely authoritative, sufficient, and clear.¹ These four features clearly comport with traditional Reformed thought, and they seem framed in plain enough terms that anyone could affirm or deny them.

But as soon as you start to dig into what these components mean, problems arise. For instance, by the Bible is inerrant, you mean the original autographs, when properly interpreted, are inerrant, right?² But we don’t possess the original autographs, for one, and this whole debate rages precisely over who among the millions of contenders has properly interpreted the Scriptures. This takes much of the strength out of the doctrine, since one could blame basically any controversy or contradiction on corrupt texts or corrupt interpretations.

Further, if we have not properly interpreted or applied the Scriptures, what does it mean for us to say it has faultless, divine authority? What if we have accidentally (or not) arrogated divine prerogatives and authority to our finite and faulty interpretations?³ How is that better than the abusive situation before the Reformation?

As for the idea of the Bible’s sufficiency, nearly no one would say that we shouldn’t employ extra-biblical information, even to understand the Bible. Most of us can’t read the original languages well enough to go without translations. And, even in translation, the Bible requires us to have outside knowledge, even for the most basic and simple texts. At the very beginning, Genesis 1:1 introduces the mundane realities of “heaven and earth,” and Moses assumes we either already know or could eventually know these realities from education and experiences outside the biblical text. The Bible simply never defines these, and many other, basic terms.

Sola Scriptura: Is the Bible Sufficient and Clear?

Beyond this, even if the Bible included within its pages absolutely all the linguistic, cultural, historical, or experiential information we required to understand it (which it does not), we would still have to interpret this information by applying an external hermeneutical and interpretive lens, also known as a tradition. So, if we require extra-biblical data and interpretive traditions in order to understand and interpret the Bible, in what sense is the Bible, in itself, sufficient for its own interpretation?

Following this, perhaps the thorniest of all the affirmations of sola Scriptura lies with Scriptural clarity. How clear could the Bible actually be? Protestants have separated themselves into 40,000 denominations all of whom disagree with each other on at least one substantial portion of the apparently perspicuous Scriptures. And, in actuality, if the Bible truly possesses in itself such abundant clarity, wouldn’t that mean that the confirmed tradition of the majority Church is likely the same as Scriptural truth? As Charles Hodge says,

It is not denied that the people, learned and unlearned, in order to the proper understanding of the Scriptures . . . should also pay the greatest deference to the faith of the Church. If the Scriptures be a plain book, and the Spirit performs the functions of a teacher to all the children of God, it follows inevitably that they must agree in all essential matters in their interpretation of the Bible. And from that fact it follows that for an individual Christian to dissent from the faith of the universal Church (i.e., the body of true believers), is tantamount to dissenting from the Scriptures themselves.⁴

I hope you can see then, that this little doctrine has some substantial difficulties. John Peckham has helpfully summarized all the major criticisms of the doctrine under three representative headings:

(1) it is self-defeating—it is unbiblical or the product of circular reasoning, (2) it isolates Scripture to the exclusion of any other revelation, the proper use of reason and scholarship, and/or interpretive communities past and present, and (3) it leads to subjectivism and/or hyper-pluralism.⁵

Can we defend the doctrine against these claims? Will we leave anything useful and distinctive of it once we do?

What did Sola Scriptura Mean to the Reformers?

Perhaps we should go back to the origins of the slogan. The Reformers’ original thoughts on Scripture and authority help greatly to combat the abuses of sola Scriptura rightly denounced by critics. The Reformers’ emphasis on Scripture coincided with a renewed emphasis on the Holy Spirit.

For the Reformers, the Scripture interpreted Scripture, but this interpretation came when the author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit, spoke in and through Scripture and thereby imparted enlightenment. As Calvin said,

Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated (αύτόπιστον); hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the testimony of the Spirit. For even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit.⁶

We cannot stress this enough. The Westminster Confession makes a similar point, saying, “we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word.”⁷

Without the Spirit, we are all hopeless to understand the Scriptures truly and savingly (Jn. 14:26, 16:13). Additionally, we receive the Spirit individually as we join the body of Christ, His Church (1 Cor. 12:13). Consequently, Paul calls the Church “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15)—because the Word that the Spirit breathed out and the Spirit breathed into God’s people will not contradict each other, for they are one. The Spirit in the Church resonates with the Spirit in the Scriptures, so that as the Church applies herself to the Scriptures and the Scriptures to herself, the Spirit corrects errors and draws the Church and Scriptures closer to the standard—God Himself in Christ.

What the Reformers detected in the church in their day was a different spirit, however. This spirit and its traditions would not submit themselves to the Holy Spirit in Scripture. The Reformers then, were not doing battle against church tradition as such, but against an alien church tradition that had begun to war within and against the Church. According to the Reformers, the Roman Catholic church had attempted to displace the Holy Spirit as the authoritative interpreter of Scripture. 

The Reformers and Church Tradition

Keith Mathison has ably argued,⁸ following the historical research of Heiko Oberman, that before the Reformation, church tradition self-consciously coincided with Scripture and would not go beyond it. In the first centuries of the church, church tradition and the hermeneutic processes  preserved and improved within it did not exist independent of the Bible, but subservient to it. Oberman called this historical phase of the church, which lasted unchallenged until about the 4th century AD, “Tradition 1.”

Shortly after this, the church began to invert the structure of authority. Rather than viewing themselves as the mere caretakers and servants of the authoritative text in and through the Spirit, certain church fathers began to view the church as an independent, and in some cases superior, source of divine truth and authority alongside the Scriptures. Oberman calls this Tradition 2. The Reformers, according to Mathison and Oberman, had no intention of destroying church tradition or authority with sola Scriptura. Rather, they desired to return the church from its errant two-source model of inspiration back to its sole, proper grounding in the Scriptures. They intended to re-establish the authority of the church tradition in the Scriptures, not do away with church tradition altogether.

So, as Craig Allert explains,

The reformers would thus argue that true tradition must be distinguished from corrupt tradition. This can be done only by testing all tradition according to its faithfulness to Scripture. Thus, Scripture becomes the norm for identification of true tradition, rather than tradition the norm for interpretation of Scripture.⁹

Lest you don’t grasp the full weight of the historical struggle, the Roman Catholic church did not merely disagree with the Reformers on how to interpret Scripture as the standard. In the view of the Reformers, the Roman Catholic papacy claimed instead to possess in and of itself an authoritative standard equal to, and in some ways independent of, Scripture.

The Roman Catholic position at the time amounted to the declaration that it actually didn’t matter if their views went beyond or seemed to contradict Scripture. The best tradition of the church up to that point had firmly rejected such a view. The Reformers merely wanted to return the Roman Catholic church back to its former position of Scripture-grounded interpretation.

The Reformers Rejected Individualism

The Reformers did not utterly reject tradition, reason, and extra-biblical learning, however. In many ways, their critiques of Rome rested on Augustinian tradition, sound reason, and the redeemed scholarly erudition of burgeoning humanism.¹⁰ They most assuredly did not believe these things to be primary, but subordinate to the Scriptures. Not a single Reformer wanted to jettison the entire doctrinal, hermeneutical, and liturgical tradition they had inherited. Instead, they wanted to get back to perfecting their traditions from Scripture and what could be logically deduced from Scripture, as the Apostles and church fathers had done for centuries.

Some, if not most, inheritors of sola Scriptura have not embraced the Reformers’ view of church tradition and learning, but have utterly rejected Tradition 1 as well as any other interpretive tradition,—at least theoretically.¹¹ As Mathison laments:

Unfortunately, many of the heirs of the Reformation rejected Tradition I as well, and in doing so they unwittingly rejected sola scriptura. In an extreme reaction against the abuses of ecclesiastical authority found in Rome, these men rejected all ecclesiastical authority. Their doctrine (Tradition 0) rejected the authority of the Church, of creeds and of tradition of any kind. This doctrine of “solo” scriptura has become the predominant doctrine within Evangelical Protestantism, but it has caused as many if not more problems than it sought to correct. By denying the authority of the corporate judgment of the Church, “solo” scriptura has exalted the individual judgment of the individual to the place of final authority. It is the individual who decides what Scripture means. It is the individual who judges between doctrines on the basis of his individual interpretation of Scripture. It is the individual who is sovereign.¹²

So, the most destructive applications of sola Scriptura come from men and women who have actually rejected the Reformed position, though many of them claim the Reformed mantle most vociferously. The Reformers did not want to relegate all matters of doctrine to the hopelessly subjective realm of private interpretation cut off from the stream of historical interpretation or the Church. They merely wanted tradition, the faculties of reason and learning, and every other aspect of human endeavor to submit themselves together in the Church to God’s will and character as it had been sufficiently revealed in the Bible through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

What the Reformers Meant by “Sufficient”

Because of their confidence in its Author, the Reformers firmly believed in the sufficiency of Scripture, but not in the way some advocates (and opponents) of sola Scriptura think. The Westminster Confession teaches that “all things necessary for [God’s] own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”¹³ The WCF makes clear that the sufficiency of Scripture in itself does not propound to all matters and all things explicitly, but to those things related to God’s relation to humankind and human moral life. But, lest we think the sufficiency of Scripture applies only to religious matters, John Frame explains that:

There is . . . an an epistemological unity among all the different forms of Christian reflection. In all cases, we address extra-scriptural data, and in all cases we consider that data under the sola Scriptura principle. That principle applies to Christian politics as much as to the doctrine of justification. In both cases, Scripture, and Scripture alone, provides the ultimate norms for our analysis and evaluation of the problematic data before us.¹⁴

The “Hermeneutical Spiral”

In other words, the sufficiency of Scriptures is not in itself, but from itself. From the Scriptures,  though not necessarily in the Scriptures, you can understand all things. Theologians refer to the process of subjecting the thoughts we use to interpret Scriptures to the very Scriptures we use them to interpret as “a hermeneutical spiral,” ably described by Peckham:

In order to subject other factors to Scripture, this hermeneutical circle must be consciously recognized and intentionally addressed via a hermeneutic of suspicion wherein all identifiable presuppositions and factors should be bracketed out for scrutiny, as far as possible, pending a thorough investigation of the canon as a whole, on the basis of which those presuppositions and factors might be accepted, rejected, or reformed. This process is ongoing, avoiding vicious circularity by proceeding in a hermeneutical spiral such that the interpreter attempts to subject ever more presuppositions and factors to the canonical data at each opportunity.¹⁵

This would indeed be a hopelessly circular and deconstructive process if not for two inter-related correctives, both embraced by the Reformers as we saw: the need for the Holy Spirit for interpretation and the operation of the Holy Spirit in the church over time. The Holy Spirit uses the Scriptures as we use Scripture to correct our views of Scripture. If He does not, then did Jesus lie to us? Of course not. But I want to re-iterate that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit not to individuals, but to the Church (“you all”), the body of Christ. The Spirit in our brothers and sisters can help to correct our errors, as we help to correct theirs. But this cannot happen while the church continues its fleshly fragmentation.

In other words, some of the most vociferous advocates of sola Scriptura, who regularly separate themselves into individualistic and quarrelsome factions (Prov. 18:1), have cut themselves off from the only protection for the doctrine they say they love, namely, the corrective force of differing opinions in a unified and Spirit-filled church.

The Private Right of Interpretation, Distorted

I do not think the Reformers could have imagined the degree to which their need of private interpretation would come to be viewed as a right of private interpretation. They, like Athanasius, humbly submitted to a hard-won and carefully-articulated minority opinion to preserve important truths in the face of a tyrannical, and in their view apostate, majority opinion. Their position and practice hardly bears comparison to the present Protestant situation. In an embarrassingly large number of cases, contemporary advocates of Reformed theology stubbornly hold to ill-informed and piecemeal opinions (often synthesized uncritically from trusted authorities) simply because we refuse to submit ourselves to the reasonable objections and opinions of our neighbors.

That said, even a nuanced and humble adoption of sola Scriptura will tend toward emphasizing the individual’s opinion over the community’s. As Bavinck taught:

[A church’s interpretation] can bind a person in conscience only to the degree that a person recognizes it as divine and infallible. Whether it indeed agrees with God’s Word no earthly power can decide, but it is for everyone to judge solely for himself or herself.¹⁶

And perhaps even more surprising, Bavinck believed that the private right of interpretation actually undergirded both the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions: “The deepest ground for faith, also in the case of Rome, is not Scripture or the church, but the ‘interior light.’”¹⁷ No one can escape this, I suppose. As individuals, we must all be convinced in our own hearts concerning the truth (Rom. 14:5).

The Holy Spirit and Corporate Accountability

But once we have been convinced of the authority of the Scriptures by and through the Spirit, should that not produce in us all the fruit of the Spirit? Should that not begin to look like the wisdom from above? The Spirit may convince us individually, but we must grow together corporately. And we do not have a choice with whom we grow, really, if we would stay united to the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, sola Scriptura desperately needs to become something more than what Mark Noll said it usually means:

When people say, “We’re following the Bible alone,” they almost always mean, “We’re following the Bible interpreted by a circle of interpreters we trust.”¹⁸

This doctrine, which the Reformers wanted to use to constantly correct and challenge merely human opinion, has become, ironically, a doctrine many people use to claim that their own favored interpretations and interpreters (i.e., human opinions) possess nearly unchallengeable divine authority. Far from a corrective, then, many have used sola Scriptura merely to recreate the problem it was originally intended to address (i.e., human autonomy rearing up against the Spirit). Clearly, the Reformers did not mean or want this.

Conclusion: Does Sola Scriptura Do Us Any Good?

Given the fact that almost no one means the same thing by this slogan, and using it always requires quite a bit of explanation, it might not serve the church to keep insisting on it. On the other hand, I believe we must retain all that the Reformers meant by the slogan with even greater and more persistent tenacity. I largely agree with Henk van den Belt on this:

The expression sola scriptura one-sidedly emphasizes only one of the four defining attributes of Scripture, namely its sufficiency, and does not convey the nuanced way in which this is related to its necessity, clarity, and authority. . . . In other words, sola scriptura is only acceptable if it means that Scripture is clear and contains enough for salvation and for the conduct after salvation. This does not, however, exclude the role of tradition for the transmission of Scripture, the role of general revelation next to Scripture, and the role of hermeneutics for the correct interpretation of Scripture.¹⁹

We would do very well to return to the Reformers’ view of the doctrine. If only we could. Their emphasis on the Holy Spirit preserved the doctrine from circularity. Learning all things from the Scriptures if not in them (sola not “solo” scriptura) gave them a deep and healthy respect for extra-biblical learning and tradition. And love for the church who possessed the same Holy Spirit as the Scriptures necessitated the Reformers exercise an Athanasian extremity of private interpretation, the necessity of which has long since passed. If they had matched their submission to the Spirit of the Scriptures with mutual submission to the Spirit in one another, they probably would have produced the unity in the truth for which they longed. All that said, don’t you think they would pull back in horror to see Protestantism today?

We will recover from the individualistic tendency that has distorted the noble aims of the Reformers only with great difficulty. But we must try. To honor and forward the noble aims of sola Scriptura in our generation, we must reject the Spirit-quenching individualism and self-centeredness that has perverted the doctrine nearly beyond recognition. We can summarize the Reformers’ antidote for our sickly version of sola Scriptura in one sentence: the Holy Spirit infallibly interprets and applies the Scriptures in and to the Church, and the Church must fallibly apply herself to and interpret the Scriptures in and through the Holy Spirit. Semper Reformanda!

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