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A Protestant friend recently told me “The Bible is absolutely sufficient for my salvation.” This, of course, is not at all unusual to hear coming from a Protestant. The doctrine of sola scriptura was proudly proclaimed by Martin Luther, over against the need for Sacred Tradition and the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, and is considered the formal cause of the Protestant Reformation. What is unusual is for Protestants to be aware that there are significant problems with this claim. Here are five of them.
Surely the Protestant doctrine about the sufficiency of Scripture, which claims that Scripture alone is the sole infallible guide for all Christian beliefs, has abundant and indisputable evidence in Scripture. How could it not? On the contrary, the strongest Biblical “evidence” offered in favor of sola scriptura is from Paul’s second letter to Timothy.
Paul says “All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16). To this Catholics say, “Amen!” But where in this passage is there any reference to the Bible being the sole infallible guide for Christians? Perhaps if “profitable” were substituted for “sufficient” Protestants could make some sort of case for sola scriptura, but that is not what the text says.
In context, when Paul is referring to Scripture he is referring to the Old Testament, for much of the New Testament had not even been written yet. Additionally, the fact that Scripture is God’s inspired word and profitable or useful for many good things—which Protestants and Catholics both agree upon—does nothing to support the idea that the Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith. Protestants mistakenly (and often unwittingly) read sola scriptura into this and other passages that speak to the inspiration and importance of Scripture because they already assume sola scriptura to be true. What is revealing is that some Protestant apologists have begun admitting that the Bible does not explicitly teach sola scriptura but then claim that this does nothing to undermine the doctrine. I will let the reader decide if this seems plausible.
What the Bible does teach is that authentic Tradition is to be embraced as authoritative. Paul elsewhere says “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thess 2:15). Notice that the Apostles’ verbal and written teachings are placed on an equal plane and that both are considered “traditions”. Tradition here is clearly shown to be a positive thing, not something to categorically reject as many Protestants do.
We can therefore conclude that sola scriptura is unbiblical both due to a lack of evidence in its support and because of the explicit evidence against it.
In a previous article I provided a list of essential disagreements among Protestants regarding faith and morals. I will not relist those disagreements here. Instead, I will provide further insight into why the Bible alone is insufficient to maintain Christian unity.
Christians agree that the Bible is the inspired word of God. But the Bible is still a book, or rather, a collection of books, in need of interpretation.
There are many difficult passages in Scripture. One common solution put forward by Protestants to shed light on these dark passages is to use the clear passages in Scripture to explain the unclear passages. The problem is no one can agree on which passages are clear and which are unclear. The Bible can’t interpret itself and it doesn’t give a list of the supposed clear and unclear passages. Because the Bible is a book, it requires an interpreter. Without an infallible authority to resolve the many debates by providing a correct and authoritative interpretation of Scripture, “Bible only” Christians are left fighting over the Bible based on their own fallible interpretation over not only innumerable secondary issues, but on doctrines affecting the gospel and salvation.
Many important questions about faith and morals are not directly answered in the Bible. Debates about the nature of God (e.g., Is God a Triune God?) and the nature of Christ were not resolved for centuries and only after much debate. Other modern moral issues, like IVF and surrogacy, cannot be addressed in the Bible because the issues had not arisen when the Bible was written.
But another problem is that even when the Bible does address specific moral questions, it is not always clear if the Biblical mandate is culturally-dependent or if the moral instruction is intended to endure for Christians of all later generations. Examples range everywhere from “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (1 Cor 16:20) to the question if the Ten Commandments are still binding on Christians today. Christians disagree on all sorts of moral issues explicitly taught in the Bible because the Bible is not always clear which mandates are transient and which are to persist, which goes back to the need for an authoritative and trustworthy interpreter to resolve debates.
In An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman masterfully articulates another reason why sola scriptura is insufficient for Christian unity. Newman said that ideas contain a “living principle” within them, and once an idea possesses the human mind there is an active process of trying to understand it as the idea is freshly considered from every conceivable angle by a variety of people. But that process takes time, especially for the greatest of ideas. The greatest idea of all is Christianity, which is more than an idea, but an idea nonetheless.
As Christians sought to unpack the deepest mysteries of the faith, more and various developments came about, some authentic to the original idea and some foreign. As Newman argues, the very nature of ideas and their development makes it extremely probable or even necessary that there be an infallible authority to judge between true and false developments. Without such an authority, Christians are left with only the Bible, which is inspired and essential but unequipped for the task of definitively resolving future disputes after its pages were written.
All Christians accept the canon of Scripture on the basis of Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Catholic Church. This is an inconvenient historical fact, one that many Protestants are unaware of.
God did not hand us a stone tablet with the books of the Bible engraved on it. We know which books belong in the Bible because a group of Catholic bishops, being guided by the Holy Spirit, authoritatively declared the canon of Scripture, first at the Council of Rome in A.D. 382, and later by reaffirming it at the Council in Hippo in A.D. 393 and at the Council in Carthage in 397.
It is worth noting that ever since the canon was settled by the Catholic Church in the 4th century, Christians held to a biblical canon of 73 books. It was only in the past 500 years that Martin Luther and the Reformers took out 7 books from the Bible, the deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament. This was because these books supported Catholic doctrines about purgatory and praying for the dead, which the Reformers rejected on the basis of their own interpretation of Scripture. But if the Reformers were able to remove books from the Bible because certain books went against their own theology, what is to keep others from doing the same?
Sola scriptura is undermined by Protestants’ reliance upon Tradition and the authority of the Catholic Church for the infallible list of books included in the Bible, thus making the doctrine of sola scriptura self-defeating.
If the idea that “The Bible is absolutely sufficient for my salvation,” as my friend put it, is true, should we not expect to find ample and early testimony from Christian writers espousing such a critical doctrine? The issue is not that we simply lack sufficient early Christian writings—we have copious extrabiblical documents, especially in later centuries. No, among the thousands of pages from the Church Fathers and voluminous writings from later Christians writers, we don’t have any source that asserts this one allegedly essential thing: that all Christians need is the Bible. For at least the first 1,000 years of Christianity, there is no compelling historical evidence that anyone believed in sola scriptura.
Sure, there are many passages about the inspiration of Scripture, the necessity of Scripture, the primacy of Scripture for Christian belief and practice, and even the material sufficiency of Scripture, but nowhere is a single passage, correctly understood in context and in light of everything else written by the author, found in support of the idea that the Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith for Christians. Instead, we find statements like this from none other than Saint Augustine: “For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church” (Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus 5).
Do your own research. But then ask yourself: Why is so much written about the need to follow the bishops and the teaching authority of the Church while there is little to nothing in support of sola scriptura? Is it possible that sola scriptura is in fact unhistorical and was an innovation introduced very late in Christian history by the Reformers? The historical record speaks for itself and is readily available to anyone willing to commit to some personal study.
It is indisputably true that the earliest Christians did not believe in sola scriptura. In fact, both Catholics and Protestants agree that sola scriptura was impossible for the earliest Christians.
First, the books of the New Testament were not all written until several decades after Jesus’s resurrection, so the earliest Christians could not have accepted the “Bible alone” even if they wanted to. Additionally, as noted above, we didn’t have the Bible as we know it until the 4th century when the canon of Scripture was declared by the Catholic Church. Until this infallible decision was made, there were disagreements between believers about which letters were considered inspired. So since sola scriptura is based on the idea that the Bible is all Christians need, and the earliest Christians did not have the Bible until the 4th century, sola scriptura was impossible for the earliest Christians at least until the 4th century.
Rather than relying on the Bible alone, the earliest Christians followed the authoritative teaching of the Apostles, those entrusted with Jesus’s own authority to preach the gospel. And when disputes arose, these very first disciples, who were primarily Jewish followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2), did not look solely to the Scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament) for answers. Instead, we know from Scripture that disputes were resolved by the Church. For example, when some Jews were insisting that gentiles needed to be circumcised to be saved, Paul took the dispute to the Apostles in Jerusalem where the problem was definitely resolved when Peter stood up and spoke to the assembly, declaring that circumcision was not necessary for salvation (Acts 15:1-21).
Since sola scriptura was impossible for the earliest Christians, is it unreasonable to think it is also impossible for Christians at all times in church history, including for Christians today?
Based on the many problems with the doctrine of sola scriptura, five of which have been outlined here, it is not difficult to see that sola scriptura is nothing other than a tradition of men that Jesus warned his followers to reject (Mark 7:8).
Jesus did not teach sola scriptura or expect his followers to believe it. No, he loves us too much to leave us to our own feeble resources as we each try to interpret a diverse and incredibly difficult collection of ancient texts written in foreign languages. Indeed, it is because we are all individually fallible and uncertain that Jesus gave us an alternative: the trustworthy teaching authority of the Catholic Church, which is grounded in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. The Holy Spirit will not fail to “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13) when you follow the teachings of the Church, which is “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15).
