Thanks for this important post. I have a few objections to sola scriptura. And for my list, I will focus just on the NT. But we first must define sola scriptura – for if we do not agree on its definition we cannot agree on its doctrinal soundness. I define it as an abiding faith that (a) the NT writers were inspired by God to write what they wrote in such a fashion that every word is accurate historically when it recounts history and accurate doctrinally when it exhorts theology; (b) the assembly of the 27 NT books and the process by which these particular writings came to be chosen as canonical (e.g., the letter to the Hebrews is in, the Gospel of Thomas is out) -- based largely on the twin on criteria of presumed ties to the original apostles and consistency with then-held orthodoxy -- was likewise inspired by God to ensure that those making the cut were all included in (a) above; and (c) there can be found in the 27 that happened to make the cut an answer to every material theological question imaginable.
This post is already going to be long, and it would take way too long to discuss the possible challenges to (a) and (b) – and any challenge to (a) will draw way too much vitriol on this site! -- so I will focus on (c). With that out of the way, here are my comments:
1. The first generation of Christians had no NT. They had the oral teachings of the apostles and their disciples (and MAYBE, within a decade or so of Pentecost, some written compilations of the sayings of Jesus Christ now lost to us), and soon the teachings of Paul and his disciples as they traveled around the eastern Mediterranean world (slowly – no planes, trains, cars or powerboats back then). By around 50 C.E. Paul’s letters delivered to particular churches in particular towns started to be written and then copied so as to make their way beyond those towns, and MAYBE the first gospel was written in the early 50’s as well and, sooner or later, got similarly copied and began to be spread around (slowly – no printing presses back then). But that means around 20-30 years – a generation – of reliance solely or almost solely on the oral traditions of the apostles and their disciples. This was a time of nulla scriptura rather than sola scriptura. Yet Christianity in some form (whether the Jerusalem flavor of Peter and Mark or the Antiochene flavor of Paul and, much later, Luke) nevertheless managed to take root – proving that oral tradition alone can do the trick. Imagine that! Keep that in the back of your mind for now.
2. The apostolic tradition in those early years was not unanimous. There is little reason to doubt some difference of opinion among the original apostles (let’s add Matthias to the group; in fact, let’s add “the seventy”), all of whom were Jewish, on outreach to Gentiles (think about Peter’s vision and the Cornelius incident, and its aftermath, in Acts 10 and 11 – a mind-boggling scenario if these apostles had indeed heard the final words of Jesus as “recorded” in Matthew 28:19). There is little reason to doubt the disagreement between Peter and Paul recounted in Galatians on proper interaction with the Gentiles (the very different account of this “split” and its resolution as recounted in Acts is probably the more accurate). We know about the Council of Jerusalem to resolve the latter dispute. We don’t know how many other councils, conferences, theological debates and formal or informal efforts to achieve apostolic consensus on other matters took place (none of the 27 NT books describes any, but that hardly suggests there were none).
3. Even after the books of the NT were composed, different apostolic traditions continued to thrive. An example is the date of celebrating Easter, which didn’t get resolved until Nicaea in 325 C.E. The churches in Asia Minor followed the
tradition handed down by John and Philip celebrating Easier on 14 Nisan regardless of whether that date fell on the Lord’s Day; most everyone else celebrated Easter only on the Lord’s Day. No answer in Scripture! A council was required to resolve the issue.
4. The gospel authors wrote down different apostolic traditions, and while they do not agree on all details, each presented different words and deeds of Jesus to support differing theological perspectives. But as full expositions of everything Jesus said and did, they are necessarily incomplete. Luke 1:1 tells us that many other accounts were written. John 21:25 tells us that Jesus Christ said and did so much more than was written by him that the whole world wouldn’t hold all the books required to do so. It follows that all of the apostles who were witnesses to what Jesus Christ said and did – whether they dictated gospels or not – were a treasure trove of unrecorded teachings of Christ. And in the first generation of Christendom, their oral traditions mattered – not just the one-tenth or one percent (at best!) that is found in the four canonical gospels. Why should it not matter today (presuming we can reconstruct it)?
5. Doctrine is informed by more than Scripture, and has to be. The doctrine of the Trinity is a prime example, if only because Scripture is so equivocal on the subject. (I use this example with some trepidation, as I suspect this post is going to be hijacked by strident debaters on both sides of this issue – because they can’t help themselves. So buckle in. It’s unavoidable. But I digress . . .) Those few scattered passages in the emerging NT canon that could arguably be deemed binitarian or (far less frequently) trinitarian yield no coherent picture of the Son’s participation in the Godhead, and as a result, three centuries of patristic thinking were occupied by the effort to explain the Church’s understanding of the nature of Jesus Christ in a manner consistent with Scripture. Thinking of two beings as distinct, and yet as sharing the same substance or essence, the same
ousia, presents no difficulty unless that substance or essence or
ousia is itself the unique and absolute self-subsistence of the Mosaic “I AM”—for by definition only one being can have
that as its essence. Efforts to solve this dilemma—and the first three centuries of the Christian era were marked by an astonishing array of such efforts—required more than resort to Scripture if all of the myriad heresies of the time were to be beaten down. Arianism, Sabellianism, and dozens of similar isms would have hijacked the Faith and split it apart if the Church could have done no more than point to passages in Scripture. Something was needed to fill the gap – and that something was reason and philosophy. The march of Christianity outward from Palestine into the Greek world inevitably resulted in a cultural and philosophical disconnect, as tales told and texts written from a Jewish/messianic perspective were being interpreted by men imbued in a Greek philosophical tradition. It was thus natural that Greek philosophy, which had long sought to locate an ontological bridge between the One and the Many, between the realm of soul/spirit and the material world, would provide the looms for this tapestry. Rejecting it as “unscriptural” will revive all manner of early heresies. Nicaea and Chalcedon – not simply opening a Book -- were necessary to defeat them.
Given all of this, what reason do we have to believe that the NT has all the answers to everything? I can see none. I can see, rather, the need for respect to the apostolic traditions from the first and second century, as revealed in sacramental/prayer rituals tied to that era, and in the writing of the Church Fathers of the patristic period discussing these things -- as well as the need for Church councils.
[By the way, I’m not Roman Catholic, but I do think the RCC is a repository of some of this ritual and tradition (the Eastern Orthodox Church is as well). There is so much Catholic bashing on this site that I wonder whether Protestants are blind to this simply because they deem the bathwater to be as tainted as the baby.]
