Prima Scriptura: A Rebuttal

Recently, a colleague within The Outrider Post provided a logical argument for the Christian doctrine of Sola Scriptura. He made a passionate defense for the infallibility of the Holy Scripture as an authority for Christian theology. While I must commend him for this noble endeavor, I must provide a rebuttal to the idea that Scripture is the sole authority within the Church. The Holy Scripture is the divinely inspired Word of God, and should be given the veneration owed to it as we should owe our Father in heaven.

However, the Church is the body of Christ and where two or more gather in His name, His spirit shall be. We should not so easily dismiss the traditions and experiences of the Church as a source of authority for Christian teachings. Christ provided a guide for measuring the spirits of man. The Apostle John tells us in 1 John 4, to not “believe every spirit”, but rather to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” In Matthew 7, Christ instructs us how to discern between actions of men, and actions of the Holy Spirit. He said, “by your fruits you will recognize them.”. We should measure the traditions and experiences of the Church and its believers against the Scripture for the Holy Spirit will never contradict Himself. This is the doctrine of Prima Scriptura.

We celebrate those traditions and experiences that are fulfilled in scripture, and reject the heresies that contradict it. The concept of Sola Scriptura leaves the Church vulnerable to fragmentation and modernism. When there is no tradition to guide the understanding of the Scripture, then the interpretation of the Scripture is left to the personal devices of the individual. This is the general problem with the legal jurisprudence of textualism. The law should be interpreted by the direct meaning of the words, but what happens when the vocabulary evolves? Or when cultural influences produce varying meanings of the text? Without any original foundation, or tradition to guide, the text evolves like anything else.

The same unfortunate conclusion within legal jurisprudence is the same for theological hermeneutics. When the Christian believers are left to interpret the Scripture without any tradition to guide understanding, each believer will walk away with a differing account that is deemed right by their own eyes. This is why the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which cling to tradition have remained relatively whole and theological consistent for millennia, while the Protestant Reformation has been afflicted with dozens of separate divisions.

Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation has been plagued with the challenge of modernist thought, which is why many honorable churches, like the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopalian denominations, have faced theological schisms over blatant heresies regarding virtue and sin. This was entirely predictable as when Scripture is left entirely to the interpretation of the individual, without the bumpers of tradition, then those interpretations will evolve with the cultural parameters that underline our worldviews.

The second fundamental problem with Sola Scriptura is that it is predicated on the Holy Scripture, which was assembled, first by the Great Sanhedrin of the Second Temple, and later by the early Church fathers. It was the Church that made the original decisions over which letters would be considered the Gospel of Christ and which epistles would be included within the Canon. If the decisions of the early Church were not guided at all by the Holy Spirit, how can we place faith in the Apostolic Scripture? If they were guided by the Holy Spirit, then why did the Spirit abandon the Church thereafter?

The answer is that we measure their fruits. We can stack the Gospels and the Epistles against the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi’im – Prophets, and the Ketuvim – Writings) and against historical accounts. Do the letters have origins that align with the proper period? Is the author known and do we have high degree of confidence in his authority? Does the substance of the letters contradict the scripture? Do they contradict a fellow apostle? This is precisely the process that the Church followed to produce the current Holy Scripture.

This doesn’t insinuate that the Church, or more precisely the humans that comprise it, are infallible. Humans are flawed creatures. We have a natural inclination to sin. It is possible for personal biases, political influence, and misunderstandings to lead individuals into error. However, that is why we always measure these human decisions by their fruits.

The final major problem with Sola Scriptura is that it is not supported by the Scripture itself. The Apostle Paul wrote in his second letter to the Thessalonians, “stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 11:2, Paul writes, “I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you.” The Apostle John wrote in his gospel letter that Christ performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples which were not recorded in his letter. We can see from the Scripture, that the Apostles built the Church on both the Holy Scripture and the Holy Tradition. We cannot reject the latter for the former, for we end up with neither.