WM 302: The Failure of James White's Apologetic in the "Real World": RCC, PA, and Sola Scriptura

 

JTR

Allen and Swain on solo Scriptura as "a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism"

Last week, I finished reading Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain’s Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Baker Academic, 2015). I was struck by this quote on the distinction between sola Scriptura and solo Scriptura:

Indeed, sola Scriptura has served for some moderns as a banner for private judgement and against catholicity. In so doing, however, churches and Christians have turned from sola Scriptura to solo Scriptura, a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism. Even the Reformational doctrine of perspicuity has been transformed in much popular Christianity and some scholarly reflection as well to function as the theological equivalent of philosophical objectivity, namely, the belief that any honest observer can, by use of appropriate measures, always gain the appropriate interpretation of a Biblical text. Yet this is a far cry from the confession of Scripture’s clarity in the early Reformed movement or even in its expression in the post-Reformation dogmatics of the Reformed churches. On top of this type of mutation, we regularly encounter uses of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” that ignore or minimize the role of church officers as well as the principle of sola Scriptura to affirm a lived practice of “no creed but the Bible.” Right or not, then, many people embrace sola Scriptura, thinking that they are embracing individualism, anti-traditionalism, and/or rationalism. Similarly, right or wrong, many critique sola Scriptura as one or more of these three things (85).

JTR

Calvin on Papists, Mahometans, and the Sufficiency of Scripture

I’ve been reading Calvin’s commentary on John as I preach expositionally through the Fourth Gospel. In those sermons I only get to refer to a fraction of the Geneva master’s insights. One overlooked comment from recent sermons on John 4 was Calvin’s contrast of the woman at the well’s simple trust in Christ (turning from the corruption of Samaritan religion) with that of “Papists” and “Mahometans” in his remarks on John 4:25:

I wish that those who now boast of being the pillars of the Christian Church, would at least imitate this poor woman, so as to be satisfied by the simple doctrine of Christ, rather than claim I know not what power of superintendence for putting forth their inventions. For whence was the religion of the Pope and Mahomet collected but from the wicked additions, by which they imagined that they brought the doctrine of the Gospel to a state of perfection? As if it would have been incomplete without such fooleries. But whoever shall be well taught in the school of Christ will ask no other instructors, and indeed will not receive them.

….There is, therefore, no danger that he will disappoint one of those whom he finds ready to become his disciples. But they who refuse to submit to him, as we see done by many haughty and irreligious men, or who hope to find elsewhere a wisdom more perfect—as the Mahometans and Papists do—deserve to be driven about by innumerable enchantments, and at length to be plunged in an abyss of errors….

Notice that Calvin sees the problem with both groups to be their tendency to make “wicked additions” to Scripture in order to bring it to “perfection.” For Calvin, the Scriptures are sufficient and complete as they are.

JTR

Is "sola Scriptura" a Reformation slogan?

I’m still working my way through Robert Letham’s Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective (Mentor, 2007). It includes an intriguing chapter comparing Orthodox and Reformed views on Scripture and tradition (pp. 173-198), in which Letham notes confusion, on both sides, about the term sola Scriptura.

Letham’s point is that the popular modern concept of sola Scriptura as a “right of private interpretation” was not a Reformation principle (see pp. 194-195). He adds: “To categorize Reformed theology as individualistic, with no doctrine of the church, is an error of monumental proportions” (p. 195). See similar reflections in Keith Mathison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura on the difference between the Reformers’ view of sola Scriptura and modern individualistic evangelical view of what he calls “solo” Scriptura.

In this year of the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, many discussions on various points of Reformed theology and practice are surfacing. I noticed that the May 26, 2017 issue of Christianity Today has an interview with church historian Mark Noll titled, “The Freedom and Chaos of Sola Scriptura” (BTW, I do not, in fact, subscribe to “Christianity Yesterday,” as some derisively call it, but take a look at it, as well as the mainline The Christian Century, from time to time when I visit the central library, and I just happened to thumb through this issue last week). That article begins its discussion of the slogan by noting, “It has been a hallmark of Protestantism for 500 years….” That may be true of the concept but Letham suggests that the actual slogan does not go back that far.

Letham comments:

In fact, this slogan cannot be traced back to the sixteenth century; it was a much later concoction. Its intention was not to suggest that only the text of the Bible was acceptable. Indeed, the Reformers produced a wide range of new catechisms and confessions….  What they taught was that the Bible is the supreme authority, and sits in judgement on the teaching of the church, not vice versa (p. 175).

He later adds, regarding the term:

This is often taken to mean that the Bible is to be the only source for theology. It is almost universally claimed that it is one of the central pillars of the Reformation. However, there is not evidence of such a slogan in the entire sixteenth century. It is probable that it did not put in an appearance until the eighteenth century at the earliest. Contrary to so much hot air, it is not a Reformation slogan. When it was coined it was held to affirm that the Bible is the highest court of appeal in all matters of religious controversy, which is what the Reformers and their successors actually held.

So, Letham makes two interesting points:

First, historically, the exact term or slogan sola Scriptura was not, in fact, coined in the sixteenth century but in the eighteenth century (though Letham does not suggest who first coined the term—that would be interesting to know).

Second, theologically, the Reformed concept of sola Scriptura does not champion “private interpretation.” It also does not suggest that the Bible is the only source for theology but that it is the standard by which theology is rightly understood and evaluated.

JTR