A CHALLENGE FOR PROSTESTANTS

A Challenge

It has become quite common today for those who hold to sola scriptura to claim that it does not mean Scripture is the only authority for the Christian but that it is the ultimate authority. They argue that church councils and history are authoritative in some sense, but that only Scripture is our final authority.

My main objection to this line of reasoning is that, though it sounds good in theory, in reality I have never known two Protestants to use any of these other sources of authority as a genuine tiebreaker in their disputes. It always seems to come down to my interpretation of Scripture versus yours, which in the end makes me the ultimate source of authority.

In a way, I think this is fair, since I cannot expect a Protestant to hold the Catholic understanding of authority. But I do have a challenge for the Protestant who claims that there are authorities outside of just the Bible: let those authorities be actual authorities. If councils, creeds, and the Fathers are never allowed to truly settle a dispute, then they function as no authority at all. And neither they nor the Scriptures become the actual final authority, but the individual.

History as a Safeguard Against Myself

For me, this was one of the main reasons I began to take Church history seriously, not as an authority equal to Scripture in itself, but as a safeguard against my own private interpretation.

Here was my approach

I began with Scripture, accepting it as one hundred percent authoritative, and did my best to interpret it honestly.

Then I turned to the earliest Christians, looking first to the Apostolic Fathers, those who knew the apostles personally, and asked two main questions:

1. How does their interpretation of Scripture compare with mine

2. Is their interpretation at least plausible, or is it altogether anti scriptural

Continuing generation by generation, I repeated the process with later Fathers and councils, testing whether their interpretations showed continuity or a rupture.

What I found was that history often exposed the blind spots in my own reading. If I discovered that the Christians closest to the apostles read Scripture differently than I did, I had to ask myself whether I was really more likely to have the correct interpretation than those who were closer in both time and space to the original authors, as well as being entrusted by them to pass on their teachings.

This did not mean I gave history absolute authority, but it did mean I treated it as a mirror, forcing me to confront whether my interpretation was consistent with the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Conclusion

Our Lord promised to send us a helper to lead us into all truth (John 16:13). But was this promise meant for the individual or for the Church as a whole. If it was meant for the individual, then why do so many Christians disagree about the meaning of Scripture. If I look at a passage and interpret it one way and my fellow Christian brother interprets it another way, then my brother must have been led less by the Holy Spirit than I have. Under this view, I am implying that he must not be as close to God as I am, otherwise he would have been led into the same truth as me. But Scripture reminds us what to do if I have a dispute with my brother that cannot be resolved. I am to take it to the Church (Matt 18:17), which is the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15). The Bible also makes it clear that no verse of Scripture is of one’s own interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). And if it comes down to my interpretation against yours, I am making myself the final authority. The only way to avoid this is by looking to something outside of ourselves.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. CK Chesterton