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August 24 - December 9, 2024
In a visit to Germany in 1980, for example, Pope John Paul II could even call Luther “a witness whose message of faith and justification should be listened to by us all.”24
Popes, councils, and all other postapostolic organs of the church are fallible. As Anthony Lane puts it, “Sola Scriptura is the statement that the church can err.”3
Sola Scriptura does not deny that creeds, catechisms, confessions, and councils function authoritatively. It just maintains that they are not infallible and therefore are placed under Scripture within a hierarchy of authorities.
Thus, the vast majority of Christians today can agree that Scripture is ontologically unique in its nature. No other rule of faith we have is the inspired Word of God. Nothing else that we possess today constitutes the God-breathed, Spirit-carried, unbreakable oracles of God. Sola Scriptura is simply the position that, as the Bible is unique in nature, so it is correspondingly unique in authority.
One can express this concern at a more metaphysical level: God is unique; therefore, his speech is unique. Why should we accept that which isn’t the speech of God to have equal authority to that which is the speech of God? If you want to put something else into the “infallible rule” category alongside the very words of God, you will need a good reason.
The general importance of Scripture among the people of God can be seen by the frequent exhortations to meditate on it as a source of life and flourishing (Josh. 1:8, Pss. 1:2; 119) and by how its recovery leads to reform and renewal (for example, 2 Kings 22).
The possibility of error in literary transmission, by contrast, is comparatively tiny and does not touch any dogmas of the faith.
First, it is without precedent in Old Testament. The Jewish people had no such ongoing organs of infallibility, so this would be an innovation within redemptive history if it came into being with the church. Second, it is without ground or instantiation in the New Testament. Although the New Testament is replete with information about the offices of the church, there is not even a hint of any post-apostolic office in the church that possesses infallibility
However carefully the New Testament is scrutinized, not one word will be discovered about infallible authority being vested into an ongoing post-apostolic function in the church. Yet if the church did possess such a function, wouldn’t this be the single most important fact for the New Testament to tell us?
At the end of the day, there is simply no good biblical or historical reason to conclude that the post-apostolic church possesses ongoing capacities of infallibility. This does not mean the church died or fell away from God. It simply means the church can err and therefore must continually measure her doctrine and practice by the infallible words of Holy Scripture.
Protestants find themselves in a broad agreement on this point with the Roman Catholic position, as articulated at Vatican I: “these books the church holds to be sacred and canonical not because she subsequently approved them by her authority . . . but because, being written under the inspiration of the holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and were as such committed to the church.”
For Protestants, the church’s charge extends not only to recognizing the canon but also to protecting the Scriptures during times of persecution and to translating, teaching, and proclaiming them. Thus, Protestants have spoken of the church as not only a necessary witness to the Word of God, but also the custodian and herald of the Word of God.
That the church is entrusted with such a task in no way grants her infallible authority parallel to Scripture any more than John the Baptist possessed parallel authority to Christ.
Infallibility is not necessary for canonization since the church’s responsibility is not constituting Scripture but simply recognizing it. Such recognition is not itself the action of an infallible agent.
As J. I. Packer more recently stated, “The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. . . . Newton did not create gravity but recognized it.”
Ultimately, the trustworthiness of the canon is rooted in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as well as the progressive nature of revelation itself. Thus, the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli pointed out that in the work of discerning the Word of God, the church does not start from scratch, but measures each book against the previous revelation she has already received from God.
The simple fact is that it is not necessary to be infallible to discern that which is infallible. When Moses heard God at the burning bush, he didn’t need a second voice whispering in his ear that this was indeed God.
This is what Protestants intend when they speak of Scripture as self-authenticating. This simply means that the ultimate ground on which we receive the Scripture is inherent in it, rather than external to it. For there is no higher authority the Word of God could rest upon than the Spirit speaking through it.
There is one way we can know with certainty that the church does not need infallibility to discern the canon: the facts of history.
The process of canonization leading to that point was bottom up, not top down. It was a gradual, cumulative, widespread, and organic process by which the church discerned the Word of God through the enabling direction of the Holy Spirit. It was not the result of an infallible statement from the Pope of Rome or an ecumenical council.
Unfortunately, criticism of sola Scriptura sometimes completely overlooks the distinction between the apostolic age and the post-apostolic age.
sola Scriptura in no way designates Scripture as the only authority to be obeyed (as opposed to only infallible rule).
More basically, sola Scriptura is a framework for the church as such, not for Christians in the apostolic age sitting under the teaching of living apostles, during the era in which Scripture was still being written.
Martin Chemnitz listed eight different definitions of the word tradition as it was used by the church fathers, the first seven of which are completely harmonious with sola Scriptura.
It is only the eighth kind of tradition, that which was affirmed at the Council of Trent, that sola Scriptura opposes. This kind of tradition Chemnitz defines as “traditions which pertain both to faith and morals and which cannot be proved with any testimony of Scripture but which the Synod of Trent nevertheless commands to be received and venerated with the same reverence and devotion as the Scripture itself.”
We all use private judgment for the most important and poignant decisions of life—including whether to be a Christian, which church to join, and whether to remain in that church.
Furthermore, while erroneous private judgment is a real danger, another danger is far worse: erroneous ecclesiastical judgments. It is one thing to be able to err; it is another to be yoked to error. This is what sola Scriptura seeks to guard against.
To state this concern metaphorically: Democracy is clumsy, but it’s better than tyranny. And for Protestants, it is nothing less than tyranny when churches require belief in indulgences, or the assumption of Mary, or the veneration of icons, or many other points of doctrine that we have no reason to believe are apostolic.
What are the necessary doctrines a Christian is required to accept? Without sola Scriptura, the parameters get widened to encircle all kinds of historical accretions.
This is why biblical arguments for the papacy typically focus on Peter, not the idea of an ongoing Petrine office. In so doing, they assume succession rather than trying to establish it. But this is problematic. Peter’s office as an apostle was unique. The idea of a successive office stemming from Peter and imbued with his authority cannot merely be asserted. It needs to be demonstrated.
If Jesus and the apostles envisioned an ongoing office in the church characterized by supremacy and infallibility, it is not unreasonable to expect it to come up somewhere in their teaching or writings.
Why would we be given such detailed information about lesser offices (for example, multiple qualification lists in 1 Tim. 3 and Titus 1) but not the slightest hint of this supreme office above them?
The simple fact is that Peter never claims supremacy or unique infallibility; no one else ascribes it to him; and the events of the New Testament nowhere depict him possessing such characteristics.
Further, the context of Matthew 16 is Peter speaking on behalf of the other apostles in response to Jesus’s question to them all: “Who do you [plural] say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15).
The papacy gives every appearance of being a slow historical accretion—a gradual accumulation and centralization of power within the Western church.
Johann Döllinger, a nineteenth-century Catholic theologian who was excommunicated for rejecting papal infallibility, maintained his opposition to the dogma mainly on historical grounds. In a letter recounting his concern he wrote, “We are still waiting the explanation how it is that, until 1830 years had passed, the Church did not formulate into an article of faith a doctrine which the Pope . . . calls the very foundation principle of Catholic faith and doctrine?”
For Döllinger, the notion that infallibility could be vested in one person in the terms of Vatican I was manifestly not how the church had functioned—especially in the patristic era and in the Christian East.
The idea that one man can infallibly pronounce a dogma simply isn’t present in the first millennium of church history.
But for the rest of the Christendom, including not only Protestants but also the Old Catholics and various non-Catholic Eastern traditions, the papacy is arguably the single greatest barrier to unity.
Throughout the New Testament, there is a plethora of evidence that local churches had a plurality of leaders. Commonly these leaders are referred to with the term “elder” or “presbyter” (presbyteros).
In contrast to this, we never see a single bishop presiding over any church in the New Testament.
The logic here is as follows: appoint elders if they are above reproach . . . for a bishop must be above reproach. This makes no sense unless the terms “bishop” and “elder” refer to one and the same office (for the greater office can include the lesser, but not vice versa). Thus, these two terms, as used by the apostles themselves, do not designate two distinct offices. Instead, the New Testament portrays two offices in the church: bishop/presbyter and deacon.
Looking at the extrabiblical first-century literature, we find the exact same picture. The early treatise the Didache instructs churches to appoint two offices: “Appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord.”
Eamon Duffy, a Roman Catholic scholar, summarizes, Clement made no claim to write as bishop. His letter was sent in the name of the whole Roman community, he never identifies himself or writes in his own person. . . . The letter itself makes no distinction between presbyters and bishops, about which it always speaks in the plural, suggesting that at Corinth as at Rome the church at this time was organized under a group of bishops or presbyters, rather than a single ruling bishop. A generation later, this was still so in Rome.16
Part of the reason Duffy (with most scholars) thinks the monoepiscopacy (i.e., rule by a single bishop) has not emerged in Rome even a generation after Clement is the testimony of the Shepherd of Hermas, which was written in Rome sometime in the early second century, and which references “the presbyters who preside over the church” and always speaks of the leadership of the church in the plural.
Almost every institution goes through rapid institutionalization after its founder or founders are gone. It is the most natural thing in the world that the early church, facing the triple pressures of heresy, schism, and persecution during the tempestuous second century, and in the absence of the apostles, would evolve a more centralized, hierarchical organization.
The recognition that apostolic succession is not of divine constitution but rather represents a gradual development in the early church need not necessarily entail that there is anything particularly wrong with episcopal church government as such. On prudential grounds, one could make a case for elevating one presbyter into a unique role above others or even calling such a presbyter a different term. But requiring such a structure—as well as limiting valid ministry to those churches adhering to it—unnecessarily injures and divides the church.
Reformers did not appeal to Scripture alone, ceding church history to their opponents. Rather, they argued from history, casting the Protestant effort as a retrieval of patristic practice and thereby a return to catholicity—that is, the doctrine and practice that is most representative of the fullness of the church.
The Protestant outlook was that alongside all the good God was doing in the history of the church, various aberrations, declensions, innovations, accretions, and errors crept in along the way. The point of Protestantism was to remove the errors. Their goal was to return to ancient Christianity, to a version prior to the intrusion of various accretions.
Protestants were not arguing that, by the late medieval era, the church had died and needed resurrection. This is a common caricature. Consistently the Reformers affirmed the opposite—that God had faithfully preserved his church, even in the darkest times.
