On the untenability of the doctrine of sola scriptura

In its classical, confessional sense, sola scriptura does not assert that Scripture is the only authority whatsoever, nor that the Church may not employ creeds, councils, liturgy, or reason; it asserts, rather, that Holy Scripture alone is the one infallible norm (norma normans), while all other ecclesial norms are subordinate and corrigible (norma normata). In its biblicist or restorationist radicalisation—often styled nuda scriptura—the claim hardens into an attempt to receive the Bible not merely as the supreme judge, but as an authority so self-sufficient and self-interpreting that the Church’s inherited rule of faith, doctrinal vocabulary, and conciliar judgments become at best dispensable, at worst suspect, and sometimes positively excluded.

It is this posture, in both forms, that proves untenable—not because Scripture is deficient (God forbid), but because the isolation of Scripture from the living apostolic transmission which gave it birth misconstrues what Scripture is, how it is known as Scripture, and how it is to function in the household of faith.

Representative mainline articulations

Within Anglican and Episcopalian formularies, the sufficiency of Scripture is expressed with characteristic sobriety: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation’, such that nothing is to be required as necessary to salvation that cannot be read therein or proved thereby.¹ The same accent appears not merely as a historical relic but within present rites: the consecration of a bishop in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer includes the declaration of belief that the Holy Scriptures ‘contain all things necessary to salvation’.² Yet Anglican self-description typically refuses biblicist constriction by placing Scripture within an ecclesial matrix of creed, sacrament, and episcopate; the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral, for instance, names the Scriptures as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’ while immediately adjoining the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as ‘the sufficient statement’ of faith.³

Within Lutheranism, the same formal principle is stated with particular asperity. Luther insists, in the Schmalkald Articles, that one may not ‘make articles of faith’ out of patristic words or practices, for ‘God’s Word’ alone establishes such articles.⁴ This hard edge is then given confessional precision in the Formula of Concord, which declares that the ‘sole rule and guiding norm’ by which all teaching and teachers are to be judged is ‘the prophetic and apostolic writings’ of the Old and New Testaments.⁵

Within the Reformed tradition as it crystallises in the mid–sixteenth century, one finds an almost identical grammar. The French Confession of Faith (1559), prepared in Calvin’s circle, describes Scripture as ‘the rule of all truth’ and denies that it is lawful ‘to add,’ ‘diminish,’ or ‘change’ anything therein.⁶ The Belgic Confession (1561) likewise teaches that Holy Scripture ‘perfectly contains the will of God,’ and that ‘everything’ one must believe in order to be saved is ‘sufficiently taught’ in it.⁷

These examples matter, for they show that historic Protestantism ordinarily distinguishes sola scriptura from nuda scriptura by retaining creeds, confessions, ordered ministry, and an appeal to the Church’s teaching office—albeit as fallible and revisable.

Why the posture is nevertheless untenable

Sola scriptura requires, as a condition of its own operation, a determinate answer to a question Scripture does not answer from within itself: which writings are Scripture. No list of inspired books is given in the inspired books. The actual reception of a canon is therefore an act of ecclesial discernment and inheritance—historically mediated, liturgically embodied, and ultimately dependent upon the Church’s memory of apostolic origin. One may observe, with some irony, that even the Anglican Article on sufficiency defines ‘Holy Scripture’ as those canonical books ‘of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church’, thereby appealing—at the decisive point—to the Church’s prior judgment and practice.⁸ The Westminster Confession a classical Reformed statement, for its part, not only lists the canonical books but excludes the Apocrypha on the ground that they are ‘no part of the canon’, while admitting that the Church’s testimony may move one to a reverent esteem of Scripture.⁹ In either case, the appeal to ‘Scripture alone’ presupposes a non-scriptural principle of identification without which ‘Scripture’ remains an indeterminate label.

This is not a trivial preliminary. The claim ‘Scripture alone is the sole infallible rule’ already stands upon an ecclesial deliverance—namely, that this collection of writings, and not another, is to be treated as the prophetic and apostolic norm.

The apostolic writings are not delivered as a set of self-interpreting axioms, but as the Church’s inspired witness to Christ—written within and for the Church. It belongs to Scripture’s own self-presentation that interpretation is perilous when detached from the Church’s common mind: some things are ‘hard to understand’ and are ‘twisted’ by the unstable¹⁰; prophecy is not ‘of one’s own interpretation’¹¹; the apostolic injunction is to ‘hold fast the traditions’ delivered both ‘by word of mouth’ and ‘by letter’¹²; and the Church is named ‘the pillar and bulwark of the truth’¹³. The pattern of Acts 15 is equally decisive: a doctrinal crisis is not resolved by each believer’s isolated exegesis, but by apostolic and ecclesial judgment, expressed in a binding decree, received as the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church (‘It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us’¹⁴).

Historically, the Fathers respond to heresy not by Scripture citations alone abstracted from ecclesial life, but by Scripture read within the regula fidei, the Church’s rule of faith. St Irenaeus appeals to the public teaching of the apostolic Churches and to succession as the concrete form in which apostolic truth is preserved in Against Heresies.¹⁵ St Basil the Great, in his contest with anti-Trinitarian reductionisms, appeals to the Church’s unwritten traditions precisely to show that the apostolic deposit is larger than what can be established by proof-texting alone in On the Holy Spirit.¹⁶ St Augustine of Hippo’s oft-cited remark—‘I would not believe the Gospel unless moved by the authority of the Catholic Church’—in Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental is not a diminution of Scripture but a refusal of an individualist epistemology of revelation.¹⁷

Once this is granted, the pressure becomes plain. Either ‘Scripture alone’ implies an ultimately private criterion of what Scripture means (which cannot but proliferate into mutually exclusive ‘biblical’ Churches), or it implies a public criterion—an ecclesial rule of faith and a teaching office—which, if it is not merely advisory but binding, already exceeds the principle as commonly framed.

Mainline Protestantism, to its credit, ordinarily refuses nuda scriptura and thereby confesses—implicitly—that Scripture, in the economy of providence, is meant to be read as Scripture within a formed community, with a received language of doctrine and worship. The Episcopal appeal to Scripture ‘understood through tradition and reason’, together with the Quadrilateral’s pairing of Scripture and Creed, is a direct admission that Scripture functions ecclesially. Lutheranism’s insistence upon the Scriptures as sole norm is accompanied by an equally strong confessional culture in which the ecumenical creeds and the Lutheran Confessions act as authoritative doctrinal instruments. Reformed polity, likewise, treats confessions as ‘subordinate standards’—real standards—which exist precisely because Scripture requires public, corporate exposition.

Yet this very move exposes the instability. For if creeds and confessions are required to guard right reading, then the question becomes: by what authority are these expositions binding, and who judges when a proposed ‘biblical correction’ is faithful rather than schismatic? The principle answers: Scripture, as privately or locally apprehended, judges them. But that simply relocates the final court from the Church to the interpreter, or to a communion whose boundaries are themselves established by fallible instruments. In practice, sola scriptura oscillates between an ecclesial need it cannot authorise in principle and an interpretive autonomy it cannot restrain in practice.

Where nuda scriptura is pursued consistently—under slogans such as ‘no creed but the Bible’ or the restorationist maxim ‘Speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where the Bible is silent’—it does not escape tradition; it merely drives tradition underground. Interpretive habits, inherited doctrinal assumptions, communal shibboleths, and preferred harmonisations become the real authorities, precisely because the community has refused the visible, accountable form of tradition in creeds, councils, and a teaching office. The result is not a pure return to apostolic simplicity, but an unacknowledged confessionalism—often more rigid for being unofficial—together with a chronic fragmentation that no appeal to ‘the plain meaning’ can cure, since the contest is always over what the ‘plain meaning’ is.

The confessional, mainline form of sola scriptura is more theologically serious than its biblicist caricature, precisely because it instinctively retains creeds, confessions, and ordered ministry; yet for the same reason it demonstrates the inner instability of the posture, since the ecclesial conditions required for Scripture’s canonical identity and right reading cannot be authorised by ‘Scripture alone’ without circularity. The biblicist or restorationist form attempts to escape the circle by denying tradition outright, but thereby produces an unaccountable tradition of its own, and exchanges public continuity for private or sectarian certainty.

The Catholic alternative is not ‘Scripture plus something alien’, as though the apostolic Word were insufficient, but Scripture within the living apostolic transmission—Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as one sacred deposit, authentically interpreted by the Church’s Magisterium. Here doctrine serves, not to exhaust the mystery, but to keep faith’s hearing of the Word within the communion in which that Word was first preached, received, and—by divine providence—written.