The Bastardization of Sola Scriptura

The Bastardization of Sola Scriptura April 20, 2015

I’ve been reading Michael Allen and Scott Swain’s book Reformed Catholicity and thought this quote was spot on:

We do well, nonetheless, to acknowledge the drift away from a lively setting of sola Scriptura in the redemptive economy of the Triune God and amid the life of the communion of saints. Indeed, sola Scriptura has served for some moderns as a banner for private judgment 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 a 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 by the post-Reformation dogmatics of the Reformed churches … Right or not, then, many people embrace sola Scriptura, thinking that they are embracing individualism, anti-traditionalism, and/or rationalism. Similarly, right or not, many critique sola Scriptura as one or more of these three things.


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