What Is Reformed Theology? with R. C. Sproul, Scripture Alone, 3

The Meaning of Sola Scriptura and the Authority of Scripture Alone

The Bible says that all men are liars, and I'm afraid that I verified the truth of that, at least in terms of its application to myself in our last session, because I concluded our last session by saying from now on we were going to only consider the distinctives of Reformed theology.

In the next two sessions we're going to be studying the doctrine of sola Scriptura and sola fide, which I've already told you are critical doctrines held in common by the evangelicals in their traditions.

And so I lied, but I didn't lie intentionally, but I was mistaken. I don't want to leave you with the impression that the doctrine of sola Scriptura is a distinctly or uniquely Reformed theological principle.

It is part of that body of truth that we share in common with historical evangelicalism. But having said that, let's look then at this principle that historians call the formal principle of the Protestant Reformation, sola Scriptura.

In one sense this concept was born publicly in Luther's famous confrontation with the rulers of the state and the church at the Diet of Worms, whereupon Luther was called to recant of his teaching, and you recall on that occasion when he stood at this solemn place he said, Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I cannot recant, for my conscience is held captive by the Word of God.

And to act against conscience, said Luther, is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. God help me. Now that's been memorialized in motion picture lore and in the history books and so on. But though this was the public debut in a historic sense at Worms, it was not a new concept with Luther.

Luther had been more or less forced to say this in earlier debates with some of the theologians that were trying to persuade him to change his views, where he earlier had said that it was possible for popes to err, to make mistakes, and even for church councils to make mistakes.

But the only absolutely authoritative written source of divine revelation is the Scripture itself. And so we get this word sola that we place before the word Scriptura, and the phrase simply means by the Scripture alone.

Scripture, Tradition, and the Source of Special Revelation

Well what does this mean? What is the vantage point that we're concerned about here with the use of this term alone? Well actually there's more than one consideration, though they're all interrelated.

In the first instance, one of the disputes at the sixteenth century level was the question of the source of divine revelation. All Christians in the sixteenth century believed that Christianity is a revealed faith, that its content comes from God.

And both sides of the dispute, Rome and Protestantism in the sixteenth century, agreed that there were at least two distinct places where God gives revelation of Himself. One is in nature, which is called natural revelation or general revelation, whereby the heavens declare the glory of God, and the other of course is the Bible.

Now both sides agreed that the Bible was revelation, and both sides agreed that nature is also revelatory. But the dispute over the alone was whether there was more than one source of what we call special revelation.

And the Protestant movement said there is only one source of what is called special or written revelation, and that is Scripture, where Rome confessed its confidence in two sources of special revelation, Scripture and tradition.

I've gone over this in other courses, but I want to review the bidding on it now for the context of this study of the essence of Reformed theology. At the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, which was the Roman Catholic Church's response to Luther and to Protestantism, the council was held in different sessions at different times, spread out over a few years.

And at the fourth session of the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the truths of God are found in the Scripture and in tradition. And the Latin word that is in the final text of the Council of Trent that links Scripture and tradition is the somewhat innocuous, simple Latin word et, which I used to think when I listened to my grandmother was the past tense of the verb to eat, because she would say, if you et your supper.

But that is not. That is simply the Latin word for and. Well, this is a complicated discussion because an Anglican scholar in the twentieth century was doing his research for his doctoral dissertation, and he was focusing on the fourth session of the Council of Trent, which session ended unexpectedly and abruptly because of the outbreak of war on the continent.

And there were some loose ends left dangling and some difficult things to explain from the discussions that went on at that time. And what this Anglican scholar noted was that in the first draft of the fourth session of the Council of Trent, the statement was made in Latin that the truth of God is contained partly, partin, partly in Scripture and partly in tradition.

Partly in Scripture, partly in tradition, which would indicate clearly that there were two separate distinct sources for the church's doctrine, one from the Bible and the other from the historic tradition of the church.

Now when that first draft was presented to the council, two priests who were delegates to the council stood up and protested the language. I don't know why I remember their names, but their names were Bonuccio and Nocchianti.

These two Italian priests protested this language saying that it undermined the sufficiency of Scripture. And there the record stops, and we don't know what then transpired in the further debates about their objection.

All we know is that the final draft exhibited a change, and the words partin, partin, which clearly taught a dual source of special revelation, were crossed out and in their place was the word et, which may or may not mean two separate sources.

The word and here is a little bit ambiguous, isn't it? Because if you said to me, where would you find the Reformed faith? I would say, well you can find it two places. You can find it in the Bible, or you can look at the confessions that appear in church history that try to give a summary of the Reformed doctrine.

As in so far as those creeds are consistent with the Bible, they are repeating it, and it's just another place that you could go to find it. And so the church may have meant simply to say that we find the truth of God first of all in Scripture, and then as it is represented to us in the historic councils or the decrees of the church, that's the other place you can look, which somebody could say and still hold to sola Scriptura.

And now that debate continues to this day among contemporary Roman Catholic scholars as to whether their church is committed to two sources or one. Unfortunately, there are those conservatives in the church who said that the change from partum to partum, from partum partum to et was not a substantive change but merely a stylistic change, and that the church clearly was meaning to affirm in the sixteenth century two sources of written revelation.

Now that debate, though it continues, was more or less settled by a papal encyclical of the twentieth century which unambiguously refers to the two sources of revelation. And that has been the mainstream of thinking within the Roman church since the sixteenth century, that truths that are founded in the tradition of the church are just as binding upon the consciences of believers as the truths of Scripture, whereas in Protestant heritage the principle of semper reformanda is embraced by virtually all Protestants.

That is, the church is always called to undergo reformation and always called to check her own creeds and confessions to make sure that they are in conformity to sacred Scripture. And virtually every Protestant church that has a creed or confession that is unique to their communion will go to great pains to say that their own confessions are not infallible and do not carry the weight of Scripture except insofar as they faithfully reproduce the doctrines of the Scripture because the overarching principle is affirmed, namely that the Bible alone is that written source that has the authority of God Himself, the authority to bind our consciences absolutely.

Lesser Authorities, the Voice of God, and the Inerrancy of Scripture

And though we are called to be submissive to lesser authorities and respectful of other authorities, in my own church I am called to submit to the authority of the presbytery or to the session of the local church.

There are all kinds of levels of authority, and I'm told that if I find inconscience I can no longer genuinely submit that it is my duty to withdraw from that communion peaceably. But otherwise I am not to disturb the peace of the church by acting in direct conflict to the confessions or the government of the church.

And yet at the same time the church says we know our confessions could be wrong and some of the ordinances of our church are possibly incorrect, but this is what we believe to be the true, and as long as you're going to serve here you have this obligation to submit.

It's not that sola scriptura eliminates other authorities, but what it says is there's only one authority that can absolutely bind the conscience, and that authority is sacred Scripture, and that all controversies over doctrine and theology must be settled in the final analysis by Scripture.

Now there are other aspects, as I said, about this sola besides the business of being the only source of written revelation, and second the only authority that can bind absolutely but not the only authority at all, but also involved in this affirmation in the 16th century was a clear affirmation that the Bible is the vox dei or the verbum dei, the Word of God or the voice of God.

Being infallible and inerrant because it comes to us by the superintendence of God the Holy Spirit, that the Bible is inspired in the sense that its author ultimately is God, even though it is transmitted through human writers.

The ultimate source of its truth and of its content comes from God, and God of course is infallible. Human writers in and of themselves are fallible, but the view of historic Protestantism was that God so assisted the weaknesses of our fallen humanity as to preserve the Bible from the corruption that one would normally expect to find from the writings of human beings by His divine superintendence and by the special ministry of the Holy Spirit, and so that even though the Bible comes to us in human words and by human authors, it is considered to be of divine origin.

Now I realize that in light of the dispute in our own day over the infallibility of the Scripture and the inspiration of the Scripture and the inerrancy of the Scripture, words that have engendered all kinds of theological controversy, there have been those who have protested loudly that the very idea of an infallible or inerrant Scripture was not something that was taught and embraced by the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century, but was the result of the intrusion of a kind of Protestant scholasticism that came to pass in the seventeenth century, which is called the age of reason, where these rationalists were so concerned about certainty that they had almost a psychological or emotional need for certainty to such a degree that they invented this concept of inerrancy and infallibility.

Well now that question directly is not a question of whether the Bible is infallible, it's a question of where the doctrine came from. It's a historical question. Is this something that was invented in the seventeenth century or in the sixteenth century?

Let me take a few moments to just read a few quotes to you from the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century and let you decide for yourself. Here are a few observations that I've included in my book that come from the pen of Martin Luther.

Luther says this, quote, The Holy Spirit himself and God the creator of all things is the author of this book. Another quote, Scripture although also written of men is not of men nor from men but from God.

Again, he who would not read these stories in vain must firmly hold that Holy Scripture is not human but divine wisdom. Again, the word must stand for God cannot lie and heaven and earth must go to ruins before the most insignificant letter or tittle of His word remains unfulfilled.

And then he cites Augustine. Saint Augustine says in his letter to Saint Jerome, quote, I have learned to hold only the Holy Scripture inerrant. Now that's not Luther quoting a seventeenth century scholar.

That's Luther quoting Augustine in the end of the fourth century where Augustine says I have learned to hold only the Scripture inerrant. Again he says in the books of Saint Augustine one finds many passages which flesh and blood have spoken.

And concerning myself I must also confess that when I talk apart from the ministry at home, at table or elsewhere, I speak many words that are not God's word. That is why Saint Augustine in a letter to Jerome has put down a fine axiom, that only Holy Scripture is to be considered inerrant.

So we see that Luther hardly hedges. Another passage I could quote from Luther in which he says the Scriptures never err. Now I don't know that Luther ever used the word inerrancy. He just used the word inerrant and said that the Bible never errs, which is the very essence of the concept of inerrancy.

So I think it's a fool's errand to try to argue that the Reformers of the sixteenth century were strangers and foreigners to the idea of the inspiration and the authority and the infallibility and the inerrancy of sacred Scripture.

The Bible in the Vernacular and the Perspicuity of Scripture

But one of the other important points of Sola Scriptura in the sixteenth century, which has become a very important principle for historic evangelicalism, was a hermeneutical principle. The Scriptures, the Reformers not only confessed their view of what the Scriptures are and where they came from, but they also expressed their views on how the Bible is to be interpreted and who has the right and responsibility to read it.

One of the radical things that happened in the Reformation was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, taking it out of the hands of those who were able to read Latin or Greek or Hebrew and putting it in the hands of people who could only read in their native tongues.

As Luther translated the Bible into German and Wycliffe translated the Bible into English and so on, and in some cases the people who did that paid for it with their lives because the principle that was asserted in historic evangelicalism was the principle, first of all, of private interpretation, meaning that every Christian has the right and the responsibility to read the Bible for themselves, and they have the right to interpret it for themselves.

Now that was heard by Rome, as witnessed in the fourth session of Trent, to mean that the Protestants were giving license to the rank and file church member not only to read the Bible for themselves, but to distort it at will.

And, of course, the Reformers were horrified at that idea. They said every Christian has the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, but no Christian ever has the right to misinterpret it or to distort it according to their own whims or their own prejudices.

But the principle was of private interpretation was based upon another principle, which was the principle of the perspicuity of Scripture, which is a three-dollar word for clarity. Now Luther said there are many parts of Scripture that are difficult to handle, and that's why we need teachers in the church and commentaries and all of that.

But that the basic message, that message that is necessary for a person to understand and grasp is plain for any person to see it. And when Luther talked about giving the Bible to the laity, the church said if you do that, that will open up a floodgate of iniquity, because people will start creating all kinds of horrible distortions, which is exactly what happened.

But Luther said if that is the case, and if a floodgate of iniquity is opened by opening the pages of the Bible to people, so be it. But the message that is clear is so important. It contains the message of our salvation.

It is so important and so clear that we'll take the risks of all of the distortions and all of the heresies that go with that to make sure that the central message of Scripture is heard. And as a result of this affirmation of sola Scriptura, the Bible was put into the church, and the reading of the Scriptures and preaching from the Scriptures became central to the liturgy and to the worship of historic Protestantism.