Sola scriptura
Sola scriptura is a Christian theological doctrine held by most Protestant Christian denominations, in particular the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, that posits the Bible as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice. Sola scriptura is a formal principle of many Protestant Christian denominations, and one of the five solae theorized in the early 20th Century in attempts to characterize common ground in disparate Protestant theologies.
The Catholic Church considers it heresy and generally the Orthodox churches consider it to be contrary to the phronema of the Church. While the scriptures' meaning is mediated through many kinds of subordinate authority—such as the ordinary teaching offices of a church, the ecumenical creeds, councils of the Catholic Church, or even personal special revelation—sola scriptura in contrast rejects any infallible authority other than the Bible.
It was a foundational doctrinal principle of the Protestant Reformation held by many of the Reformers, who taught that authentication of Scripture is governed by the discernible excellence of the text, as well as the personal witness of the Holy Spirit to the heart of each man.
By contrast, the Protestant traditions of Anglicanism, Methodism and Pentecostalism uphold the doctrine of prima scriptura, with scripture being illumined by tradition and reason. The Methodists thought reason should be delineated from experience, though the latter was classically filed under the former and guided by reason, nonetheless this was added, thus changing the "Anglican Stool" to the four sides of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that to "accept the books of the canon is also to accept the ongoing Spirit-led authority of the church's tradition, which recognizes, interprets, worships, and corrects itself by the witness of Holy Scripture". The Catholic Church officially regards tradition and scripture as equal, forming a single deposit, and considers the magisterium as the living organ which interprets said deposit. The Roman magisterium thus serves Tradition and Scripture as "one common source with two distinct modes of transmission", while some Protestant authors call it "a dual source of revelation".
Many Protestants want to distinguish the view that scripture is the only rule of faith with the exclusion of other sources, from the view taught by Luther and Calvin that the scripture alone is infallible, without excluding church tradition in its entirety, viewing them as subordinate and ministerial.
History
is frequently cited by Protestants as a Church Father who espoused the doctrine of sola scriptura. The following is a passage in Augustine's letter to Jerome, which is given as evidence for Augustine's adherence to the notion that Scripture is of a uniquely infallible authority in contrast to the writings of all other men. It is also noteworthy that Augustine attributes his view to Jerome.I admit to your Charity that it is from those books alone of the Scriptures, which are now called canonical, that I have learned to pay them such honor and respect as to believe most firmly that not one of their authors has erred in writing anything at all. If I do find anything in those books which seems contrary to truth, I decide that either the text is corrupt, or the translator did not follow what was really said, or that I failed to understand it. But, when I read other authors, however eminent they may be in sanctity and learning, I do not necessarily believe a thing is true because they think so, but because they have been able to convince me, either on the authority of the canonical writers or by a probable reason which is not inconsistent with truth. And I think that you, my brother, feel the same way; moreover, I say, I do not believe that you want your books to be read as if they were those of Prophets or Apostles, about whose writings, free of all error, it is unlawful to doubt.Protestants also argue that Augustine professes the sufficiency of Scripture in this sentence from On Christian Doctrine, "among the things that are plainly laid down in Scripture are to be found all matters that concern faith and the manner of life".
In the 14th century, Marsilius of Padua believed that the only authority for a Christian is the scriptures, instead of the pope. The same point was made by John Wycliffe who foreshadowed the sola scriptura doctrine in the 14th century.
Johann Ruchrat von Wesel, Wessel Gansfort and Johannes von Goch also foreshadowed the Protestant view of sola scriptura: they viewed the scripture as being the only infallible authority and denied the authority of the pope or the church as infallible. Peter Abelard believed that human reason was a means of understanding the scriptures, instead of submitting to everything the Catholic Church defines.
Some elements of sola-scriptura are also foreshadowed by William of Ockham and Girolamo Savonarola.
Overview
Sola scriptura is one of the five solae, considered by some Protestant groups to be the theological pillars of the Reformation. The key implication of the principle is that interpretations and applications of the scriptures don't have the same authority as the scriptures themselves; hence, the authority of the church is viewed as subject to correction by the scriptures, even by an individual member of the church.Martin Luther, 16th-century friar and figurehead of the Protestant Reformation, stated that "a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it". The intention of the Reformation was thus to correct what he asserted to be the errors of the Catholic Church, by appealing to the uniqueness of the Bible's textual authority. Catholic doctrine is based on sacred tradition, as well as scripture. Sola scriptura rejected the assertion that infallible authority was given to the magisterium to interpret both Scripture and tradition.
Protestants, in their defense say that Sola scriptura does not ignore Christian history, tradition, or the church when seeking to understand the Bible. Rather, it sees the church as the Bible's interpreter, the "rule of faith" embodied in the ecumenical creeds as the interpretive context, and scripture as the only final authority in matters of faith and practice. As Luther said, "The true rule is this: God's Word shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel can do so." But the statement contradicts the practice of such doctrine.
Protestantism
Lutheranism
teaches that the books of the Old and New Testaments are the only divinely inspired books and the only source of divinely revealed knowledge. Scripture alone is the formal principle of the faith in Lutheranism, the final authority for all matters of faith and morals because of its inspiration, authority, clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency.Inspiration
Lutheranism teaches that the Bible does not merely contain the Word of God, but every word of it is, because of verbal inspiration, the word of God. Most Lutheran traditions acknowledge that understanding scriptures is complex given that the Bible contains a collection of manuscripts and manuscript fragments that were written and collected over thousands of years. For example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America teaches that "Lutheran Christians believe that the story of God's steadfast love and mercy in Jesus is the heart and center of what the Scriptures have to say."As Lutherans confess in the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets". The Apology of the Augsburg Confession identifies "Holy Scripture" with the Word of God and calls the Holy Spirit the author of the Bible. Because of this, Lutherans confess in the Formula of Concord, "we receive and embrace with our whole heart the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the pure, clear fountain of Israel".
The prophetic and apostolic Scriptures are said by the Lutheran church to be authentic as written by the prophets and apostles, and that a correct translation of their writings is God's Word because it has the same meaning as the original Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek. A mistranslation is not God's word, and no human authority can invest it with divine authority.
Composition and authority
For early Lutherans, sola scriptura did not mean that all books of the Bible are equal: there is an authoritative first-class subset for dogma: this has been called "the canon within the canon."The phrase "prophetic and apostolic" serves to exclude as sources of dogma those biblical books which do not directly deal with Christ or the Gospel: this may not only exclude the Old Testament Deuterocanonicals but the New Testament antilegomena such as Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, Jude and Revelation.
Early Lutherans used "apostolic" in what has been called a theological rather than historical sense: Luther wrote "what preaches Christ would be apostolic". At one stage of Luther's developing opinion, he rejected the Epistle of James as a foundation of the faith and held that the Book of Revelation was neither prophetic nor apostolic in his terms.
Luther's followers to an extent restored the historical link between authority and canonicity by appealing to ideas of New Testament antilegomena to favour those books deemed to have initially been accepted by all the early churches. Martin Chemnitz listed the first-class books of the Old and New Testament: for Chemnitz "no dogma ought therefore to be drawn out of these books which does not have reliable and clear foundations and testimonies in other canonical books. Nothing controversial can be proved out of these books, unless there are other proofs and confirmations in the canonical books," which moderates or contradicts Luther's general hermeneutic principle "scripture interprets scripture." However, Chemnitz himself had to use antilegomena to justify some anti-Roman positions.
By the early 20th century, Lutheran theologian J.P. Koehler taught that a statement of the homologoumena must not be restricted by a statement taken from the antilegomena. However, conventionally many Lutheran theologians hold that there is no statement in the former that actually contradicts the latter, as a matter of logical necessity or actual examination, making the idea of a canon-within-the-canon moot: Catholic theologians have disputed this. Another contemporary theologian August Pieper wrote that the Lutheran church "wisely failed to determine formally the extent of the New Testament canon" in the sense of not explicitly formalizing the canon-within-the-canon.
According to Lutheran scholars, the so-called apocryphal books of the Old Testament were not written by the prophets, nor by inspiration; they contain errors, were never included in the Palestinian Canon that Jesus was theorized to use, and therefore are not a part of scripture.