There is an interesting book review of Reformed Baptist’s James White’s version of sola scriptura that can be found here. This book looks like it demonstrates a prime example of the pitfalls one can encounter in the more modern Evangelical movements. The term ”Scripture Alone” has snowballed into this notion that there is no human authority of revealing the gospel to us and that the very text of the Bible is all the authority we need.
This has come to be idolatry today in many Evangelical circles. The Bible can indeed speak to anyone that reads it, but it will not speak to them outside and contrary to what the Church approves of…unless the person has some sort of prophetic gift. Perhaps men like Calvin were modern prophets, in that God revealed to them more than what the current church could swallow. But are all 2 million of today’s Evangelicals on par with Calvin? The idea that we do not need church leaders today as a viable means of God’s revealed Word is just absolutely absurd.
If the Bible should be ”alone” as many say it should be and that man has no part of God’s revealed truth then there can be no teachers within the Church. The Bible can only be read aloud over the pulpit and not expounded upon. Once a man expounds on the Scriptures and reveals dogma he now becomes a part of God’s revelation. This is why Paul the Apostle says that not many should become teachers, and that teachers have stricter judgement. After all they are revealing the very Word of God.
The logical conclusion of today’s Christians that stretch the definition of sola scriptura is that they are all immersed in autonomy, the very antithesis of the gospel. Each one of these people simply cannot give up their individualized authority and so become their own pope. If they do not “agree” with something the Church teaches, rather than researching as to whether or not the Church has taught or teaches that doctrine (looking into all her history) they merely research their personal - usually mental - library, concluding that the teaching is false because they have “never heard” such teachings. But the fact of the matter is that most Christians are not studied enough to make the accusations that they do. Even many seminaries today will not reveal doctrine to a student unless it is in line with that particular denomination, as if all others are heretics!
We must remember that many of the Reformers taught that there was no salvation outside the Church. Even the late Reformers of the Westminster divines taught that there was no ordinary means of salvation outside the Church (WCF XXV:II). The Church has authority to bind and loose, as Christ says in Matthew 16.
The doctrine of sola scriptura is a good doctrine if it is viewed as a polemic for its time and that does indeed have equity for our time, but we must understand the nature of debate in the Medieval times, and how subjects had much more of an internal “combustion.” Many of the prophetic utterances of the Reformation were new to that age and so had to be packaged tightly so as to not dissolve into the heat of the movement. Now that we have hindsight on the Reformational terms, let us take those terms and use them to grow rather than to wallow in.