It is a truth universally acknowledged that a private university, in want of support from wealthy donors, must be at odds with a sizable portion of its student body.
George Fox, my alma mater, has had its fair share of media coverage for some of the student backlash from administrative decisions. I mean, we have a dry campus, a history of really poorly-handled assault cases, and a “lifestyle policy” that requires abstinence and Chapel attendance, among other things. Did anyone really expect peace?
One of the tamer issues on campus—and one I was actually fairly vocal about within my circles—was how George Fox conducted its Chapel services. Not only were students required to attend (under threat of an actual monetary fine), the services themselves were… mediocre at best, actively heretical at worst. Students had been protesting the way these services were run for years with little progress; but one year, on the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to a church door, a student posted 95 theses of their own to our Chapel doors.
At the time, I had only a small inkling of who Luther was—but just a year later, we would read some of his work in our Great Books program, and I would learn a lot more than I’d bargained for.
Read more: Sola Scriptura | Prepared to Give an Answer
Reading Luther
I should preface this with a quick note: Martin Luther is not some intrinsic villain to the Catholic Church, he’s a brilliant theologian, and I highly respect the vast majority of his work. The 95 Theses were a much-needed wake-up call for the Catholic Church; there was a lot of corruption and, frankly, evil within the Church, and Luther was absolutely right in calling it out.
That said, the longer Luther preached and wrote, the more… bold he grew, in both his criticisms and his theology.
When we hit the Reformation period in our Great Books program, we read the 95 Theses and the responses to them, we read Luther’s “Treatise on Christian Liberty”, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, we read his “Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude”. Suddenly, we were confronted with an entirely foreign opinion:
“I therefore refuse [James] a place among the writers of the true canon of my Bible,” Luther wrote. “I do not hold [the book of James] to be of apostolic authorship.”
Something… wasn’t right there. I learned shortly afterwards that Luther had printed his own Bibles that put the books he considered “disputed” at the end in an appendix—these included James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation. This also included, I learned, a subset of other books called the “Apocrypha,” or the Deuterocanonical books: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Sirach, and Wisdom (as well as some additions to both Esther and Daniel).
Luther had legitimate reasons for separating the Deuterocanonical books—they appeared in the Greek collection of Jewish scriptures, the Septuigent, but not in the original Hebrew collection. For books like James or Hebrews, though… Luther wanted them separated, for the most part, because he disagreed with them theologically.
And then he turned around and put forth Sola Scriptura.
The question demanded to be asked: How can you claim your only authority is Scripture while you’re actively arguing about what Scripture is?
Scripture Alone?
I know I’m running the risk here of grossly misrepresenting Luther’s positions; I can already feel the Lutherans from Twitter crawling out of the walls to correct me. I’ll be the first to say that I’m no Lutheran scholar—but I do know that Luther was highly educated and very much not stupid.
It still didn’t follow for me, though, how Luther could claim Sola Scriptura—that the Christian’s sole authority is Scripture—while arguing that certain books weren’t theologically sound enough to remain a part of the main canon.
If Scripture was his only authority, by what authority was he essentially editing Scripture? I couldn’t figure it out.
There are all sorts of arguments for and against Sola Scriptura out there; the internet is littered with articles, podcasts, and YouTube debates on the subject. I spent a long time consuming as many of them as I could, learning all about the origins of Biblical canon, the many councils it was debated at, the Septuigent, what Catholics meant by “Sacred Tradition”—but none of it truly stuck. I think maybe I didn’t want it to. After all, there was only one group who didn’t adhere to that particular Sola—and it wasn’t the Protestants.
But then I found the turning point I never wanted in a single sentence from Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid, re-worded here:
If the Bible is our only authority, but the Bible never states that Scripture is to be our only authority, saying it is our only authority is already imposing an external authority.
It was a self-defeating argument.
I’m fairly certain I paused the interview to just.. process. Madrid was absolutely right. There was nothing to be done. The common verses appealed to in defense of Sola Scriptura didn’t work here—verses like the famous 2 Timothy “all Scripture is God-breathed…” didn’t prove anything. All they said was that Scripture was from God, not that it was the only thing from God.
Pretty much against my will, I could no longer say I believed in the “Scripture Alone” view of Biblical authority. I also had no idea where this left me.
If I didn’t believe the Bible was our only authority… what else was? There was no way that some guy dressed in white living at the Vatican was the only answer—I wasn’t going to touch that for quite a while. There was also no way that I’d ever believe that the Bible didn’t have intrinsic and imperative authority—arguing that the Bible never declared itself a sole authority was nowhere near believing Christians weren’t still bound to follow all of its teachings.
But despite that… I knew I couldn’t honestly defend Luther’s doctrine of Sola Scriptura. It changed very little about my faith at the time—there was no other authority I submitted to, so I still lived with Scripture as my sole authority—but it left cracks in my foundation.
If I didn’t have Sola Scriptura, what would defend me against the claims certain other churches made about authority?
If I didn’t have Sola Scriptura… what would defend me against the Pope?
As it turned out, there were far more historical and scriptural arguments to be picked through before I got anywhere near understanding the Papacy, much less (spoiler alert) deciding to submit to it. But the damage was done—a huge barrier had just been removed, and I couldn’t go back.
So—sorry, Martin. You’re brilliant… but I guess I love James’s epistle too much to agree with you here. 🙂
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