Sola Scriptura is Not Solo Scriptura
In understanding the Reformation commitment to Sola Scriptura, it has become increasingly necessary to distinguish this truth from the distorted error of Solo Scriptura – an error that Rome wrongly attributes to the Reformers but also, ironically, an error that many Protestants have ended up adopting! Simply put, Sola Scriptura holds that Scripture is the final and ultimate authority in interpretation even though there are many other lesser and still helpful authorities in understanding and protecting truth (traditions, creeds, the church fathers, etc.). The Bible as God’s Word alone is the norming Norm and alone can lay claim to being God’s special revelation to man but we can still make use of other uninspired authorities like creeds and confessions. Solo Scriptura argues that the Bible is the only authority and no other authorities should count; in fact, creeds and confessions and long-standing interpretive traditions should be rejected for raw, individualistic readings of the Scripture. Thus, Solo Scriptura is an erroneous distortion of what the Reformers understood as Sola Scriptura. Like many other essential doctrines, a lot hangs on the difference of one little letter.
The heartbeat of Sola Scriptura is the conviction that Scripture is the ultimate and final epistemological and moral authority over the church. This conviction, of course, came out of the Reformation’s desire to return to the true worship of God as commanded in Scripture as well as a true understanding of the Gospel itself as revealed in Scripture. And yet, the Reformers understood that the church, guided by the Spirit, has a long history in defending and articulating truth – truth established by Scripture but forged and written down in other writings that are themselves not Scripture.
The language of Sola Scriptura certainly became explicit in the Reformation, but the debate over epistemological and moral authorities – be it Scripture, nature, tradition, or the Roman Magisterium – was being waged well before Luther’s famous apology that, “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”[1]
The debate, in the language of Medieval and Reformation scholar Heiko Oberman, was split between two main “Traditions” – Tradition I and Tradition II. Tradition I was the idea that God gives special revelation through one source, the Scriptures, and from out of that single source a general tradition of interpretation and orthodoxy will arise within the church. This was the view of most of the church fathers, Irenaeus being a good example.[2] “The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith…”[3] In other words, what the Apostles wrote down to become our New Testament, and what their disciples then handed down to the church in terms of how the church has received, interpreted, and applied those writings – that is Tradition I. The interpretive reception – that is, the Rule of Faith which developed over centuries within the growing church – it certainly mattered and served as a protection against fringe misinterpretations and heretical teachings, but that rule of faith was not itself a second source of revelation. And therefore it was not and is not as authoritative as Scripture itself. Tradition only helped to safeguard the deposit of truth handed down from the Apostles.
Keith Mathison helpfully puts it this way concerning Tradition I: “The sole source of divine revelation and the authoritative doctrinal norm was understood to be the Old Testament together with the Apostolic doctrine, which itself had been put into writing in the New Testament. The Scripture was to be interpreted in and by the church within the context of the regula fidei (“rule of faith”), yet neither the church nor the regula fidei were considered second supplementary sources of revelation. The church was the interpreter of the divine revelation in Scripture, and the regula fidei was the hermeneutical context, but only Scripture was the Word of God.”[4]
It was this Tradition I which was recovered and strengthened in the Reformations understanding of Sola Scriptura. Tradition matters. It’s not to be sidelined as unimportant; in fact, it should be used with wisdom and even applied authoritatively. Just about every Reformer, while seeking to subject all arguments to Scripture alone did not just use Scripture alone – they quoted and made extensive use of the church fathers, major creeds, medieval doctors, and so on. This was the Rule of Faith (the interpretive conclusions arrived at by the church like creeds and confessions) that, to the Reformers, still served as a protective guard to orthodoxy. And though these interpretations may not be inspired and inerrant like Scripture is, and at many points needed to be challenged against Scripture, they were still a helpful guidepost for protecting truth.
And so, where Rome went wrong was that overtime it began to exult the interpretive tradition of the church to something higher than was originally intended, making tradition itself not only on the same level as Scripture but, in fact, a second source of Special Revelation. This is Tradition II. Thus the Council of Trent, in its Fourth Session, can state: the Gospel “before promised through the prophets in the holy Scriptures, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, first promulgated with His own mouth, and then commanded to be preached by His Apostles to every creature, as the fountain of all, both saving truth, and moral discipline; and seeing clearly that this truth and discipline are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions… (the Synod) following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety, and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament – seeing that one God is the author of both – as also the said traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals, as having been dictated, either by Christ’s own word of mouth, or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession” (emphasis mine).[5]
The Reformers rightly denied this. Luther, in response to Cardinal Cajetan, could exclaim, “The truth of Scripture comes first. After that is accepted one may determine whether the words of men can be accepted as true.”[6] Of course, the response lobbed back against Luther and the other Reformers was that the floodgate of interpretive anarchy had been opened and unleashed. If every man, unmoored from the Spirit-guided teaching of the church and its inspired traditions, was left free to interpret the Scriptures for himself, then the church would be plagued with an uncurable cancer of disunity and heresy. It’s not for nothing that Brad Gregory blames the Protestant Reformation for “contemporary Western hyperpluralism with respect to truth claims about meaning, morality, values, priorities, and purpose.”[7] The Protestant Reformers were, in the minds of Roman Catholics, radically reducing the church’s reception of the Apostolic faith to every man and his Bible. Not Sola Scriptura but Solo Scriptura.
Sadly, during the 19th century, this is exactly the wrong move that many Anglo-American protestants made! Keith Mathison explains, “In America during the eighteenth century, this individualistic view of the radical Reformation was combined with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the populism of the new democracy to create a radical version [now referred to as] Tradition 0 that has all but supplanted the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura (Tradition 1). This new doctrine, which may be termed “solo” Scriptura instead of sola Scriptura, attacks the rightful subordinate authority of the church and of the ecumenical creeds of the church.”[8]
Solo Scriptura (Tradition 0) has now, unfortunately, supplanted Sola Scriptura (Tradition I) as the majority report with Protestant evangelicalism.Just like the end of every Scooby-Doo episode when then true villain is finally identified after the Mystery gang take of the villain’s mask, so it is that Tradition 0 has been wearing the mask of Sola Scriptura, but underneath his true identity is finally revealed: Solo Scriptura. It his high time that more and more confessionally evangelical churches unmask this error and reclaim the truly Reformed position of Sola Scriptura: the Scriptures alone as our highest measure of inspired truth while still making use of other true and helpful traditions, confessions, and creeds. The early reformed orthodox theologian Girolamo Zanchi perhaps says it best:
“Although the Holy Scriptures are perspicuous in those things that are necessary for salvation, we nevertheless do not reject the interpretations and explications of devout men who are both learned and skillful, whether they are ancient or more recent, namely, their interpretations and explanations that are pursued on the basis of those same Holy Scriptures and insofar as the Scriptures are explained by the Scriptures and in accordance with the first foundations of the faith (1 Thess. 5:21). The sum of these is contained in the Apostles’ Creed as well as in the creeds of the truly ancient and holy ecumenical councils convened against prominent heretics.”[9]
[1] In Luther’s 1520 “An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as to the Amelioration of the State of Christendom,” he probes the question further as to why the Pope’s interpretation of Scripture must be accepted as the only right interpretation in the face of so many other interpretations? “The Romanists profess to be the only interpreters of Scripture, even though they never learn anything contained in it their lives long.” Martin Luther, “An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as to the Amelioration of the State of Christendom,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor, 1962), 412.
[2] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Brazos Press, 2016), p. 118-119
[3] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1 (translation from Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:330)
[4] Keith Mathison, “Solo Scriptura”, in Modern Reformation, May 2, 2007 – https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/solo-scriptura
[5] https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/fourth-session.htm
[6] Martin Luther, Acta Augustana (1518), Luther’s Works 31:282
[7] Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press, 2015), p. 377 – found in Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel, p. 11-12.
[8] Keith Mathison, “Solo Scriptura”, in Modern Reformation, May 2, 2007 – https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/solo-scriptura
[9] Girolamo Zanchi, Confession of the Christian Religion, translated by Patrick J. O’Banion (Reformation Heritage Press, 2025), p. 49
