Sola Scriptura?

Question

I've heard the claim that tradition is equal with scripture and the early christians didnt have the benefit of a completed Bible so tradition lived on outside of the Bible
Q: If that tradition was so important why didnt those same people put writings, that backup those traditions, into the Bible when it was being assembled?
ex: Mary's sinless state, her bodily assumption - praying to dead saints
the scriptural references now claimed for these are very weak at best

Answer 1

VERY Good point ....in fact those traditions were NOT in place in the early church but were added later by the Catholic Church AFTER the Canon was completed....

Rejection of Sola Scriptura ( Scripture only as basis of truth) erroneously leads one to believe continuous new doctrines can be devloped by the Church.....and is very dangerous.

Answer 2

Your not understanding sacred tradition. Sacred Tradition and sacred scripture cannot be separated. It is only together that they give us the fulness of faith. How can this be? Simple: the practice of handing down the Faith in the old testatment days was primarily by oral means. Jesus, Himself, was a jew and taught in this very same manner. Remember, Jesus never wrote a book or anything. He taught orally and by His life.

In the same manner, the apostles preserved the faith in the same way (they were Jewish also). It wasn't until the Church began to grow that they saw the need to write these teachings down to defend against heresy, protect and preserve them, and construct a more uniform method of handing down the Faith. These are seen in the letters of Saint Paul, John, Peter, and so forth.

It's like this: the Faith was passed on orally and in written form. If you separate one from the other you lose the Faith. This is why when examining our Christian history and how we received our Faith, you discover that Sola Scriptura guts 400 years of Christian history.

I think the problem is we modern Christians have just assumed that the Bible was always there because we've always had it, but the truth is that at one point we had no New Testament (for four centuries). Ask yourself, without a bible, how did the early Christians preserve and keep the Faith?

God bless.

Answer 3

Most bible scholars agree that isolated scripture without two or three witnesses (other canonized passages) can give a distorted doctrine.
For example, the trinity is well established in both the old and new testaments, not in name, but in inference.
The 'founding of the church in Peter' is an example of an isolated scripture, the meaning, I believe, is inferring the confession of Peter, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

I am a firm believer in Sola Scriptura.

Answer 4

Because the Bible was never intended to be a complete summary of all Christian beliefs. In fact, from the writers' perspective, their writings were never intended to be part of a book. They simply wrote letters to various Christian communities as needs dictated, and gospels recording some of Christ's teaching and activities. The Church, 350 years later, decided to bind some of these pre-existing writings of the Apostles into a book, and whatever they had written was what went into the book. There was no attempt to create a complete volume of the teachings of Christ and the beliefs of the Christian Church. The only intent was to preserve certain particularly important writings of the early Church, specifically those which could be identified as divinely inspired.

The true Church doesn't need scriptural references to "back up" its teaching. The True Church taught the fullness of Christian truth for many years before a word of the New Testament was ever written, and long before the Bible itself was compiled. And it would have continued to do so whether those texts had ever been written or not, and whether they had ever been gathered into a book or not. The Bible is certainly useful, a fact which is stated in the Bible itself, but strictly speaking it is not necessary for the fullness of Christian truth. That was given to the Church long before the Bible existed, which is how some of it got into the Bible in the first place. The True Church received the fullness of truth directly from its founder, Jesus Christ. Everything Christ said was the Word of God from the moment He said it, whether it was later written down or not, because Christ is God. Christ didn't give us any written materials at all, only oral Tradition. The Apostles went out and preached the Word of God that they had heard preached to them, not what they had read in a book. Years later, when they wrote down some of this teaching, it remained the Word of God; but it didn't become the Word of God when they wrote it down. Likewise, whatever parts of the Word of God they didn't write down still remained the Word of God. This unwritten teaching is what is known as Apostolic Tradition. Therefore Apostolic Tradition (not mere "traditions", which all churches have) and Scripture, that is, unwritten Tradition and written Tradition, are both the Word of God, and therefore are equal in value and equal in authority, and there can never be any conflict between them. Truth cannot conflict with truth, and the Word of God cannot conflict with itself.
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Answer 5

Yet there are so many sacred traditions that are completely explained in the Bible and yet Sola Scripturaists completely ignore them?

Hail Mary full of Grace, Full of Grace IS the same as Sinless!

This IS my body, he did not say this is a REPRESENTATION of my body.

The installment of Peter, you have the keys to heaven and the forces of evil shall not prevail against it, what you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Not direct quotes from scripture, but you get the idea!

Google miracle of the Eucharist, interesting read....

Peace and God Bless!

Answer 6

The simple fact is, all those things were common knowledge to the early Chrisians, and nobody ever dreamed that in the future, anyone would deny the God-given authority of the only church Jesus ever founded, in order to justify following only the very limited dictates of a holy book that was produced by the very same church.

How can anyone presume to know exactly why the sacred writers chose to write, or why God told them to write precisely what they did?

As for Mary's bodily assumption, the event was experienced by a number of the apostles. And since God would not allow his son's flesh to see corruption, and Jesus' flesh was made from Mary's flesh, the assumption of Mary makes perfect sense.

The following Psalm applies truthfully to both Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God, and Mary, who now sits at the right hand of her divine son.

Psa 16:8 I set the Lord always in my sight: for he is at my right hand, that I be not moved.
Psa 16:9 Therefore my heart hath been glad, and my tongue hath rejoiced: moreover, my flesh also shall rest in hope.
Psa 16:10 Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; nor wilt thou give thy holy one to see corruption.
Psa 16:11 Thou hast made known to me the ways of life, thou shalt fill me with joy with thy countenance: at thy right hand are delights even to the end.

If you were God, would you abandon your mother's body to the corruption of the grave, and to desecration by the forces of evil?