Sola Scriptura: trying this again?

Question

In the verses below we are told scripture can perfect us for every good work. So we can be prepared for every good work by scripture. Not some good works but every good work. So if the Bible can prepare us for every good work why do we need more? And before you say this was written before the NT was finished or the Bible compiled. Remember God is omnipotent and omniscient. He knew the Bible would be compiled and what would be in it. Thus when He inspired this verse He knew we would have the Bible and apply it to it. So my question is if the Bible equips us for every good work as it says it does why do we need more?

2Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
2Ti 3:17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

Why do we need traditions? Especially oral traditions?

Dillon C - some tradition is based upon scripture. Not all of it.

Pastor Billy - Once again you do not read everything. While Timothy may only have had the OT. While Paul may have thought that was all he was referring to. God who knows all including the future knew we would have the Bible when He inspired this verse. Thus your argument does not hold water.

rt66lt - Ever think maybe He tried and they refused to listen?

cristoiglesia - You strike me as a smart person so why make the stupid argument about the Bible not existing for 200 years? The apostles were writing within 20-30 years of Jesus' death. While a church might not of had every book of the Bible they had parts of the NT.

cristoiglesia - Also it says all scripture not each individual scripture by itself. Quite frankly this verse says the Bible can prepare us for every good work. Thus we need nothing else but what is contained in the Bible.

Answer 1

It is far more important to follow the Word of God than human traditions.

Answer 2

I believe that you are forgetting that the Church preceded the Bible by several hundred years and that the Bible is the product of the Church. The Bible itself says in St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians that we are to hold fast to both that which is written and that which is taught by Word.
Besides for one to believe the heresy of Sola Scriptura one would have to understand the written Word correctly. The Bible says that every Scripture is sufficient, so following Protestant interpretation this would mean that only John 3:16 vis sufficient or the Gospel of Matthew. Some would say that the epistles of St. Paul is sufficient. So does it make sense to say sola St. Matthew or Sola St. Paul. Of course not, so the chair passage that Protestants rest on is no support at all for Sola Scriptura. Protestants use these Scriptures that they claim support for this heresy but can only support their man made doctrine with eisegesis.

In Christ
Fr. Joseph

Edge,

Actually in the Greek it says that "each" Scripture is sufficient. This is a well known translation error that you are taking as support for your argument. Don't take my word for it, I am just a professor of early Church history and biblical languages, check it out for yourself.

The Bible did not exist as a rule of faith until it was canonized by the Church at the African Synods in the late fourth century and early fifth century. Until then there were a whole host of writings circulating through the Church. Most of them were uninspired work or heretical works such as apocryphal writings like the Gospel of Thomas which was Gnostic in origin. It was the Church through the leadership of apostolic succession that taught what works were suitable for teaching and which were not. But, until the Synods there was no universal agreement on which works were actually inspired. All apocryphal books were banned shortly after the African Synods by Pope St. Gelasius and many have disappeared as a result but some are still circulated to this day as the so called "lost books of the Bible".

So, it took centuries for what we have as the Bible today to become part of the "regula fidei" of the Church.

Answer 3

A council made the final decision on the New Testament. While I don't agree with the Da Vinci Code crowd, the canon of the New Testament wasn't so easily decided. Pretty much most of what we have was decided by Christians in general as the early Church grew.

By the Fourth Century, it stood close to what we have, but the early Church Fathers debated over six final books. Revelation and Hebrew were almost omitted; Barnabas, I Clement, the Shephard of Hermas, and the Didache were almost included. It took the council to finally decide the fate of those six books.

If what you are saying is true, does that mean that people who claim God communicates to them are liars or misguided? If God can communicate with individuals, why would he not communicate with people in the Catholic Church?

Answer 4

The issue is time.

The Catholics claim that they gave the world the Bible (how generous). They claim that no New Testament existed or was widely used until they created it. So according to them from the time of the apostles until the creation of the New Testament was over 200 years. So their logic says, "If there was no Bible, then Apostolic Tradition is the Authority in the Churches".

History proves, that there were so many copies and trasnlations of scripture that Augustine and others complained about it. The Fathers of the church collective writings can be used to create most of the New Testament.

The Old Italia (latin trasnlation dating from 120 A.D.) was the Bible of the non-catholic churches down to the time of the printing press. A romantic language called Occitanian or Languadoc developed from it.

There are about 5,000 greek manuscripts from the Byzantine (Greece) line still preserved as hand copies for us today.

It is very simple. The Catholics have always de-emphasized the role of scripture. They have always actively striven to keep the Word of God out of believers hands by burning or hiding the Bible from people.

The ancient churches always valued the Bible. When Peter refers to Paul's letters as scripture, how did his large audience in Turkey & Greece even know what he was talking about? Simple, they had read and distributed these letters.

The truth is that copying, translating, studying, preaching, and living according to the New Testament writings was the central effort of the ancient churches. In modern "New Testament" churches this tradition continues.

In Pagan/Christian churches, the tradition of de-emphasizing the scripture and the True Word of God also continues.

Answer 5

Pastor Billy says: Edge try reading the verses prior to 2Tim3:15, heck read the entire chapter. If you wish to make these verses support your position you'll have to throw out your entire New Testament and use only the Old Testament because Paul clearly talks to Timothy on the scriptures of his...youth the New Testament wasn't completed or assembled yet. If Sola Scriptura were at all provable from these verses you'd have to saw your bible in half.

addendum: I did read all remember Paul is also reminding Timothy on interpretation "from whom" he received his teaching. Not everyone with scripture in hand is your teacher, the Church is made up of elders, evangelists, teachers etc etc.. not everyone is called to teach or even annointed to do so. The ministrial priesthood is required to deligate this task just as Paul was doing here with Timothy. This letter is what is known as a "pastorial" epistle. It wasn't written to the general Church as a "Catholic" epistle although we now use it as such being in the canon of scripture.

Edge remember CONTEXT lad.

addendum#2: contrary to what our buddy Realchurch-yada-yada has just written, the Roman Catholic Church doesn't claim to originate as the One Church with a founding in the city of Roma. Neither does it claim Latin is it's only language and first language. Latin is the language of primarily the Western rite of the Church and of course the offical language of the Vatican, there are however some additional 20+ rites which form the Eastern rites of the Catholic Church and they are all in full communion with the bishop of Rome, the pope as the physical head of all Christian churches. Be mindful I'm not talking about our separated brothers the Eastern Orthodox here. Learn about the Melkites, try doing a google search on Peter and Paul Melkite Church and see what comes up. These ancient Middle Eastern Christians primarily from Lebannon never separated from unity with the bishop of Rome.
Roman Catholicism didn't start in the city of Rome it started in the city of Jerusalem in the Roman Empire.

please see the following link for Greek Catholics who would use Greek in their liturgy and text http://www.byzantines.net/

Realchurch buddy is simply lazy or he would have already known even the Western Catholics use Greek texts and look to the ancient fragments of Christian scripture called codexs

Would someone advise Nina we aren't discussing any "traditions of men" you'd think that false dicotomy of pitting scripture against the Church would finally end. Ah well the cliches they teach these proddie evangelists today tiresome as they are I guess they are easy to remember must be taught for the retention value.

Answer 6

Yeah but do you realize that when Timothy was written the bible as we have it today did not exist?

By scripture they meant the Jewish scriptures. The Torah, the Tanach, etc.

Nothing in the New Testament would have been considered scripture to the writer of Timothy.

Sure God may have known things but Timothy didn't.

Answer 7

Hello you are forgetting that tradition is based on scripture.

Not all of it?

Like What?

Answer 8

More WHAT? Christ is the AUTHOR & FINISHER of our faith,,,---,,, so then --MORE WHAT??!!!!

Answer 9

more what?

Answer 10

The Bible itself says that it is not complete and states the importance of apostolic tradition.

In the first place we must ask whether the Bible alone was ever meant by God to be the one and only authentic source of doctrine for Christians. No question here arises as to the truth of what is contained in the Bible. If a Protestant declares it to be the inspired Word of God, containing the "untold beauties and glories of Christ," no instructed Catholic would dream of disagreeing with him. Difficulty arises only when the claim is made that the Bible is complete, simple, and clear, telling us all that we need to know as regards doctrines to be believed and all that we need to do in order to conduct ourselves as Christians should throughout our lives in this world.

From the outset, for those willing to think into this matter, the claim that the Bible is a complete guide creates an insuperable problem owing to the fact that it expressly declares that it is not complete. All that is in the Bible is true, but not all that is true is to be found written within it. Christ commanded his apostles to teach mankind "all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:20). Yet St. John concludes his Gospel by saying, "There are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written" (John 21:25).

One who declares that the Bible by itself is a complete guide is therefore professing a doctrine not only not contained in the Bible, but one at variance with it. In the last analysis, we cannot escape the conclusion that he is but voicing a purely human and Protestant tradition, strongly as he may protest against the reliability of any tradition.

Again, the claim that the Bible is simple is negatived by the Bible itself. Far from supporting that idea St. Peter, in speaking of St. Paul's epistles, declares that in them there are "things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction" (2 Pet. 3:16). That does not sound as if the Bible were so simple.

Finally, if the Bible were indeed clear, how can we account for the fact that Protestants who have taken it as their only authentic guide have so failed to agree among themselves as to what it means that they have split up into over four hundred different and conflicting sects?
What did Christ intend?

It can be said here, a thought to which we shall return later, that the man who declares that he accepts only the Bible as his authority in religious matters does not really mean it. For he really believes in what he himself thinks any given passage of the Bible to mean, which might not be what the Bible means at all. For such a person, the only ultimate authority in religious matters is not that of the Bible, but that of his own judgment concerning it, and he has no assurance that his own judgment is any more reliable than that of others whose interpretation differs from his and who honestly believe his interpretation to be quite mistaken.

I mention this here merely to bring out the fact that the Catholic position is not affected by such difficulties. For it holds that Christ never intended the Bible alone to be each man's "guide book" to religious truth. His method was to establish a Church authorized by him to teach mankind in his name. He chose his apostles, trained them, and commissioned them to go and to teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, "teaching them all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:20). He did not tell them to write any books. No books of the New Testament were written until years after his death.

But the first Christians were not without guidance. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that they "were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles" (Acts 2:42). Christ, therefore, meant the official teaching of the apostles and of their successors in the Church to be our guide, not the written Bible which is so liable to misinterpretation by its various individual readers, however sincere they may be. The Bible, as the very Word of God, is true in itself, but not all the conclusions people choose to draw from it are necessarily right. And this brings us to a further and very vital point of divergence between the position of Protestants generally and that of the Catholic Church.
"Private interpretation"

Apart from the question of the adequacy or inadequacy of the Bible, the problem of its interpretation is one of the first importance. It can have authority for us as the Word of God only provided we rightly grasp exactly what God intended to say. No meanings other than those he intended to be read into the text by men have any divine authority at all.

It has been said that once one admits that the Bible contains the revelation of God himself, then we have to admit that no man can go wrong if he is guided by it. If he were really guided by it, that would of course be true, at least as regards that part of divine revelation which has been recorded in its pages. But the trouble is that a man can wrongly think he is being guided by the Bible when in reality he is not, owing to his having misunderstood it. And is it not true, passing over for the moment the fact that for over a thousand years before the invention of the printing press it was impossible for each man to have a Bible, that when universal distribution became possible sincere and earnest Bible readers arrived at a multitude of conflicting conclusions? If private interpretation were God's way, the same Holy Spirit would have led all confiding in his assistance to one and the same truth.

Against these considerations, the command of Christ has been urged that we "search the Scriptures" (John 5:39). But the thousands of well-intentioned Protestants who have quoted those words as if indeed they were a command have been led astray by the translation in the Protestant Authorized Version of the Bible, a translation which has been corrected in the Protestant Revised Version to "You search the Scriptures." Christ was stating a fact, not giving a command. He was addressing a group of Jews and blaming them for not recognizing him as the fulfillment of all that the Scriptures had predicted about him. The . . . Protestant Revised Standard Version describes him as saying, "You do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe him whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me."

As a matter of fact, the whole passage is fatal to the contention that by searching the Scriptures one will necessarily arrive at the truth. The very ones to whom Christ was speaking had searched the Scriptures in the sincere belief that by such means they would learn all that was necessary for eternal life. Christ acknowledged that they really thought in such a way. And yet they had not arrived at the truth!
"Bible its own interpreter"

A way out of these difficulties was thought to be found in the contention that the Bible, as no other book can boast, is its own interpreter. After all, it was urged, since the Bible contains the inspired Word of the infinite God, no interpretation of it by any finite mind could possibly do it justice. We must therefore hold that the Word of God interprets itself to each sincere reader of the Bible.

It is really impossible, though, to maintain such a position. Although sacred Scripture is inspired by the "infinite God," we cannot escape accepting the interpretation placed upon it by finite minds. After all, Scripture must mean something. To declare that meaning is to interpret it. And as human beings have only finite minds, they must either rely on meanings derived from it by their finite minds or refuse to attribute any meaning to Scripture at all.

No book, even one inspired by God, can be its own interpreter, and the very suggestion that the Bible is self-interpreting is opposed to its own teaching. For not only does the Bible nowhere claim to be "its own interpreter," it declares the very opposite. Thus we read in the Acts of the Apostles that, when Philip found the Ethiopian reading the Bible, he said to him, "Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?" The man replied, "And how can I, unless some man show me?" Then Philip, in the name of the Church, interpreted the Scriptures for him (Acts 8:27-39).

Writing to Timothy, St. Paul tells him that it is the Church of the living God which is "the pillar and the ground of truth" (1 Tim. 3:15). Again, he tells him, as a bishop of that Church, to "keep the good thing committed to thy trust by the Holy Ghost...Preach the word...reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine" (2 Tim. 1:14, 3:2). What does that mean but to interpret Scripture correctly and insist on the acceptance of the true interpretation declared in the name of the Church wherever it is a question of such doctrines as are contained in the Bible? The choice, then, is between interpretations proposed by unauthorized and fallible human minds and those of an authorized and infallible teacher in this world if such exists. The Bible contains the truth, but not everyone, even with the best of good will, is able to discern the truth it contains.

The Bible needs an authoritative teacher to explain its meaning in innumerable passages if misunder-standings are to be avoided. If a teacher is needed in schools to explain the text-books dealing with the mysteries of nature itself, how much more necessary is a teacher to explain the mysteries of divine revelation contained in Holy Scripture! The Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church alone, claims to be the divinely-appointed and infallible teacher at hand for this purpose, and hers is the only truly biblical position.
"Holy Spirit speaks"

Lacking faith in the Catholic Church and not finding her claims acceptable, Protestants go on to declare that even if the Bible as a book cannot be its own interpreter, at least the Holy Spirit is infallible, and he can render each reader infallible in his interpretations provided he has faith in Christ and is prepared to rely entirely upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But if each sincere reader of the Bible is rendered infallible by the Holy Spirit in discerning the meaning God intended to reveal, what is this but to claim for each believer an infallibility before which the much more modest claims of Catholics to one infallible pope pale into insignificance!

But descending from the ideal plane to that of the real, is it not astonishing that millions of would-be infallible readers of the Bible are not dismayed by the fact that they arrive at a multitude of mutually-exclusive conclusions? Results in practice make it almost a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit has anything to do with such a host of contradictory interpretations.

Just consider the multitude of different Protestant churches which have been established in accordance with the immense variety of opinions arising from the private interpretation of Holy Scripture! Thus we have Lutherans and Calvinists, Anglicans and Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and the host of more recent sects, such as the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Witnesses of Jehovah, and an almost unending list of others, each claiming to be based upon the Bible.

The height of absurdity is reached by such extravagances as those of the Kentucky snake cults whose members believe they can be bitten at will by poisonous reptiles without any ill-effects, thinking their practice to be justified by a passage in St. Mark's Gospel: "They shall take up serpents...and it shall not hurt them" (Mark 16:18).

In reality, they base their practice on their own wrong interpretation of those words. Christ did not say that the miraculous sign he promised would be always operative for everybody. Among the signs shown by his followers sometimes even such things as being unharmed by serpents could be expected. But always it would be a miracle wrought by God when God willed, not a kind of magic within the power of deluded people when they willed. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that St. Paul was bitten by a viper and that God preserved him from harm (Acts 28:5). But St. Paul was not guilty of presumption, deliberately allowing himself to be bitten and then challenging God to protect him--a form of presumption which our Lord expressly condemned (Luke 4:12).

When the devil told Christ to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, quoting Scripture to show that no harm would come to him, our Lord replied, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God" (Matt. 4:7). Men have not the right to dare God to do even what they think, rightly or wrongly, that God has promised to do.

Even in the earliest years of the Protestant Reformation, during the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare made Bassanio say, "In religion, what damned error, but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text" (Merchant of Venice, III:2). But it is doubtful whether Shakespeare himself foresaw such grotesque outbreaks resulting from the so-called principle of private judgment as those of the Kentucky snake cults!

What has to be noticed, however, is that such fantastic cults are the effect of the same principle as that claimed for themselves by the more sedate and respectable Protestant denominations which reject the authority of the Catholic Church and declare that they have the right to be guided by their own individual interpretations of Holy Scripture.
Bible and reunion of churches

There is a growing consciousness of the evil of all these divisions among Protestants today. They pay much more attention than they once did to the prayer of Christ "that they all may be one as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee" (John 17:21). More and more we hear them speaking about "the sin of our disunity." But the astonishing thing is that they still believe that the only thing needed to bring about unity is for all men to take up the study of one and the same Bible for themselves. This is merely to propose as a remedy for their divisions the very thing that caused them in the first place.

A few years ago a series of letters on this very subject appeared in the British Spectator. Toward the conclusion of the correspondence a most significant comment was sent in by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe, of the Rationalist Press Association--by a man, therefore, who, far from being a Catholic, repudiates all belief in the Christian religion. Here is what he wrote [March 30, 1951] to the editor of the Spectator:

"Sir: I felt sure someone would write to you in answer to the astonishing suggestion of W. L. C. Bond that more intense study of the Bible would lead to a reunion of all the Christian sects. As no one seems to have done so, may I point out that it was precisely Bible-reading which created this disunion? As soon as people were allowed to interpret the Scriptures according to their own fancies, prejudices, or craziness, a great many sects were formed, and the unity of Western Christendom, which had prevailed until the sixteenth century, was broken forever.To suppose it could be restored by further doses of the poison which killed it is fantastic."

Not for a moment does the citation of that letter imply approval of the unbelief of so-called "rationalists." But this particular rationalist has seen at least how inevitably divisions must result from the Protestant principle of the private interpretation of the Bible.
Catholic Attitude

In the light of all this, surely it is not difficult to understand the objections of the Catholic Church to the idea that each reader individually should constitute himself an independent judge as to the meaning of the Bible. As I have suggested earlier, this is practically to claim that each reader is rendered infallible by the Holy Spirit as often as he devotes himself earnestly to the reading of Holy Scripture, a claim far in excess of any claim made by Catholics even for that one man only, the pope, whose infallibility is exercised on isolated occasions only and within the limits of the most exacting conditions.

Even Bernard Shaw was fully alive to this aspect of the subject. "Perhaps," he wrote, in the preface to his play Saint Joan, "I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous dogma of papal infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he clearly has more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final."

What, then, does the Catholic Church say? She permits and encourages the private reading of Scripture. But she says definitely that no one has the right to interpret the Bible for himself in any way opposed to the official teachings of the Catholic Church. Passing over the fact that the majority of people lack the required training in the many different sciences bearing upon scriptural interpretation necessary even for a merely natural understanding of the Bible, we have to reckon with the positive provision made by Christ for our instruction in his religion.

The Bible itself tells us that "no prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation" (2 Pet. 1:20). It tells us that Christ established and guaranteed his Church, that he commissioned that Church to "teach all nations" (Matt. 28:19) in his name, and that he said of it, "he that heareth you, heareth me" (Luke 10:16), and also, "If a man will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen" (Matt. 18:17). No wonder St. Paul declared the "Church of the living God" to be "the pillar and the ground of truth" (1 Tim. 3:15).

That, then, is the Catholic position. Christ never made his religion dependent upon each individual's private interpretation of the Bible. His infinite wisdom would not choose a method which would lead, and has led, as we have seen, to division, chaos, and driftage from religion altogether. He established the Catholic Church, and that Church can say with her divine Master to those who profess to believe in the Bible that the very Scriptures upon which they claim to rely bear witness of her (John 5:39). She is the appointed guide to which, in obedience to Christ, we Catholics submit.

Speaking of the sixteenth-century Reformers, the eminent Congregationalist Scripture scholar, Professor C. H. Dodd, says, "In placing the Bible at the disposal of the uninstructed they took a fateful step. It could now be read, and was widely read, 'without note or comment,' without the guidance which had been supplied by tradition. To allow and encourage this was inevitably to admit the right of private judgment in interpreting it. [It was now] exposed to the possible vagaries of private interpretation, an absolute authority displacing the authority of the Catholic Church. The Church of Rome replied by an increased rigidity in its control of Bible-reading. The cleavage which ensued had unfortunate results. In the churches of the Reformation...the claim that the Bible could be read, just as it stood, without the guidance of tradition...exposed it to the dangers of a chaotic individualism. Where there was no longer a common standard or perspective, the line was not easily drawn between a just freedom of responsible judgment and the play of arbitrary preference....The demand for unqualified freedom opened the way to limitless aberrations. An extreme example is to be found in the exploitation of the more obscure 'apocalyptic' writings such as the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New, which became the licensed playground of every crank" (The Bible Today, 21-23).

It is true that Professor Dodd stops short of the final goal to which such thoughts should logically lead. But that merely means that he has not yet attained to the positive and supernatural grace of the Catholic faith in all its fullness. What is encouraging is to find a Protestant biblical scholar glimpsing something of the Catholic outlook on this subject.