Nature of Scripture in the Early Church

The Light Shines in the Darkness...

It has often been asserted by Roman Catholic apologists that the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura was a theological novelty created at the Reformation and was totally unknown for the first fifteen centuries of the Church. They claim that:

a. The Scriptures are not materially sufficient; that is, not all doctrine is contained in Scripture. Some revelation is contained in an oral ‘Sacred Tradition’ independent of Scripture. [This view, called partim/partim, is not held by all Roman Catholics. A great many accept material sufficiency. However, as many Roman Catholic scholars who hold to ‘partim/partim’ recognize, this view is impossible to defend because it results in wild interpretations of the Biblical text.]

b. The Scriptures are not perspicuous; that is, what they teach is too vague for the average believer to understand.

c. As a result of a. and b., the Scriptures are not formally sufficient; that is, ‘Sacred Tradition’ and the ‘infallible’ Church are needed to properly interpret the Scriptures. [It must be noted that even if a Roman Catholic holds that the Scriptures are materially sufficient, they still don’t believe in formal sufficiency because of claim b.]

The Roman Catholic view is accurately described by James Cardinal Gibbons:

“We must, therefore, conclude that the Scriptures alone cannot be a sufficient guide and rule of faith because they cannot, at any time, be within the reach of every inquirer; because they are not of themselves clear and intelligible even in the matters of highest importance, and because they do not contain all the truths necessary for salvation.”

-James Cardinal Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers (Rockford: Tan, 1980), p.73.

Contrary to Roman apologists’ claims, the church fathers did believe in the principle of sola Scriptura. The following are quotes from both Protestant as well as Roman Catholic scholars who affirm this:

Protestant

“In its primary sense, however, the apostolic, evangelical or Catholic tradition stood for the faith delivered by the apostles, and he [Tertullian] never contrasted tradition so understood with Scripture. Indeed, it was enshrined in Scripture, for the apostles wrote down their oral preaching in epistles. For this reason, Scripture has absolute authority, and woe betide him who accepts doctrines not discoverable in it.”

–J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, reprinted 2003), p.41.

“In the West, Augustine declared that ‘in the plain teaching of Scripture, we find all that concerns our beliefs and moral conduct’; while a little later, Vincent of Lerins (c. 450) took it as an axiom the scriptural canon was ‘sufficient, and more than sufficient, for all purposes.”

–J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, reprinted 2003), p.43.

“The clearest token of the prestige enjoyed by the latter is the fact that almost the entire theological effort of the fathers, whether their aims were polemical or constructive, was expended upon what amounted to the exposition of the Bible. Further, it was everywhere taken for granted that, for any doctrine to win acceptance, it had first to establish its Scriptural basis.”

–J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, reprinted 2003), p.46.

“…champions of novel theological terms…had to meet the damning objection, advanced in conservative as well as heretical quarters, that they were not found in the Bible. In the end, they could only quell opposition by pointing out that, even if the terms were non-Scriptural, the meaning they conveyed was exactly that of Holy Writ.”

–J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, reprinted 2003), p.46.

“Athanasius himself, after dwelling on the entire adequacy of Scripture, went on to emphasize the desirability of having sound teachers to expound it.”

–J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, reprinted 2003), p.47.

“The only formal authority the Apologists call upon…is Scripture. Aristedes gives first a summary of the main points of the Christian creed and then an exposition of Christian morality, i.e., of the commandments of the Lord Jesus Christ. The source of knowledge of this Christian faith is the Scriptures of the Christians.”

-Ellen Flesseman-van Leer, Tradition and Scripture in the Early Church (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1953), pp.68-69.

“The whole purpose of Irenaeus, at least, as we can reliably collect it from the prefaces and endings of each of the books of Adversus Heareses, was to refute the Gnostics from Scripture…Irenaeus will allow Scripture alone as his source of information about God, and if Scripture tells us nothing, then we can know nothing.”

-R.P.C. Hanson, Tradition in the Early Church (Westminster: Philadelphia, 1962), pp.109, 119.

“The most cogent argument for the view that Origen believed that Scripture was the sole source of doctrine for himself or any other Christian is that (unlike Clement) he never quotes any other source as his authority for doctrine, and usually assumes without question that in any discussion the deciding factor is the evidence of the Bible.”

-R.P.C. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition (SPCK: London, 1954), p.49.

“From his first writings onward, St. Augustine was clearly and fully convinced of the divine authority of Holy Writ, and recognized no authority above it. In his famous discussion with Jerome he observed that Scripture must be placed on the highest pinnacle of authority.”

-A.D.R. Pohlman, The Word of God According to St. Augustine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), p.63.

Roman Catholic

“When twelfth century theologians observed-as they sometimes did-that many things were held by the church that were not to be found in Scripture they seem to have had in mind only liturgical customs or pious practices. An extra-Scriptural source of faith like the Apostle’s Creed (which was commonly regarded as a work of the apostles themselves) was held to define various tenets of Christian doctrine with absolute fidelity; but it was not considered to be a body of revealed truth supplementary to Scripture. Rather the Creed could be called in the twelfth century a ‘summary’ of the contents of Scripture. In this view Scripture recorded divine truth once and for all and the living voice of the church, guided by the Holy Spirit, interpreted that truth and proclaimed it anew to each succeeding generation.”

-Brian Tierney, The Origins of Papal Infallibility (Leiden: Brill, 1972), p.16.

“The greatest centuries of the Middle Ages-twelfth and thirteenth-were thus faithful to the patristic concept of ‘Scripture alone’.”

-George Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1959), p. 20.

“The Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine above all, themselves practiced that devotion derived from Scripture, whose ideal the Protestants steadily upheld; they hardly knew any other. No doubt they were much more careful than many Protestants not to isolate the Word of God in its settled form of Scripture from its living form in the Church, particularly in the liturgy. But, this reserve apart…they were no less enthusiastic, or insistent, or formal, in recommending this use of Scripture and in actually promoting it. Particularly from St. John Chrysostom, one might assemble exhortations and injunctions couched in the most forcible terms; they have often been recalled by those Protestants, from the sixteenth century onwards, the best grounded in Christian antiquity. It would be impossible to find, even among Protestants, statements more sweeping than those in which St. Jerome abounds: Ignoratio scripturarum, ignoratio Christi is doubtless the most lapidary, but not necessarily the most explicit. What is more, in this case just as when the authority of Scripture is viewed as the foundation of theology, the constant practice of the Church, in the Middle Ages as well as in the patristic times, is a more eloquent witness than all the doctors…For them, it was not simply one source among others, but the source par excellence, in a sense the only one.”

-Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), pp.132-133. Translated by A.V. Littledale. First published by Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1954.

“…it is right to insist that this narrow ‘biblicism’ is by no means to be confused with the affirmation that the Bible, and in one sense the Bible alone, is the ‘Word of God’ more directly and fully than any of its other expressions, since it alone is so inspired by God as to have him for its author. In making their own assertion, and giving it the vigour and emphasis so characteristic of their doctrine, the Protestant reformers did not go beyond the unanimous verdict of Judaism on the Old Testament, once constituted, and of the Fathers and theologians on the Bible as a whole. The cautious reservations introduced by modern Catholic writers, as a result of the controversies of the sixteenth century, cannot disguise the fact that the Protestants, in the positive statements we refer to, say no more than the unanimous ecclesiastical tradition…”

-Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), p.129. Translated by A.V. Littledale. First published by Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1954.

Others

“As a priest, a bishop, and a Christian intellectual, Augustine was convinced that the Bible was the “foundation” of all religious teachings…Wherever the Bible is unclear, nothing definite can be asserted, though of course Augustine believed deeply that one might do one’s utmost to make the meaning of the text as clear as possible.”

-Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p.63.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, some helpful audio on this topic can be found at:

http://www.straitgate.com/webster/

http://www.straitgate.com/aom/dl/99.htm (Jan. 30, Feb. 6)