UNDERSTANDING THE SOLAS SYSTEM
By Roger Salter
Special to virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
March 24, 2013
In wishing to know ultimate truth the speculative mind of proud and sinful man reaches vainly for the sky. Complete and certain understanding concerning essential reality in all its vastness and intricacy is far above and beyond us. We grope for some knowledge of human purpose and also the meaning of the universe of which we are an infinitesimally small part. We seek to detect an origin, an explanation, perhaps an author of all that is, and a possible intelligence behind all that exists and which makes sense of our being, and we puzzle over our own baffling and mysterious nature that at the same time amazes us with its ingenuity and terrifies us with its propensity to irrationality and destructiveness.
We traverse the fields of discovery in science and inventiveness in art and industry with an air of cocksureness and yet also of accompanying insecurity and sadness. If we assess ourselves accurately we arrive at the conclusion expressed in the words of Blaise Pascal that for all our aspirations and attempts to fulfill them man is a thinking reed, a perplexing blend of nobility and weakness. We cannot ascend to an assured grasp of the deep secrets of God and man, and if we are to find them then heaven must descend to us in the form of divine revelation.
It is in our favour, and to our advantage, that God has spoken. His Word is everywhere and creation, natural and human, echoes a song to his glory, that fallen man only dimly hears and oft times seeks to repel. Natural revelation may impress whilst its message is suppressed, and the continual reminders of God's presence depress a guilty conscience. We writhe uncomfortably at the evidence for God written in his handiwork external to ourselves and felt internally by his witness to our consciousness. Because we strive to silence the multifarious self-witness of God he has further, and with enormous forbearance, addressed us with special revelation relayed to us through chosen prophets and apostles and fully represented in his Son Jesus Christ.
This revelation is known as God's Word spoken through human instrumentality and supremely through the humanity of the God-man when the Saviour was among us and his teaching recalled and recorded by an audience of faithful witnesses. The Holy Scriptures consist of mental and oral messages often supported by insight into natural phenomena and events or the performance of supernatural signs. God has spoken even more audibly to our dull-wittedness and unbelief in accents of grace.
He has surpassed his achievement of creation in the accomplishment of human redemption and the precious truth of this mighty salvation on our behalf is preserved and propounded in the solas or solae of the 16th century Reformation which succeeded the dark night of medieval concealment and superstition that overlaid the simple message of the Bible. The purity of the Gospel of God is maintained in the observance of tradition, truth and wisdom "handed over" by inspired sources, and derived now from "Scripture alone". This wholesome and saving truth, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, generates the possession of divinely wrought salvation by "faith alone". And the disposition to heed the Word and believe it from the heart (trust) is caused by "grace alone".
These three elements constitute the core of sound and safe Christianity. They are guardians of an orthodox comprehension of the faith "once delivered to the saints" and guarantee that that faith will be delivered to present and future generations. Shreds of truth may be found, through divine mercy, in deviations from this trinity of precious principles, but these alone find their culmination and fulfillment - the intended goal of the forgoing solas - in the affirmations of the remaining two solae of the Protestant Reformation, namely that mankind's rescue is to be attributed to "Christ alone" to the glory of "God alone".
The Reformational solae are not ingredients in a humanly invented theological formula but the inevitable discovery as a result of the Holy Spirit's illumination of the Word of God. They are not so much the consequences of man's deduction as they are treasures dug from the depths of Scripture by patient and prayerful investigation.
The Christian Tradition: An Examination of the First "Alone".
Earnest acquaintance with Scripture communicates its sufficiency and supplies complete satisfaction to the soul. This is an experiential reality to those who read and pray through the pages of the Bible and feel its truth and comfort. Its inspiration and wisdom is self-authenticating. Its witness to God and man is complete and the human mind and heart chime in with the glad tones of the divine voice whenever the Lord chooses to speak through the sacred text and bring his Word home to the understanding. Scripture requires no supplement, only explanation, and explanation arises from the complete canon compared and expounded.
The canon is explored by sanctified reason, and Scripture and God-given comprehension, encompassing the word and works of God, determine Christian tradition. We learn from God's book, God's world, and God's providence (or governance). Humble minds gather the evidence for a grasp of his will so far as he makes it known and we believe and behave as he directs. His Word has the final and overall say, though we must be duly cautious as to what it does say and not narrow the spectrum of its program of disclosure, misread it, and jeopardize its authority. Literary genre and historical context must be observed as skillfully and faithfully as possible. Our fundamental grasp of reality is derived from Scripture though our limited observations in some instances may be provisional.
What we need to know for trust in God's reliability and our salvation is in Scripture, and sound Christian tradition is derived from Scripture alone, certified by the Spirit of truth, and recognized by the mind imbued with truth. We meet the Triune God and live in his fellowship and favor through the testimony of the Word.
To append any other tradition to Scripture is either pretentious or deceitful and utterly unsafe. When Protestants contend for the authority of Scripture they are not thinking naively of a book only and ruling out oral tradition that finds its way into or out of Scripture. They honor the Word of God that finds its present preservation in the Bible however it was originally communicated. This is a safe deposit. We may examine it check it, verify it for ourselves by rigorous scrutiny, as much as we are able.
The words of parallel oral tradition delivered by human authority or mere diktat alone cannot be validated. God guaranteed that his truth would always be possessed and uttered by his church but he did not guarantee infallibility or indefectibility through any agent such as a magisterium. For all we know, except for the magirsterium's say so, its teaching may be plucked out of the air or fanciful clerical invention.
Believers were given the privilege and right, even the duty, to validate truth for themselves by every intelligent means available. Faith is responsible before the Word as well as responsive to it, and assurance that it is "the Word" is necessary prior to acceptance. Human authority has often played a corrupting influence in the life of the church.
However do you detect its deleterious effects except by reference to the Word of Scripture. Our Christian tradition simply cannot be grounded in magisterial assertions coupled with Scripture as revelation. It is our reasonable task to sift error from truth by referring to the one assured authority to which Jesus appealed and contributed - The Holy Bible which now sums up everything the Lord wishes us to know in order to be his. "It is of course obvious that there is a tradition which is older than the Holy Scripture and on which Holy Scripture as such is founded: it is the way from revelation as such to its scriptural attestation" (Karl Barth quoted by H. L. Ellison, Baker's Dictionary of Theology edited by Everett F. Harrison).
Whilst Scripture draws from sacred tradition and gives rise to oral tradition there is nothing in it to suggest that it is to be accompanied by a body of truth known only to the episcopate which is to run parallel to the sacred text. Apostolic tradition is adherence to the Word: apostolic succession is the transmission of the Word.
What is lacking in Scripture, we might ask, that is supplied by any added extra? What wild dream could possibly conjure up elements of the faith omitted from Scripture or details of divine instruction that are alleged to be lacking? All that is necessary for salvation is found there.
Evangelicals are not perfectly adept in their handling of the Word of God, nor fully appreciative of the breadth and depth of the deposit of truth they sometimes too casually survey but they are not so crass as some advocates of Romanism accuse them to be.
Matthew Kelly in his work Rediscover Catholicism charges that the Bible has been kidnapped by Protestants and Evangelicals - an extreme point of view. Rather it is true to say that the Scriptures have been released to the people from Roman captivity by the Reformation, and recent enthusiasm for the study and knowledge of the Word has been kindled by Catholic association with attitudes akin to the Protestant tradition that have stirred much RC interest both academic and popular (see Carlo Caretto with his long period of solitude in the desert with nothing but the Bible alone to read and a blanket for warmth.
Also the Encyclopedia of Biblical Theology edited by Johannes Bauer with numerous references to and agreement with Reformed sources). The same author, Kelly, contends that for 1500 years all Christians were Catholic, the majority without access to the Bible, and therefore dependent on the oral tradition of the church. The term "catholic', of course, requires accurate definition together with awareness of chronological nuances, and there needs to be recognition, too, of the many exceptions to strict Roman standards within the catholic communion, folk that were loyal to Scripture as supreme.
Protestants do not deny, but stoutly defend the power of the preached Word (oral tradition) to those without its text before them. As is so often iterated we are not bibliolaters, but reverent towards the word whether it is enacted by God, spoken by his servants, and inscripturated by his secretaries. Kelly asserts that that the Reformational sola scriptura is the "most monumental case of a well argued nonsense in the history of humanity" (page 231).
In his view the catholic church has sole right to interpret the meaning of the Bible and that its mission is to liberate "so many people from blind subservience to a book and deliver them to a loving obedience to God alive and present in the one holy Catholic and Apostolic church" (page 230). To sum up, he wonders why so many seeming lovers of the Lord Jesus display hostility to the church he defends (page 231).
Perhaps the disappointment of Evangelicals is due to the demotion of Scripture to a level much lower than it deserves. All deference to the Roman magisterium is founded upon a dubious foundation and supported by spurious claims that smack of desire for complete power and control over the people of God. There is no early testimony to verify that the apostle Peter ever held office as the Bishop of Rome, and until Cyprian in the late second century there was no attempt at listing a succession of bishops created by direct apostolic authority.
The enormous claims of Rome and their dire repercussions, are established on pillars of sand that the rolling waves of New Testament teaching and ambience swiftly sweep away. So much that is contrary to plain apostolic doctrine has been smuggled into a distortion of the faith through appeal to tradition and an exaggerated notion of ecclesiastical institution that functions in an impersonal and mechanistic fashion. Converts from Evangelicalism to Rome often speak of a prolonged and hard fought process in their transition which suggests that self-inflicted forced feeding gradually acclimatizes the appetite to bad tasting, unwholesome, spiritual nutrition.
We mean no denigration of Catholic believers personally. We applaud their church for its stand on social and moral matters. We appreciate the spiritual wisdom of many of its masters and doctors. We stand firmly with it on the pronouncements of the ecumenical creeds, we share the love of many of its members for the word of God so affectionately and eloquently expressed in words that sometimes excel Protestant descriptions of their esteem for Scripture ("It is necessary that that warm and living love for Scripture which emanates from the Liturgy of the Hours shall be renewed among all, so that in truth Sacred Scripture becomes the source of all Christian prayer. Paul V1. See also the added beauty of Roman Collects compared to contemporary Anglican versions). We long for the day when God will awaken both Protestantism and Catholicism to a united and faithful proclamation of the gospel in all its purity and power. Both sectors of professing Christianity are not guilt free and are each due for a more radical Reformation, shake-up, and renewal than the world has ever seen before.
In the church to come, please God, may the heirs of Luther and Bernard, Calvin and Augustine, Contarini and Bucer, link hands to encircle the globe with the knowledge of the grace and glory of God. May we proclaim a word free of human invention, misinterpretation, and error. May God ensure that the Christian tradition that addresses a lost world derives from Scripture, opens Scripture, and declares Scripture "alone". - the lovely Word of God truly sacred, sufficient, satisfying, saving, and sweet - in no need of supplement.
By Roger Salter
Special to virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
March 24, 2013
In wishing to know ultimate truth the speculative mind of proud and sinful man reaches vainly for the sky. Complete and certain understanding concerning essential reality in all its vastness and intricacy is far above and beyond us. We grope for some knowledge of human purpose and also the meaning of the universe of which we are an infinitesimally small part. We seek to detect an origin, an explanation, perhaps an author of all that is, and a possible intelligence behind all that exists and which makes sense of our being, and we puzzle over our own baffling and mysterious nature that at the same time amazes us with its ingenuity and terrifies us with its propensity to irrationality and destructiveness.
We traverse the fields of discovery in science and inventiveness in art and industry with an air of cocksureness and yet also of accompanying insecurity and sadness. If we assess ourselves accurately we arrive at the conclusion expressed in the words of Blaise Pascal that for all our aspirations and attempts to fulfill them man is a thinking reed, a perplexing blend of nobility and weakness. We cannot ascend to an assured grasp of the deep secrets of God and man, and if we are to find them then heaven must descend to us in the form of divine revelation.
It is in our favour, and to our advantage, that God has spoken. His Word is everywhere and creation, natural and human, echoes a song to his glory, that fallen man only dimly hears and oft times seeks to repel. Natural revelation may impress whilst its message is suppressed, and the continual reminders of God's presence depress a guilty conscience. We writhe uncomfortably at the evidence for God written in his handiwork external to ourselves and felt internally by his witness to our consciousness. Because we strive to silence the multifarious self-witness of God he has further, and with enormous forbearance, addressed us with special revelation relayed to us through chosen prophets and apostles and fully represented in his Son Jesus Christ.
This revelation is known as God's Word spoken through human instrumentality and supremely through the humanity of the God-man when the Saviour was among us and his teaching recalled and recorded by an audience of faithful witnesses. The Holy Scriptures consist of mental and oral messages often supported by insight into natural phenomena and events or the performance of supernatural signs. God has spoken even more audibly to our dull-wittedness and unbelief in accents of grace.
He has surpassed his achievement of creation in the accomplishment of human redemption and the precious truth of this mighty salvation on our behalf is preserved and propounded in the solas or solae of the 16th century Reformation which succeeded the dark night of medieval concealment and superstition that overlaid the simple message of the Bible. The purity of the Gospel of God is maintained in the observance of tradition, truth and wisdom "handed over" by inspired sources, and derived now from "Scripture alone". This wholesome and saving truth, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, generates the possession of divinely wrought salvation by "faith alone". And the disposition to heed the Word and believe it from the heart (trust) is caused by "grace alone".
These three elements constitute the core of sound and safe Christianity. They are guardians of an orthodox comprehension of the faith "once delivered to the saints" and guarantee that that faith will be delivered to present and future generations. Shreds of truth may be found, through divine mercy, in deviations from this trinity of precious principles, but these alone find their culmination and fulfillment - the intended goal of the forgoing solas - in the affirmations of the remaining two solae of the Protestant Reformation, namely that mankind's rescue is to be attributed to "Christ alone" to the glory of "God alone".
The Reformational solae are not ingredients in a humanly invented theological formula but the inevitable discovery as a result of the Holy Spirit's illumination of the Word of God. They are not so much the consequences of man's deduction as they are treasures dug from the depths of Scripture by patient and prayerful investigation.
The Christian Tradition: An Examination of the First "Alone".
Earnest acquaintance with Scripture communicates its sufficiency and supplies complete satisfaction to the soul. This is an experiential reality to those who read and pray through the pages of the Bible and feel its truth and comfort. Its inspiration and wisdom is self-authenticating. Its witness to God and man is complete and the human mind and heart chime in with the glad tones of the divine voice whenever the Lord chooses to speak through the sacred text and bring his Word home to the understanding. Scripture requires no supplement, only explanation, and explanation arises from the complete canon compared and expounded.
The canon is explored by sanctified reason, and Scripture and God-given comprehension, encompassing the word and works of God, determine Christian tradition. We learn from God's book, God's world, and God's providence (or governance). Humble minds gather the evidence for a grasp of his will so far as he makes it known and we believe and behave as he directs. His Word has the final and overall say, though we must be duly cautious as to what it does say and not narrow the spectrum of its program of disclosure, misread it, and jeopardize its authority. Literary genre and historical context must be observed as skillfully and faithfully as possible. Our fundamental grasp of reality is derived from Scripture though our limited observations in some instances may be provisional.
What we need to know for trust in God's reliability and our salvation is in Scripture, and sound Christian tradition is derived from Scripture alone, certified by the Spirit of truth, and recognized by the mind imbued with truth. We meet the Triune God and live in his fellowship and favor through the testimony of the Word.
To append any other tradition to Scripture is either pretentious or deceitful and utterly unsafe. When Protestants contend for the authority of Scripture they are not thinking naively of a book only and ruling out oral tradition that finds its way into or out of Scripture. They honor the Word of God that finds its present preservation in the Bible however it was originally communicated. This is a safe deposit. We may examine it check it, verify it for ourselves by rigorous scrutiny, as much as we are able.
The words of parallel oral tradition delivered by human authority or mere diktat alone cannot be validated. God guaranteed that his truth would always be possessed and uttered by his church but he did not guarantee infallibility or indefectibility through any agent such as a magisterium. For all we know, except for the magirsterium's say so, its teaching may be plucked out of the air or fanciful clerical invention.
Believers were given the privilege and right, even the duty, to validate truth for themselves by every intelligent means available. Faith is responsible before the Word as well as responsive to it, and assurance that it is "the Word" is necessary prior to acceptance. Human authority has often played a corrupting influence in the life of the church.
However do you detect its deleterious effects except by reference to the Word of Scripture. Our Christian tradition simply cannot be grounded in magisterial assertions coupled with Scripture as revelation. It is our reasonable task to sift error from truth by referring to the one assured authority to which Jesus appealed and contributed - The Holy Bible which now sums up everything the Lord wishes us to know in order to be his. "It is of course obvious that there is a tradition which is older than the Holy Scripture and on which Holy Scripture as such is founded: it is the way from revelation as such to its scriptural attestation" (Karl Barth quoted by H. L. Ellison, Baker's Dictionary of Theology edited by Everett F. Harrison).
Whilst Scripture draws from sacred tradition and gives rise to oral tradition there is nothing in it to suggest that it is to be accompanied by a body of truth known only to the episcopate which is to run parallel to the sacred text. Apostolic tradition is adherence to the Word: apostolic succession is the transmission of the Word.
What is lacking in Scripture, we might ask, that is supplied by any added extra? What wild dream could possibly conjure up elements of the faith omitted from Scripture or details of divine instruction that are alleged to be lacking? All that is necessary for salvation is found there.
Evangelicals are not perfectly adept in their handling of the Word of God, nor fully appreciative of the breadth and depth of the deposit of truth they sometimes too casually survey but they are not so crass as some advocates of Romanism accuse them to be.
Matthew Kelly in his work Rediscover Catholicism charges that the Bible has been kidnapped by Protestants and Evangelicals - an extreme point of view. Rather it is true to say that the Scriptures have been released to the people from Roman captivity by the Reformation, and recent enthusiasm for the study and knowledge of the Word has been kindled by Catholic association with attitudes akin to the Protestant tradition that have stirred much RC interest both academic and popular (see Carlo Caretto with his long period of solitude in the desert with nothing but the Bible alone to read and a blanket for warmth.
Also the Encyclopedia of Biblical Theology edited by Johannes Bauer with numerous references to and agreement with Reformed sources). The same author, Kelly, contends that for 1500 years all Christians were Catholic, the majority without access to the Bible, and therefore dependent on the oral tradition of the church. The term "catholic', of course, requires accurate definition together with awareness of chronological nuances, and there needs to be recognition, too, of the many exceptions to strict Roman standards within the catholic communion, folk that were loyal to Scripture as supreme.
Protestants do not deny, but stoutly defend the power of the preached Word (oral tradition) to those without its text before them. As is so often iterated we are not bibliolaters, but reverent towards the word whether it is enacted by God, spoken by his servants, and inscripturated by his secretaries. Kelly asserts that that the Reformational sola scriptura is the "most monumental case of a well argued nonsense in the history of humanity" (page 231).
In his view the catholic church has sole right to interpret the meaning of the Bible and that its mission is to liberate "so many people from blind subservience to a book and deliver them to a loving obedience to God alive and present in the one holy Catholic and Apostolic church" (page 230). To sum up, he wonders why so many seeming lovers of the Lord Jesus display hostility to the church he defends (page 231).
Perhaps the disappointment of Evangelicals is due to the demotion of Scripture to a level much lower than it deserves. All deference to the Roman magisterium is founded upon a dubious foundation and supported by spurious claims that smack of desire for complete power and control over the people of God. There is no early testimony to verify that the apostle Peter ever held office as the Bishop of Rome, and until Cyprian in the late second century there was no attempt at listing a succession of bishops created by direct apostolic authority.
The enormous claims of Rome and their dire repercussions, are established on pillars of sand that the rolling waves of New Testament teaching and ambience swiftly sweep away. So much that is contrary to plain apostolic doctrine has been smuggled into a distortion of the faith through appeal to tradition and an exaggerated notion of ecclesiastical institution that functions in an impersonal and mechanistic fashion. Converts from Evangelicalism to Rome often speak of a prolonged and hard fought process in their transition which suggests that self-inflicted forced feeding gradually acclimatizes the appetite to bad tasting, unwholesome, spiritual nutrition.
We mean no denigration of Catholic believers personally. We applaud their church for its stand on social and moral matters. We appreciate the spiritual wisdom of many of its masters and doctors. We stand firmly with it on the pronouncements of the ecumenical creeds, we share the love of many of its members for the word of God so affectionately and eloquently expressed in words that sometimes excel Protestant descriptions of their esteem for Scripture ("It is necessary that that warm and living love for Scripture which emanates from the Liturgy of the Hours shall be renewed among all, so that in truth Sacred Scripture becomes the source of all Christian prayer. Paul V1. See also the added beauty of Roman Collects compared to contemporary Anglican versions). We long for the day when God will awaken both Protestantism and Catholicism to a united and faithful proclamation of the gospel in all its purity and power. Both sectors of professing Christianity are not guilt free and are each due for a more radical Reformation, shake-up, and renewal than the world has ever seen before.
In the church to come, please God, may the heirs of Luther and Bernard, Calvin and Augustine, Contarini and Bucer, link hands to encircle the globe with the knowledge of the grace and glory of God. May we proclaim a word free of human invention, misinterpretation, and error. May God ensure that the Christian tradition that addresses a lost world derives from Scripture, opens Scripture, and declares Scripture "alone". - the lovely Word of God truly sacred, sufficient, satisfying, saving, and sweet - in no need of supplement.
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church.
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