Sola Scriptura: What It Isn’t
The Reformation teaching of Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) does not mean that the Christian alone reads the Bible alone and interprets it alone. Sola Scriptura does not at all mean we should be Lone Rangers when studying God’s Word.
And historically speaking, we probably shouldn’t use Luther on trial at Worms as an illustration of what Sola Scriptura means unless we give it a fuller contextual explanation. The Diet of Worms wasn’t at all “Luther alone and his Bible alone against the Roman Catholic Church.”
Here’s how Richard Muller describes it.
“…It is…entirely anachronistic to view the sola scriptura of Luther and his contemporaries as a declaration that all of theology ought to be constructed anew, without reference to the church’s tradition of interpretation, by the lonely exegete confronting the naked text.”
“It is equally anachronistic to assume that Scripture functioned for the Reformers like a set of numbered facts or propositions suitable for use as ready-made solutions to any and all questions capable of arising in the course of human history. Both the language of sola scriptura and the actual use of the text of scripture by the Reformers can be explained only in terms of the questions of authority and interpretation posed by the developments of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Even so, close study of the actual exegetical results of the Reformers manifests strong interpretive and doctrinal continuities with the exegetical results of the [early church] fathers and the medieval doctors.”
Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics vol. 2 p. 63-64.
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