Sola Scriptura & the Israel of God

The aftermath of the sixteenth century Reformation in the Western church isn’t pretty. Death never is. As in the days of old when our fathers and mothers in Israel became unfaithful with the trust that was given to them and God ripped them apart, so we are heirs of the death that was the Reformation. The church of Jesus Christ, though joined mystically as one body, is visibly torn to pieces. There are thousands of communions that are at odds and even at war with other communions. The two big communions—the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church–are not exempt. They parade a façade of unity before the world, but the emperor has no clothes. I don’t say that with delight. I say it as a fact. One must lie to himself to believe that because he is in the Church of Rome or in an Eastern Orthodox Church he is not in a schismatic church.

Many times, those from these two communions lower their ecclesiastical guns on Protestants and tell us that our position of sola Scriptura is one of the sires of this ecclesiastically deformed, schismatic child. What we need is to submit to the Tradition; the Tradition that infallibly interprets the Scriptures so that we can stop all of this schism. If only we will submit to the fact that the Apostolic Tradition, handed down through the bishops in an unbroken line from the Apostles themselves, is the infallible interpreter of Scripture, then we can all be one. Of course, they can’t even decide what the Apostolic Tradition is themselves. Trying to scour through twenty centuries of traditions to discover which fathers are authoritative and which aren’t, which declarations were declared in an infallible moment and which weren’t, is a more daunting task than simply believing in the absolute authority of Scripture for all matters of faith and practice. “Never mind all that thinking,” they say. “Just trust the church implicitly.”

There were groups in Jesus’ day that did the same. The scribe and Pharisees were keen on the authority of the tradition of the elders. So keen were they that they would even contradict the clear commandments of God for the sake of their traditions (see Matt 15.1-9). “Trust us. We’re the professionals. We have the oral law tradition handed down all the way from Moses in an unbroken line of priests and professional theologians.” Yeah, that didn’t work so well, now did it. Jesus condemns their tradition as abjectly sinful.

Jesus wasn’t condemning all tradition when he did this, but he was condemning tradition that contradicted the clear commandment of God, which means that he believed that the commandment of God—the Scriptures–were clear enough to be understood and that they had greater authority over all traditions. Traditions must bow before the Scriptures.

“But whose interpretation of Scripture? Which interpretation has the authority?” This is where sola Scriptura gets messy. If you are a child and your parents are disagreeing over what is obedience and what is disobedience, it can be confusing and frustrating. Living sola Scriptura is a messy, difficult business in the church. The easy thing to do is to simply pick a parent, trust the parent implicitly, and walk in lock-step with whatever mother says. No checks. No balances. No thinking. No authority over mother to check out if what she saying is true or false. All I need to do is return to being an infant or toddler who unquestioningly obeys commands without having to think through anything.

But here is the rub: the church isn’t a toddler anymore. We are supposed to be maturing. And maturity requires wrestling with difficult things intellectually, emotionally, and existentially. This is not an option for the church. It is our calling. We are the Israel of God, and Israel is the one who wrestles with God and prevails. In faith he wrestles with the Esau’s and Laban’s and ultimately God himself always holding on to God’s authoritative promises. It’s a difficult business wrestling with God through the millennia, working out unity in the faith, but it is what we are called to do. Resorting to immaturity is neither safe nor right.

Living sola Scriptura as the Israel of God means that all things are under the Scripture’s authority: the authorities the Scriptures appoint (pastors and elders) and the traditions and declarations of the church through the years past. Sometimes that can be scary. Growing up is scary, but growing up is what we are called to do.

So, while we respect all God-given authorities as gifts from him, he is the ultimate authority. His Word is the only infallible revelation of his authority by which to judge all other authorities. We must be Bereans who search the Scriptures to see whether what we hear is so (see Acts 17.11). Yes, it is messy. But search the Scriptures and find a time when it wasn’t.

God makes messes when he rips things apart. But whenever he rips things apart, it is with a plan to put them back together in a more glorious relationship. He is doing this with the church. It doesn’t look like it to us who are in the throes of death. But the crucifixion didn’t look very promising either. God is the God of resurrection. He is working through death to bring us to glory. He requires us to hold fast to his infallible Word all the way through death. That Word authoritatively proclaims that we will live again.