The church must stop paying lip service to Biblical authority
Why have the heirs of the reformation undermined the authority of Scripture?
If you have been following my work for a while, you will know that I am fascinated by the history of the 16th century reformation. One of the major emphases of the reformers, which ultimately led to the creation of the protestant churches, was an emphasis on the Bible. This was in reaction to the Roman Catholic church of the day, who believed then — and continue to believe — that ‘tradition’ is essentially equal to the Bible as a source of the church’s teaching:
The oral preaching of the Apostles, and the written message of salvation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (Bible), are conserved and handed on as the deposit of faith through the apostolic succession in the Church. Both the living tradition and the written Scriptures have their common source in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
— Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, Glossary: “Tradition”
It is because of this context that the reformers felt the need to place such an emphasis on the Bible. The reformers argued that, while tradition may be helpful and beneficial, the Bible alone was the authoritative source of the church’s teaching. This view became popularly known as sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) - one of the five ‘solas’ of the reformation.
The idea that scriptural authority would trump ecclesial authority became important very early on in the English reformation. Henry VIII asked Thomas Cranmer to investigate the case for an annulment of his first marriage on Biblical grounds (known as the king’s “great matter”). Mike Reeves made the point in his excellent video series on the reformation that this set an important precedent for the Bible coming over and above the authority of the Pope or the church.
The doctrine of sola scriptura was embedded into the Church of England from the beginning in the 39 Articles:
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.
— Article VI of the 39 Articles
The articles also state that “the church of Rome hath erred” (i.e. that an earthly institution was capable of deviating from the truth); and “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written”. So, right from the beginning of the Church of England, it was clear that the Scriptures are the supreme authority and the church has no right to contradict it.
It is precisely this doctrine of scripture which underpinned and drove the rest of the reformation. For example, Martin Luther came to understand that we are justified by faith alone by his study of Romans (and then Galatians). Some of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church were found to be based on mistranslations of the Bible, e.g. the Vulgate translated the word ‘repent’ as ‘do penance’, which gave rise to the doctrine of penance in medieval times.
The purpose of this introduction is to say, unequivocally, that the reformation was based on sola scriptura - the authority of the Holy Scriptures. So, why have churches today — especially churches which would see themselves as heirs of the reformation — seemingly rejected this doctrine?
What I’d like to do is outline how I’ve come to believe that many churches simply do not believe in sola scriptura any more.
If you’d like to read more about the reformation and why it has continuing relevance, check out the book “Why the Reformation Still Matters” by Mike Reeves and Tim Chester.
Paying lip service to sola scriptura
My Christian roots are within evangelical churches. The word ‘evangelical’ can be a little slippery depending on who you ask (especially in the USA), but I would say that it has its roots in the reformation. Essentially (in my view) it means an individual or a church which holds to the doctrine of sola scriptura.
I wrote a piece on my blog some years ago called What is an Evangelical? if you are interested.
Many of the conferences I used to attend were all about the Bible. For example, the mission statement of the Proclamation Trust — who used to be very much part of my ‘tribe’ — is to promote “biblical expository preaching”. This is reflected in their events: on every conference of theirs I went on, the Bible was front and centre - Bible readings, Bible sermons, seminars on how to preach the Bible faithfully and so on.
This is why I have struggled over the last few years to come to terms with the fact that many of these evangelical groups are not really paying attention to what the Bible says. Despite all the conferences, the organisations, the literature, the slogans — they don’t really believe in sola scriptura. They have abandoned this core reformation doctrine.
I appreciate this is a serious accusation, and I do not make it lightly. It’s taken me some time to draw this conclusion, but I have experienced the same pattern several times now and I find myself compelled to believe it. There are two areas in particular which I believe give clear evidence of this.
Covid and lockdowns
The first thing was the church’s response to covid and lockdowns. Although I’d been blogging for some time, Sacred Musings itself was born as I tried to process what I was seeing during the lockdowns. Why was it that churches were saying virtually nothing about lockdowns, except to parrot whatever the government or the media told them to say? Was there no theological angle to what was happening in the world at large?
Because no-one else (except for the good chaps over at the Irreverend podcast) seemed to be saying anything, I started writing about covid and biblical principles - freedom, safety, truth, and being human. As I was writing and discussing those pieces (and things I’ve done subsequently), I realised that too many Christians and especially evangelical Christian leaders simply don’t care about what the Bible says. I was trying to build a case from the Bible, looking at all the different angles and trying to base my action on what God has revealed to us through his Word. But it seemed like many of my evangelical colleagues were simply not interested — they came to Scripture only in order to rationalise what they already believed from the secular media.
When people did engage, they engaged on a very ‘superficial’ level. I had several people quote Romans 13 to me, as well as 1 Peter 2:13-14. Of course, both of these are important passages; however, there was no serious engagement with them other than as a prooftext that Christians were doing the right thing to obey the goverment in everything. No serious attempt was made to do some exegesis on those passages and think about how we might put together Paul’s teaching in Romans 13 with Revelation’s description of ‘the beast’, for example. Or the apostolic call to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), or Daniel and his friends’ resistance to Nebuchadnezzar, and so on.
One of the most helpful books I’ve read over the last few years is Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto. In the book he outlines the case for secular authorities having limited power and the necessity for civil disobedience when they overstep the bounds of their authority. Going back to the reformation, he says:
In almost every place where the Reformation had success there was some form of civil disobedience or armed rebellion.
He then goes on to outline several examples of such, and quotes from authors such as Samuel Rutherford and John Knox. Many of our reformation forebears had to think through issues of civil disobedience. They knew that their doctrine of sola scriptura would pit them against worldly authorities. In those days the worldly authorities were different, and the battle ground was in a different place. But, nonetheless, they realised that their commitment to the authority of Scripture would place them at odds with the secular, and they needed to stand up for what they believed in.
By contrast, churches today seem to see the Bible as being in some kind of ‘sandbox’: it’s great for personal morality, but less important for the bigger questions of government and how we structure society. The Bible has been put in a box.
In my opinion, the churches today which claim to be the heirs of the reformation are not worthy to tie the shoelaces of men like Samuel Rutherford and John Knox, who knew what it meant to fight for sola scriptura against the world.
The churches today which claim to be the heirs of the reformation are not worthy to tie the shoelaces of men like Samuel Rutherford and John Knox
Safeguarding
The second area where I believe the church has abandoned the doctrine of sola scriptura is in that of safeguarding. I have written about safeguarding several times recently (last week I wrote about Mike Pilavachi and the way church culture needs to change). One of the things I keep repeating with safeguarding is that the church needs — to quote another of Francis Schaeffer’s books — to do The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way. We are not at liberty to delegate to secular safeguarding procedures. God has given us the tools that we need, and these tools may be found in the Scriptures.
One of the things I have realised over the last few months is that the safeguarding process is not ‘flawed’ (as one person put it to me), but deeply and profoundly un-Christian. In fact, a former Church of England minister said to me that the safeguarding process was “about as far away from the Bible as you can get”. I think that’s about as frank and candid admission as possible that Church of England ministers (and perhaps those in other denominations) are required by law to do things which contradict the Bible.
Why have orthodox Christians in the Church of England focussed entirely on the ludicrous pantomime of ‘Living in Love and Faith’, while saying nothing about safeguarding? In fact, it’s worse than that - many evangelical leaders seem to be doing nothing but calling for MORE safeguarding. Justin Humphreys — of the Christian safeguarding organisation Thirty-One Eight — recently wrote a Grove booklet arguing that safeguarding is mission. His attempt reminds me of the phrase, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. It seems that everything in the Bible has become about safeguarding. It’s like the feminist readings of Scripture - seeing everything through the lens of the feminist agenda. It’s not letting Scripture speak on its own terms, it is reading one’s own agenda into the Bible.
Let me refer back to what I have said before: the gospel is sufficient for safeguarding. If we believe in the gospel, if we believe in what the Bible says about sin, repentance, and church discipline — safeguarding will be taken care of. The problem is not that we don’t have enough safeguarding, or that we don’t think about it enough. The problem is that we don’t know the gospel and the Scriptures well enough.
As Jesus once said to the Sadducees:
Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?
Mark 12:24
Going back to sola scriptura
At the time of the reformation, the doctrine of sola scriptura went against the ecclesial authorities. The Pope and the Catholic church of the day had lots of secular power (there was no separation of church and state), and so they often wielded secular power against the reformers, e.g. Luther at the Diet of Worms.
The situation is very different today. The doctrine of sola scriptura contradicts a different religion - a secular religion. It has no name, it has no scriptures. Nonetheless, it does have a kind of dogma. I believe that the two things I have mentioned — lockdowns and safeguarding — are examples of this modern secular dogma. They do not derive from the Bible but from godless categories of thought. Harry Blamires lamented as far back as the 1960s, “The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history.”
If the church is to recover the doctrine of sola scriptura, we need to be prepared to stand up against these secular ideas rather than embracing them. We need to get the Bible out of its sandbox, and we need to take off our cultural goggles which see everything through the lens of our current cultural obsessions. To do that, we need to relearn to read our Bibles and build up our worldviews from the ground up.
Of course, it’s not possible for us to completely discard our cultural goggles when reading the Bible. But it is possible to mitigate against it. Let me quote the words of C.S. Lewis, from his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. … The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
One of the problems with the church today is that people think ‘lockdowns’ and ‘safeguarding’ are good ideas because we keep being told they are good ideas. Therefore, when we go to the Scriptures we already have an idea of what we want to find there. What we need to do, as C.S. Lewis says, is to “keep the clean see breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” and we do this by reading what writers in previous centuries thought about the state, civil disobedience, safety, and so on.
One good example of this from the Covid time is Richard Turnbull’s Christian Institute lectures - “Christian leadership in times of crisis”.
Part of the problem with the church is that we simply don’t know what our forebears even thought about some of these issues. But if we look, we will find that on many of these issues the church challenges our secular assumptions and worldview. To rediscover the doctrine of sola scriptura, we should look to previous generations to see what it meant to them - and to be prepared to have our own assumptions challenged and corrected.