The Origin of Sola Scriptura

The doctrine that Scripture is the Christian’s only infallible rule of faith was popularized and promoted by Martin Luther, who, the story goes, affixed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg’s Castle Church in 1517. His Theses put forth a series of propositions for debate, focusing prominently on the doctrine of indulgences—see the Catechism of the Catholic Church(CCC), paragraph 1471—which he sought to challenge. Since indulgences are granted on the pope’s authority, Luther’s position led to his rejection of that authority, resulting in his corollary claim that only the Bible could be the ultimate guiding authority for Christians.

In 1577, the Formula of Concord, a Lutheran confessional statement, reaffirmed this standard:

First, then, we receive and embrace with our whole heart] the prophetic and apostolic scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the pure, clear fountain of Israel, which is the only true standard by which all teachers and doctrines are to be judged.

Along with sola fide, the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation,sola scriptura became one of the two pillars of the Protestant Reformation.

Now, some of the abuses Luther reacted to were real, and he was justified in condemning them.

Indeed, he was not the first to decry abuses in the Church—St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and Cardinal Francisco Ximénes de Cisneros (archbishop of Toledo), for example, who worked within the Church to improve it without overthrowing the Magisterium, might have a more reasonable claim to the title “reformer.”

However, as the hostilities between Luther and the Church’s hierarchy proceeded, the issues ultimately centered on the question of Church authority and—from Luther’s perspective—whether the teachings of the Catholic Church and its magisterial authority are legitimate and binding rules of faith for Christians. As these confrontations intensified, and Luther became more deeply entrenched in his own beliefs, he accused the Magisterium of having corrupted Christian doctrine, and he rejected Sacred Tradition as an unwritten repository of divine revelation given to and mediated by the Church.

Was Luther’s doctrine in fact the restoration of a biblical truth that had been obscured over time, or was it only his own false view of Christian authority?

Luther was passionate about his beliefs, and he succeeded in spreading them, but these facts do not guarantee that they were valid. Jesus said that people will come in his name and “mislead many,” no doubt by spreading doctrines that appear to be from him or by claiming to speak with his authority (Matt. 24:5, Mark 13:6, Luke 21:8). The apostle Paul notes that the believers at Corinth were submitting to “another Jesus” and “a different gospel.” How? By discarding apostolic authority and tradition as the standard against which the true gospel is measured (2 Cor. 11:4). Mind you, Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church was written barely twenty-five years after Jesus’ ascension! Even after so short a time, within living memory of Christ’s earthly mission, believers could still go astray.

Today, as in the first century and the sixteenth, souls are at stake. Christians need certitude in doctrine as a safeguard against believing in bogus gospels.

We will examine Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura in depth on the basis of practical, logical, and historical considerations in an attempt to show that it is not a genuine truth from God. Rather, it is a false doctrine of men—and a particularly malevolent one at that—masquerading as biblical teaching.

As St. Francis de Sales once noted,

St. Hilary says excellently, “Heresy is in the understanding, not in the Scripture, and the fault is in the meaning, not in the words,” and St. Augustine: “Heresies arise simply from this, that good scriptures are ill understood, and what is ill understood in them is also rashly and presumptuously given forth.” It is a true Michal’s game; it is to cover a statue . . . with the clothes of David (1 Sam. 19:11-17). He who looks at it thinks he has seen David, but he is deceived, David is not there. Heresy covers up, in the bed of its brain, the statue of its own opinion in the clothes of Holy Scripture. . . . He who sees this doctrine thinks he has seen the holy word of God, but he is mistaken; it is not there. The words are there, but not the meaning.

The doctrine of sola scriptura takes a top-down structure of authority that Christ put in place, presents it as corrupt and evil on the basis of Luther’s claims and accusations, supplants it with the ultimate exaltation of the ego (since, at least for some Protestants, individual believers can determine for themselves what Scripture means), and uses Scripture itself to give it a veneer of credibility and create the illusion that the belief is divine in origin, as Francis (and Augustine) correctly noted.

With sola scriptura as his battle cry, Martin Luther fomented contempt for the Christ-given authority of the Church and then replaced it with . . . Luther—and the rest of the human race. This is a critical factor in understanding sola scriptura because, whatever Protestants may claim about “Scripture interpreting Scripture” or the Holy Spirit guiding believers who read it prayerfully, in real-life practice, the doctrine puts the self above Scripture, via the believer’s alleged freedom to decide for himself. The human reader is made to stand in judgment of God’s word.

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