The Catholic Church holds that Scripture is inspired, inerrant, and
the word of God written, and that it was never given to the
world as a free-standing rulebook. It came out of a believing
community, was recognized as Scripture by that community, and was
meant to be read inside it. The objection to sola scriptura
is not that the Bible is unreliable, but that the doctrine cannot
satisfy its own standard and does not describe how the Church
actually received the Bible.
What Is Granted
A great deal. Scripture is God-breathed, and no Catholic may say
otherwise. Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees in Mark 7 is a
standing warning, and any tradition that contradicts the written
word is condemned by it. The Bereans were commended. And the
historical complaints are not fantasies: there have been serious
sins committed by individuals — even popes — within
the Church. (At the same time, it should be recognized that many
claimed atrocities have been greatly exaggerated by those opposed
to the Church — the exaggerations are examined on
Does History Condemn the Church?)
Many Catholics have also been poor readers of
Scripture, a fault the Church herself has named and set about
repairing. (Visit any parish and you’ll find at least one weekly
Bible study — our parish currently has two!)
The Doctrine Fails Its Own Test
Begin with the difficulty at the foundation. If no
doctrine may be held unless it is taught in Scripture, then
sola scriptura must be taught in Scripture. Where? No
passage states that Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith,
and none could easily do so while the New Testament was still being
written. The Reformed answer — Westminster’s, quoted in
the panel opposite — is that a doctrine may also be deduced
from Scripture “by good and necessary consequence.”
Grant the method; the deduction still has to reach only.
Every text produced establishes Scripture’s authority,
inspiration, and profit, which the Catholic Church affirms as
firmly as Geneva. None reaches its solitude.
The verse always produced is 2 Timothy 3:16–17, and it
does not say it. It says Scripture is profitable for teaching and
reproof and correction, and that by it the man of God may be
“complete, equipped for every good work,” which is
true, and which no Catholic denies. Profitable is not the same word
as sufficient; a thing can be indispensable without being the only
thing. The stronger form of the argument rests on
“complete” (Greek artios) and
“equipped” (exērtismenos): a man made
complete by Scripture, it is said, needs nothing else. But the
words describe the man, not the book — what Scripture is
profitable for — and the same letter sends that man
elsewhere as well: to “the pattern of the sound words which
you have heard from me” (2 Tim. 1:13) and to the faithful
men who will teach what he heard (2 Tim. 2:2). A passage that
equips Timothy with Scripture and with the apostle’s spoken
word is a poor witness that the first was meant to stand alone. And
the Scripture Timothy had known “from childhood”
(v. 15) was the Old Testament: the verse commends the profit of
the Scriptures he had, not the sufficiency of a canon that did not
yet exist.
The Refined Version Fails It Too
The doctrine’s best defenders qualify it: sola
scriptura binds the Church only after the apostles,
once revelation was complete. Fair enough — but ask where
Scripture teaches that. No verse says the rule of faith would
change when the last apostle died; no verse says oral apostolic
teaching would expire rather than be handed on. The qualification
that saves the doctrine from the awkward texts is itself found in
no text — it is a tradition about Scripture, holding the
doctrine up from outside. And the apostles did provide for their
own absence, in as many words — not by promising a
completed book, but by appointing men: “what you have heard
from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be
able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2) — four
generations in one sentence, none of them a page.
The Canon Cannot Be Got From the Book
No book of the Bible contains a list of the books of the Bible. The
table of contents is not inspired; it is a conclusion reached by the
Church over the first four centuries, and finally settled by
councils of the very bishops the Reformers were prepared to call
corrupt.
So the reader who holds Scripture alone must already know, from
somewhere other than Scripture, which writings are Scripture. There
were serious candidates that lost (the Shepherd of
Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, 1 Clement),
and serious books that were long doubted, including Hebrews,
James, 2 Peter and Revelation. Whatever settled those questions
was not the Bible. This is the point at which the doctrine turns
back on itself: it must borrow from Tradition the one thing it
cannot do without.
The standard reply — that Scripture authenticates itself to
the believer by the inward witness of the Spirit, as Calvin
taught — only relocates the problem. The witness is private
and the canon is a public list; the Latter-day Saint reports the
same burning assurance for another book entirely; and the sincere
felt witness of earlier Christians canonized Hermas and doubted
2 Peter. Assurance does not draw tables of contents.
The subtler reply distinguishes discovering the canon from
determining it: the books were inspired from the pen, and the
Church merely recognized them, as a jeweler certifies a diamond
he did not make. Granted entirely — the Catholic Church
says the same; she claims to have received the books, not
authored their inspiration. But the jeweler image gives the game
away: you trust the certificate exactly as far as you trust the
jeweler’s competence. If the recognizing Church could err,
the recognition could be wrong, and Sproul’s honest
formula — “a fallible collection of infallible
books” — concedes it: on that account no one can be
certain Scripture’s table of contents is right, which is a
strange foundation for a doctrine of certainty about
Scripture alone. A canon known with certainty requires a recognizer kept from error
in recognizing. The Protestant may settle for a reliable
recognition instead; but then the certainty claimed for Scripture
alone rests on a judgment admitted to be fallible, and only the
Catholic claim closes that gap.
What the New Testament Says About Its Own Transmission
Paul does not describe a Church living from a book — and in a
single sentence he describes how binding apostolic teaching
actually reached the churches: “stand firm and hold to the
traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or
by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15). Everything the doctrine
denies is in that verse. Paul explicitly identifies two modes by
which apostolic teaching was transmitted: “by word of
mouth” — oral apostolic Tradition — and “by
letter” — written apostolic teaching. And he lays one
and the same command on both: hold to the traditions. He
does not say hold to the letters and let the spoken teaching lapse
once the ink is dry; the oral teaching is not scaffolding to be
struck when Scripture is complete. Both are called traditions, and
both are to be held.
The Greek makes this particularly clear. The verb is one
imperative, krateite (“hold fast”), and it
governs one object, tas paradoseis (“the
traditions”); the two modes are then attached by the balanced
pair eite … eite, “whether by word of mouth or
by letter.” Grammatically, teaching received by mouth and
teaching received by letter fall under the one command alike;
nothing in the sentence ranks one above the other, and nothing
expires one of them. Nor is paradosis a loose word. It is
the noun Paul uses when he praises the Corinthians for maintaining
“the traditions even as I have delivered them to you”
(1 Cor. 11:2), and the very verb and noun of our Lord’s
rebuke, “You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the
tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). What Scripture condemns is the
tradition of men; what it commands is the tradition of the
apostles. The difference is never the mode of transmission. It is
the source.
That verse proves that oral apostolic teaching was binding in
Paul’s day. Whether the Church’s later Tradition is that
teaching handed on, and not something else, is the fair next
question, and it has its own page:
How Doctrine Develops
sets out the tests for telling a development from a corruption.
Nor does the verse stand alone. Paul tells Timothy to entrust what
he has heard to faithful men who will teach others
(2 Tim. 2:2), which is a description of succession, not of
publishing. And he calls the Church, not the Scriptures, “the
pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). He makes
the tradition the standard of communion itself: “keep away
from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with
the tradition that you received from us” (2 Thess. 3:6)
— a discipline enforceable only if the recipients knew,
without a completed canon, exactly what they had received. And his
charge to Timothy is to guard a spoken deposit: “Follow the
pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me …
guard the truth that has been entrusted to you” (2 Tim.
1:13–14).
The Bereans do not tell against this. They were checking a new
apostolic claim against the Scriptures they had, which is exactly
what the Church has always said the faithful should do; and Luke
records that the result was that they believed Paul. He does not
record them concluding that they needed no apostle.
Clarity, Tested by Its Results
The claim that Scripture is clear in what matters is testable, and
the test has been running for five centuries. Sincere, learned,
prayerful readers of the same text disagree irreconcilably about
baptism, the Eucharist, church government, predestination, the
perseverance of the saints, and whether baptism saves. These are not
trivia; each side holds its position to be plainly taught.
Scripture itself is less confident about its own transparency than
the doctrine requires. Philip asks the Ethiopian whether he
understands what he is reading, and the answer is: “How can I,
unless some one guides me?” (Acts 8:31). Peter says Paul’s
letters contain “some things in them hard to understand, which
the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do
the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). That is an apostle
saying the apostolic writings are misread by people reading them
sincerely.
The Doctrine Has a Date
The early Church did not settle disputes this way. Confronted by
Gnostics who also quoted Scripture (and who claimed a secret
apostolic tradition of their own), Irenaeus did not answer
with the text alone. He answered by pointing to the churches founded
by apostles and to the public succession of their bishops, which he
treats as the test of whether a reading of Scripture is authentic
(Against Heresies 3.3). That argument makes no sense on
sola scriptura, and it is the argument the second century
actually used.
The Witness Next Door
There is a live demonstration of the difficulty, and it is the
reason this page sits in this section. Jehovah’s Witnesses
hold, with complete sincerity, that they follow the Bible alone and
no human tradition. They also hold that the Bible cannot be rightly
understood apart from the publications of the Governing Body, and a
Witness who reads his way to a different conclusion is removed from
the congregation for it.
A former Witness reading this will want to know whether the
Catholic alternative is simply the same arrangement with a
longer memory. It is not, and the differences are laid out
side by side on
Is This Just Another Governing Body?.
That is not an accusation of bad faith, but what happens when a
group takes perspicuity seriously and then has to keep order: an
interpreter appears, because one is needed. The Catholic claim is
not that an interpreter is convenient, but that Christ provided one,
and that the alternative to a Church with authority is not
no authority but an authority that has never been asked to justify
itself.
Two Charges in Closing
Tradition is unfalsifiable. Only if it were an oral
secret, and it is not: it sits on the table exactly as Scripture
does — in the creeds, the liturgies, the councils’
acts, and the Fathers, whose writings this site quotes precisely
so that the reader can check them. Irenaeus could recite the rule
of faith in a paragraph, and did. A claimed apostolic tradition
with no early attestation can be challenged on exactly that
ground, and such challenges are the ordinary business of
theology. The charge also proves too much: the canon itself
— the list that makes sola scriptura usable
— is known only by this same public tradition.
Private judgment with a larger budget. Indulgence
sellers and the Galileo tribunal were real, and this site does
not defend them. But both were failures of discipline and
prudence, and the Church has never claimed infallibility in
discipline, in administration, or in the lives of her officers
— the claim is narrow: that God preserves her from
defining error as doctrine. An abuse of office does not
void the office, or Caiaphas would have voided the priesthood
and Judas the apostolate. The question is not whether Church
authority can be exercised badly — plainly it can —
but whether Christ left an authority at all; and that question
the scandals do not touch.
The Reply in Brief
The doctrine is not taught in the book it makes the only teacher;
the
verse offered for it says profitable, not
sufficient, and commends the Scriptures Timothy had from
childhood, not a canon that did not yet exist. Its canon must be received
from outside itself, from the judgment of the Church. Paul identifies
two modes by which apostolic teaching was handed on, spoken and
written, lays one command — hold to the traditions
— on both, and calls the Church the pillar of the truth. And
its promise of clarity has produced,
among sincere readers of one text, the divisions it was supposed to
prevent.
None of which lowers Scripture. The Catholic position is that the
Bible is exactly what it claims to be, and that it was given to a
people with a living voice, in whose hands it was written, gathered,
preserved and read aloud long before anyone owned a copy. Take the
book out of that community and it does not become clearer; it
becomes whatever the reader already thought.
The full essay works through 2 Timothy 3 in its context, traces
the formation of the canon from Irenaeus to Carthage, sets out
Dei Verbum on the relation of Scripture and Tradition and
what the Church does not claim, examines the Reformers’
own admissions about the clarity of Scripture, and takes up the
strongest evangelical replies, James White’s in
particular, at the length they deserve.
