In Lesson 1, we learned that we must seek to answer the question, “Who is Jesus?” with humility and worship. In Lessons 2-3, we looked at the biblical witness in detail, seeing that the answer is that Jesus is the Lord of all, the promised Messiah, God the Son, incarnate in human flesh.
This step aims to clarify our searching of the Scriptures by asking another question: Do we rely on Scripture alone to answer the question, “Who is Jesus?”
At first glance, the obvious answer seems to be, “Yes, of course!” But we need to be careful here for two reasons.
The testimony of Scripture is very broad and deep, contained in many different genres of literature, and multifaceted.
Each of us can easily slide away from the posture of “the Bible is my authority for truth about Jesus” to the posture of “the Bible-as interpreted by me-is my authority for truth about Jesus.”
For you and I are not the first believers to read and interpret the Bible! No. Believers have been feasting on the glory of Christ in the Bible for thousands of years. There have been many summaries of biblical truth, tested by large numbers of wise and godly believers both when the summary was written and throughout the centuries that followed. We would be wise to consult these summaries, especially three concise and powerful summaries called “creeds”—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Creed in particular. These are summaries of biblical truth about the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, forged in the fires of deep debate about the divinity and humanity of Jesus. (The first two creeds are cited in the next step, and the last later in the course.)
These creeds have no authority in and of themselves. But inasmuch as they are faithful representations of the teaching of Scripture, they do have a subordinate authority. Scripture is our ultimate authority, and since the creeds contain biblical truth, therefore they have authority—authority derived from Scripture itself.
Sola Scriptura
This doctrine, vital to the Protestant Reformation, is called sola Scriptura, Latin for “Scripture alone.”
We can summarize the teaching of sola Scriptura by describing three characteristics the Reformers ascribed to Scripture, taken from the teaching of Scripture itself: Scripture is authoritative, sufficient, and clear.
God’s Word is authoritative: it is our ultimate, highest authority for what to believe and how to live.
God’s Word is sufficient: we can rightly understand the truths of the gospel through its pages, without need of supplement.
And God’s Word is clear: it explains the gospel with intelligibility and clarity to those whom God has given ears to hear.
But when we assert these three truths, there are at least three claims that we are not making.
We are not saying that we do not need the church or human teachers, because Ephesians 4 says that Jesus Himself gave to the church “shepherds and teachers,” so that believers might be “equip[ped] ... for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph 4:11, 12-13).
We are not saying that we do not need creeds or confessions, because every heretic claims to believe the Bible; therefore, we are served by writing down, outside of the Bible, what we believe the Bible is teaching – a creed or a confession.
We are not saying that we do not need any extrabiblical knowledge, because we need such knowledge to carry out our duties toward God. (For example, to understand the historical context of the Bible, or to know specifically how to obey the Bible in our individual contexts.)
So we do believe in sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as our foundation and authority; but we do not believe in “only Scripture.” To do so would be to divorce ourselves from the deep, rich, and faithful theological efforts of centuries past to understand God’s word. Doing so would place us and our thoughts at the center of our interpretation, rather than the Lord Jesus Christ, our Head. For Jesus-centered interpretation does not disregard his Body! Yes, Scripture is our only supreme authority. And the biblically faithful teachings of our forebearers serve us as we ourselves come to hear the voice of our Lord in Holy Scripture.