Lesson 1: Sola Scriptura
Two Invalid Claims
The three doctrines of authority, sufficiency, and clarity must not be misunderstood, as if the Reformers taught that the Bible is authoritative so that there is no other authority we should listen to, or sufficient so that we need no aids to interpret it, or clear so that we need no teachers to help us understand it.
When we assert, “The Bible alone is our sufficient and clear authority for salvation and sanctification,” there are at least three claims that we are not making.
Invalid Claim #1: We Don’t Need the Church or Human Teachers
We reject the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that her interpretation of the Bible is the only correct one. The church is not the mother of the Bible; the Bible is the mother of the church! When Jesus told Peter, “On this rock I will build my church” (Matt 16:18), he didn’t mean that Peter was the first Pope. He meant that he would build his church upon the apostolic witness, which we have in the New Testament. After Christ’s resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter and the other apostles travelled the world, preaching and teaching and writing down… what? Inspired Scripture, given from the Lord Jesus by the Holy Spirit. That is how the apostles are the foundation of the church. Apostolic doctrine is authoritative, and that doctrine is written down in the New Testament. As Michael Horton points out, “Christ speaks to us every time we hear the Word of God preached (Rom 10:1–17) on the basis of the biblical canon that is now complete.” We need no pope or new apostles or prophets.
In rejecting the heresy described above, we are not saying that the church and human teachers are unnecessary. In fact, to say we don’t need the church because we have the Bible attacks the Bible, for the Bible itself says that we need the church.
Ephesians 4 says that Jesus Himself gave to the church “shepherds and teachers” (Eph. 4:11). Why? Verses 12–13 answer, “To equip the saints 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.” You need to faithfully attend a Bible-preaching church. You need to hear God’s Word preached. You need the church or you will be an unfruitful tree. Does not Hebrews 10:25 command us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some”?
Believers do need the church, and they do need human teachers.
Invalid Claim #2: We Don’t Need Creeds or Confessions
This is a danger sometimes called "biblicism": all we need is the Bible, not extrabiblical creeds or confessions.
In its first few centuries, church leaders wrote several creeds—explanations of what the Bible taught, made to defend the church from false doctrine. And during and after the Protestant Reformation, various movements wrote confessions of what they believed. Couldn’t they have just saved a lot of time and energy by simply saying, “We believe the Bible”?
No.
But why not? Don’t we believe the Bible? Isn’t the Bible our final authority for what we believe and practice?
Yes.
But we must say more because the First Presbyterian Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church, the Free Will Methodist Church, the Worldwide Victorious Triumphant Only True Church of God, and the Eastern Orthodox Church of St. Anthony, would all say, “We believe the Bible!”
Therefore, we need to write down, outside the Bible, what the Bible teaches. That's what creeds and confessions are for. So the reason for these creeds and confessions, as J. Ligon Duncan points out, was not to function as a rival authority to the Bible. Rather, “[i]f you look at the history of creeds and confessions, you’ll see that human-created creeds and confessions arose out of the church’s desire to be faithful to Scripture’s clear teaching.”¹ Creeds were not written to foolishly replace the Bible but to faithfully represent it.
And creeds were crucial because heretics abounded in the early church, spreading their lies and twisting Scripture. Yet they all said, “We believe the Bible.” Systematic theologian Robert Letham points out that "various groups, down through the centuries, have said they rely on the Bible only, and have gone on to repeat virtually every heresy that arose during the early church."² (Even today, groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons today quote the Bible!) So leaders of the ancient church gathered to formulate a statement that the heretics could not agree with.
So do creeds have authority? Yes. They have subordinate authority under Scripture’s ultimate authority. Theologian Greg Allison describes this distinction:
Whereas Scripture possesses magisterial (leading) authority for Protestant churches, tradition possesses ministerial (serving) authority. Whereas Scripture enjoys ultimate authority, tradition enjoys presumptive authority: given the fact that it is grounded on Scripture, rightly summarizes Scripture, and has been cherished by the church from the beginning, tradition is to be regarded as a true secondary authority until proven wrong.
—Gregg Allison, Two Views on Church Authority.
So creeds and confessions protect us from doctrines that seem to be biblical but are not. Doctrinal confessions from centuries past “help us say, ‘We believe and teach this because we believe the Bible—and by the way, 20 centuries of Christians agree with us.’”³
Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything in every creed and confession is perfect! We need to judge even creeds and confessions by Scripture.
Here’s what the process of using creeds shouldn’t look like:
- We read a Bible verse and think it says X (or hear a preacher quote Scripture and claim X).
- But we remember that the creeds we learned say Y instead.
- So we accept what the creeds say on their own authority.
#3 is where we have a problem! So the process should look like this instead:
- We read a Bible verse and think it says X (or hear a preacher quote Scripture and claim X).
- But we remember that the creeds we learned say Y instead.
- So we look into why they said Y and not X.
- We discover the problem with our initial reading and are rescued from going astray.
Believers do need creeds and confessions.