Scripture alone (sola scriptura)

The Reformation slogan is often heard as a claim that nothing but the Bible has any standing. That is not what the Reformers argued, and the difference matters.

Their claim was about norms. Scripture is the final court: every other authority, whether council, pope, bishop, tradition or private conviction, is answerable to it and correctable by it. Luther's statement at Worms in 1521, that he could not recant unless convinced by Scripture or plain reason because popes and councils have contradicted one another, is the position in its native form. It is a claim about which authority is ultimate when authorities conflict.

That left plenty of room for the rest. The Reformers used the ecumenical creeds, wrote confessions and catechisms and required subscription to them, quoted the church fathers constantly, and expected ordinary Christians to be taught rather than to work it out alone. Lutheran and Reformed churches promptly built confessional structures more detailed than anything medieval Catholicism had imposed on the laity. Theologians distinguish this classical position, sometimes labelled the norming norm above the normed norms, from the later view that the Bible functions alone in the hands of the individual reader with no interpretive community at all. That stronger position, sometimes called solo scriptura to mark the difference, belongs to eighteenth and nineteenth-century restorationist and revivalist movements and is now widespread in independent evangelicalism.

Supporting the principle are two further Reformation claims: the perspicuity of Scripture, that what is necessary for salvation is clear enough to be grasped by an ordinary reader, and the sufficiency of Scripture, that it contains what is needed and nothing further need be revealed. Both were arguments for translation and for putting the text in lay hands, which is the practical legacy the principle is remembered by.

The strongest objection to the principle is about the canon. The Bible does not contain a table of contents. The list of books was recognised over centuries by the church, disputed at the edges into the fourth century and beyond, and settled differently in different communions. If Scripture is the sole final authority, something outside Scripture had to determine what Scripture is.

Protestant answers vary: that the canonical books are self-authenticating and were recognised rather than conferred; that the church's recognition was a fallible historical act that happened to be correct; that the question, while awkward, does not restore to the church a general authority to define doctrine. Catholic and Orthodox theologians regard none of these as adequate and take the canon as the clearest demonstration that Scripture emerged from within a living tradition and cannot be set over against it.

The Catholic position, stated at Trent and refined at the Second Vatican Council, is that Scripture and tradition flow from a single source and are interpreted authoritatively by the church's teaching office, which is not above the word of God but serves it. Eastern Orthodoxy speaks of Scripture as the pre-eminent part of a wider tradition that includes the councils, the liturgy, the fathers and the icons, and locates interpretation in the consciousness of the whole church rather than in a defining office.

The canons themselves differ. Catholic Bibles include seven books Protestants set aside at the Reformation as apocryphal, following the Hebrew rather than the Greek collection; Orthodox canons are wider still and not uniform among themselves; the Ethiopian Orthodox canon is the widest of any Christian tradition. A reader who wants to see the practical consequence can note that the passage most often cited for prayer for the dead sits in Second Maccabees, inside some of those canons and outside others.