Blog (1) Lee Gomila

Reading the Epilogue in the textbook made me immediately think about Protestant sects of Christianity and their relationship to the doctrine of Sola scriptura. The Latin term's English translation is "by scripture alone", and the basic teaching is that the bible contains all knowledge necessarily for salvation and is the sole source of religious authority. Sola scriptura is one of the strongest foundations of the Protestant Reformation, and this stands in opposition to the Catholic teaching that religious authority comes from three equal places: scripture, sacred tradition, and the church clergy (mainly, the pope).

As a person who spends a lot of time thinking about and conversing about faith issues, the idea of Sola has always bothered me, especially after learning bible history. As we are learning in this class, there exists an incredible amount of evidence of tampering with biblical texts, and beyond that, vastly different motivations for writing the texts in the first place. The way I see it, subscribing to Sola is like assuming the bible fell out of the sky written in English addressed to 21st century middle class Americans. This is quite simply just not the case. How can you say that scripture is the only source of religious authority when we can't even agree on exactly what the correct words are? Or what was added to the text centuries after being written? And how exactly do we determine what exactly constitutes as scripture? The bible certainly doesn't give us an answer there.

Another thing to consider is that the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is a logical fallacy in and of itself. Nowhere in the bible is there a verse saying that scripture is the only source of religious authority. In fact, who at the time of writing a Christian/Jewish text knew it would be considered "scripture" thousands of years later? Sola can't hold that the bible is the *only* religious authority when the bible itself does not purport to be so.

These are just my thoughts about this important subject. I do think the bible is important and relevant, but certainly not the only thing we should look to for matters of faith. And when we do look to the bible for these things, it's extremely important to be educated about what exactly we're reading.





Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament. Fourth edition. New York: 2008, p 487-499