My problems with sola scriptura

I spent sometime last week wandering around in the Evangelical Protestant blogosphere last week and some of those folks visited here as well! That’s great and welcome!!

When a Catholic and a sola-scriptura Protestant discuss and debate for a short while however, it becomes clear that the two are speaking different languages, coming from two different places. If women are from Venus and men from Mars, I suspect that the planets for Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians are even further aparet in their orbiting spheres!

Part of the problem for me is the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura – the bible alone! As a Catholic raised with the sacraments as the main focus of faith, this heavy all encompassing emphasis on the scriptures is quite a jolt to the system, (although being raised in America, I was surprised to see how some of that doctrine had even affected how I look at things?!) Protestant bible-believing, sola scriptura Christians depend on their reading of “the word” as totally and completely authoritative.

I’m going to raise a couple of problems with that today and then maybe a little bit more the rest of the week depending no my time.

First of all, for the bible to be the final authority and reading the word to be paramount, means that 70% of the world’s population today cannot share in that because they are illiterate. Come to think of it, kids and even adults in this country who had learning disabilities or other problems that limited their reading ability are also left out!! So how can the scriptures be the sole authority of what God wants when it’s unavailable to millions of people? But not just today! Through most of history people were unable to read. Maybe that’s why Christ ordered his disciples to go out to PREACH The gospel but he never told them to write anything down and pass it out! A beautiful leather bound edition of the King James Bible with gold gilded pages, (in English!) did not drop out of the sky as Jesus ascended upwards!!

Which brings me to the second problem I have with Sola SCriptura – the scriptures as we have them, did not exist for the first 400 years of Christianity! The early Christians (St. Paul included) did NOT have a bible to thump. And finally when the bible was compiled, it was the Catholic church that compiled it, decided which books were authorittive and which ones weren’t AND it was on the authority of the pope that the canon of the bible was closed. So Sola Scriptura Christians that believe that the bible is the sole authority seem to forget or not know that that bible was put together under the authority of the Catholic Church.

Any sola scriptura Christians want to tackle those?

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