What Sola Scriptura Doesn’t Mean

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Reflections by Ryan Klein

When I first read the quote above, it reminded me of some things I used to hear people say when I was a very young Christian. “If it’s not in the Bible, then it’s not true”; “If you can’t point to it in a verse, I won’t believe it.” We believed the Bible contained all the truth in all its fullness—at least, all theological truth—and so we discouraged attempts to understand God that strayed beyond it. You don't need doctrine, and you don't need theology. All you need is the Bible alone. Sola scriptura, after all.

Anabaptists rejected infant baptism based on their understanding of Scripture.

 

Sola Scriptura was a keystone of the reformation, and as a young evangelical Christian, I held on to it tightly. But in college, I began to rethink what I thought it meant. In my sophomore year, for instance, I learned about the Arian Controversy of the fourth century, during which a priest named Arius argued that Jesus was not actually God, but was the “first created” being, adopted by God in a special way. To me that clearly sounded like going wrong by going outside the Bible. “The plain and clear truth of Scripture is that Christ is God,” I thought to myself. So I was shocked to learn how successful Arius had been in gathering a huge number of followers, and how it took the church several decades to decide that his beliefs were heretical. “How could it take so long to denounce him?”, I wondered. “The Trinity is right there in Scripture!”

But when I tried to point out where in Scripture, I had a hard time. I found a handful of passages that seemed to allude to it, but learned that Arius knew the same passages and had linked them together to support his view in a surprisingly convincing way. After some study, I began to see how he had come to his conclusion through an honest pursuit of God’s truth. And it wasn’t until I had waded through dozens of treatises from other early Christians like Athanasius, whose views on this eventually triumphed, that I could articulate why I thought he was wrong.

This forced me to admit that the doctrine of the Trinity is not “right there in scripture” in the way I’d thought. It’s in there, but very implicitly, rarely ever more than hinted at. In fact, I had to admit, the doctrine wasn’t ever fully articulated until those 4th century Christians wrote it down—quite “outside” of the Bible.

Fortunately, I learned, I had been looking at doctrine, and Sola Scriptura, the wrong way. I’d thought “the Bible alone” meant “no doctrines,” and had treated doctrine as “extra stuff” on top of what the Bible teaches; but in reality, doctrine is part of the process of understanding the Bible itself. Take the Arian controversy: Christians didn’t really understand certain parts of the Bible, I’d say, until they had debated various christological doctrines and settled on the doctrine of the Incarnation. So even though this and other doctrines originate outside of the bible, they’re not extra stuff—they’re the very fruit of thoughtful Bible study. Sola Scriptura can’t mean “no doctrines,” because if we’re going to understand scripture at all, we’re going to need them.

When I first read the above quote from Hubmaier, I figured he didn’t understand this, as I had not. Even if there are no actual baptisms of infants in scripture, a good doctrine of baptism might still call for infant baptism. It seemed to me that Hubmaier was simply rejecting the idea of doctrine entirely. But I realized I was wrong— he rejected infant baptism because he believed that what is in the bible implies a doctrine incompatible with it. That is why he said “If there is an instance, I’m defeated” and not “If there is no instance, I win.” It is a subtle difference, but a very important one; the latter neglects the fact that even if a practice or belief isn’t expressly taught in the Bible, it can be very Biblical indeed.

Another way of saying this is that there are two ways to treat the Bible: as the end of conversation, or as the beginning of it. To treat it as the end is to expect it to present crystal-clear teachings and instructions whenever you require them. To treat it as the beginning is to acknowledge the difficult work it expects of us, and to begin the work with people who will think deeply with you. If the Christians of the fourth century had treated it as the end, we probably would not have the doctrine of the Trinity. Fortunately for us, they, and almost all the leaders of the great Christian Tradition—including Hubmaier—have long seen the Bible as a beginning. So in this year of commemorating 500 years of the Reformation, I plan to embrace Sola Scriptura as the beginning, not the end.

Ryan Klein is the Marketing Coordinator of Templeton Press

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