Scripture Alone, and What That Was Meant to Mean

This site says on nearly every page that Scripture comes first and carries the most weight. That is not a neutral statement. It is one side of the oldest argument still running between Christians, and the honest thing is to say so, state the other side at full strength, and then show the work. What follows is not a defence of a slogan. Two slogans are going to be tested here, and neither survives whole.

The steps, in order: what the phrase actually meant when it was coined, what it has come to mean since, the Catholic case against it stated at its strongest, the texts each side leans on, what the early church did, and where that leaves a reader who is not trying to win.

1. What the phrase meant, and what it did not

Sola scriptura is Latin for "by Scripture alone," and it entered the argument in the 1520s as a claim about final authority in a dispute. Luther was not asserting that the Bible is the only thing a Christian may read, or that creeds and councils and teachers are worthless. He kept the creeds. He kept infant baptism, which is not spelled out in any verse. He wrote catechisms of his own and expected them to be used.

The claim was narrower and sharper than the slogan sounds: when a teaching is disputed, Scripture is the court of last appeal, and nothing else is. A council can err. A pope can err. A tradition can be a corruption that has simply been running a long time. Scripture is the standard those are measured by, and it cannot itself be overruled.

That is worth separating from what the phrase now often means in practice, which is a different thing wearing the same words. Solo scriptura, as it is sometimes called by the people who dislike it, is the idea that a Christian needs nothing but a Bible and his own reading of it: no creed, no history, no teacher, no church. Luther would not have recognised it, Calvin attacks it directly, and every Reformation confession is itself a piece of evidence against it, because a confession is a tradition being written down. A man who says he follows Scripture alone and belongs to a church with a statement of faith is already doing something more complicated than his slogan admits.

2. The case against it, stated by the man who made it best

Robert Bellarmine wrote the most careful Catholic answer to the Reformation on this point, in the fourth book of On the Word of God, and this site has translated it in full. It is worth reading him rather than a summary of him, because he does the thing this page is trying to do: he states the other side in their own words before he answers them. He quotes Luther, Brentius, Calvin and Chemnitz directly, and then says exactly where the disagreement lies.

The controversy, then, between us and the heretics consists in two things. The first is that we assert that in the Scriptures the whole necessary doctrine, whether of Faith or of morals, is not expressly contained; and therefore that, besides the written word of God, there is also required the unwritten word of God, that is, divine and apostolic Traditions. But they teach that in the Scriptures all things necessary to Faith and morals are contained, and therefore that there is no need of any unwritten word.

Bellarmine, On the Word of God IV.3 · our translation

Note the word he uses: expressly. Bellarmine is not claiming Scripture is wrong or short. He is claiming it is not explicit about everything a Christian must believe, and that the gap is filled by what the apostles handed on by mouth. His argument for that runs in three moves, and each one is harder to dismiss than people expect.

First, the church existed for two thousand years without a Bible. This is his strongest card and he plays it first.

For from Adam to Moses there was some Church of God in the world, and men worshipped God by Faith, Hope, and Charity, and by external rites… But there was no divine Scripture before Moses… Therefore for two thousand years religion was preserved by Tradition alone; therefore Scripture is not simply necessary. For as that ancient religion could be preserved without Scripture for two thousand years, so the doctrine of Christ could be preserved without Scripture for fifteen hundred.

Bellarmine, On the Word of God IV.4 · our translation

Second, Scripture itself says it is not the whole record. He cites John, and the verse is not obscure: "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" (John 21:25). And before that, from Christ's own mouth, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now" (John 16:12). Bellarmine presses the obvious question: the apostles heard those things, so what did they do with them?

And here the next verse has to be read, because it answers him. This page came within one verse of doing the thing it accuses others of. John 16:12BH is quoted constantly for the many things unsaid, and Christ does not leave the sentence there:

John 16:12-14

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

Christ says what the unsaid things were waiting for, and it is not a chain of memory. It is the Spirit of truth, who would guide those men into all truth (John 16:13). That is a promise about the apostles, and the apostles wrote. So verse 12 taken alone proves an unwritten remainder; verse 12 read with verse 13 says how the remainder was to arrive, and the New Testament is the thing that arrived. It does not settle the argument, because a Catholic can answer that the Spirit guided the church as well as the pen. But it does mean the verse cannot be used for the gap on its own, and this page will not use it that way.

And it is in no way credible that the Apostles, who had seen and heard those things, did not deliver them to the Churches; for they were not envious or forgetful, that they would not or could not tell them.

Bellarmine, On the Word of God IV.5 · our translation

Third, Paul commands the holding of unwritten tradition in so many words. "Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Whether by word, or our epistle. Paul puts speech and letter side by side and tells them to hold both.

That is the case, and it should not be waved off. Anyone who has only ever heard sola scriptura defended has not met the argument.

3. The one place Scripture shows its own hand

Before answering, here is a detail that decides more than any slogan, and almost nobody has been shown it.

The verse. Paul, saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders, closes with a quotation from Jesus: "remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35).

The problem. Jesus never says that in any of the four Gospels. Look for it and it is not there. It is one of the most quoted sentences in Christianity and it exists in the New Testament only because Paul repeated it out loud in a farewell speech that Luke happened to write down.

What that means. Chrysostom, reading Acts in the fourth century, saw it and said the plain thing:

And where said He this? Perhaps the Apostles delivered it by unwritten tradition; or else it is plain from (recorded sayings, from) which one could infer it.

St John Chrysostom, Homily XLV on the Acts of the Apostles

Read him whole and he does not settle it. He offers two possibilities: either the apostles handed the saying on by mouth, or it can be inferred from sayings that are recorded. That hesitation is worth keeping rather than trimming away, because a page arguing about tradition should not quietly improve a Father who was being careful. Either way the point stands: a sentence of Christ reached the church by a route other than the four Gospels.

What changes. Both slogans take damage from one verse. Unwritten apostolic tradition plainly existed, so anyone claiming the apostles left nothing but documents is contradicted by Acts. And the way we know this particular saying is that it got written down. The oral tradition that reached us reached us inside Scripture. Acts 20:35BH is simultaneously the best evidence that the apostles taught by mouth and a demonstration of how the church came to possess what they said.

4. Answering Bellarmine, one move at a time

On the two thousand years before Moses. The fact is true and the conclusion does not follow. Nobody disputes that God dealt with Adam, Noah and Abraham without a book. But an argument that Scripture is not necessary because it did not always exist proves too much: by the same reasoning the incarnation was not necessary, since God dealt with men for four thousand years without it. Things given later can still be decisive. And the trend inside Scripture runs the other way, toward writing: God writes the commandments Himself with His own finger, Moses is told to write, the kings are told to keep a written copy, Jeremiah is told to write, Habakkuk is told to write it plain. The direction of travel in the Bible is from spoken to written, not the reverse.

On John 21:25BH. The verse says what Bellarmine says it says, and it is worth agreeing with him plainly: God has spoken more words than are in the Bible. The Bible says so itself, and says the world could not hold the books. What John 21:25 does not say is that the unwritten remainder was preserved, or that anyone alive can produce it. It says the opposite of a claim to possess it: the world could not contain those books, and John did not write them. A verse establishing that much was left unwritten is a strange foundation for a body of doctrine that claims to know what the unwritten material contained.

On 2 Thessalonians 2:15BH. This is the verse that has to be handled honestly, and the honest handling costs the Protestant something. The Greek is paradosis, a handing-over, and the same word Paul uses approvingly here is the word Jesus uses in condemnation: "laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8), "making the word of God of none effect through your tradition" (Mark 7:13). One word, two verdicts, and the difference between them is not the mechanism but the source. Tradition from God, held: tradition from men, put aside. That distinction is the whole question, and neither verse tells you how to sort a given tradition into the right pile.

Here is what Calvin does with it, and it is not the dodge you might expect. Some Reformed writers had limited Paul's "traditions" here to rules of external order, which conveniently keeps doctrine out of it. Calvin refuses:

Some restrict this to precepts of external polity; but this does not please me… Hence, in my opinion, he includes all doctrine under this term, as though he had said that they have ground on which they may stand firm, provided they persevere in sound doctrine, according as they had been instructed by him.

John Calvin, Commentary on 2 Thessalonians 2:15

Calvin grants the hard reading. Paul means the whole apostolic teaching, delivered both ways. Wesley grants it too, in six words that concede the chronology. Commenting on this exact verse he writes: "Hold—Without adding to, or diminishing from, the traditions which ye have been taught—The truths which I have delivered to you. Whether by word or by our epistle—He preached before he wrote."

So what is left of the Protestant position after those concessions? Something narrower and, I think, sturdier than the slogan. Not that the apostles wrote everything down. They plainly did not. The claim is that what they wrote down is what we can check, and that a teaching which cannot be checked cannot be required. The apostolic deposit was oral first and written second; but the written is the part that survived in a form that can be laid on a table and read by anyone, and the oral is the part that has to be taken on the word of whoever is telling you about it now, fifteen or twenty centuries downstream.

5. What the early church actually did

This is where head-counting fails, because the Fathers say things that fit neither modern camp. Chrysostom, preaching on the verse the Reformers built on, goes further than most Protestants would dare:

Thou hast the Scriptures, he says, in place of me. If thou wouldest learn anything, thou mayest learn it from them… And if he thus wrote to Timothy, who was filled with the Spirit, how much more to us!

St John Chrysostom on 2 Timothy 3:16-17

"The Scriptures in place of me," said of an apostle's own presence, is a very high claim for a book. And the same Chrysostom, reading Acts, says the apostles handed on sayings by unwritten tradition. He holds both without embarrassment, because he was not in our argument. He never had to choose, and the reason he never had to choose is the thing both modern sides keep forgetting: in the early church the two were not rivals. The rule of faith and the Scriptures were the same message arriving by two routes, and the routes cross-checked each other. Irenaeus argues against the Gnostics from both at once, and the force of his argument is precisely that they agree.

The rivalry starts when they come apart, and they come apart when a tradition appears that Scripture does not carry and that the earliest church did not know. That is a real event, it has happened, and it is what the Reformation was reacting to. It is also why the Catholic answer is not stupid: if Scripture is not explicit about everything, some authority has to say what the gap contains, and Rome at least names who that is rather than leaving every man to fill the gap privately.

6. The circle, and why it does not close

The strongest thing said against sola scriptura is short: the church gave you the canon. No verse lists the sixty-six or the seventy-three books. The table of contents is not inspired. Councils at Hippo and Carthage settled a list at the end of the fourth century, and if you trust that list you have trusted the church about something Scripture does not tell you.

That is true, and it is not a trick question. The answer this site gives is not that the church had no role, but that recognising is not the same act as creating. The councils did not vote books into inspiration; they recognised what the churches had already been reading for centuries, and they argued about the edges precisely because the centre was not in doubt. A jeweller who identifies a diamond did not make it.

But the Protestant should notice what he has just conceded, and most do not. He has conceded that on the single question of which books are Scripture, he relies on the judgement of the fourth-century church. He cannot then treat that church as a stranger everywhere else. The canon page works this through in detail, including where the lists still differ.

Where this lands

Both slogans, tested, come back trimmed.

Scripture alone survives as a rule of appeal and dies as a description of history. Nothing overrules Scripture; a council can err and a tradition can rot, and there has to be a standard that stands outside the institution being examined or the examination is theatre. But the man who says the Bible is all he needs is standing in a church that has a name, holding a canon he did not compile, reading a translation he did not make, in a language shaped by fifteen centuries of Christians arguing about these words. He is drinking from a well he did not dig.

Scripture and tradition survives as a description of history and strains as a rule of appeal. The apostles taught by mouth; Acts 20:35BH proves it. But an unwritten deposit that cannot be produced cannot function as a check on anything, because there is no way to be wrong about it. When a doctrine appears in the twelfth century and is defended as apostolic tradition, the claim is unfalsifiable by design, and unfalsifiable claims are exactly what a standard is supposed to catch.

So this site holds the order it holds, and now the reason is on the table rather than assumed. Scripture first, because it is the part that can be checked and the part that judges. Then the church that received it, before the splits, heard as the best evidence of what the apostles meant, because men who learned from the apostles' students are better witnesses to apostolic teaching than we are. Then everyone after, heard fairly and never permitted to outvote either.

That is not a middle position adopted to keep the peace. It is what you get when you take Bellarmine's argument seriously enough to answer it instead of ignoring it, and take the Reformers seriously enough to notice which of their concessions they actually made. The church wrote the book. The book judges the church. Both sentences are true, and any position that can only say one of them has stopped reading early.

Related: Upon This Rock takes up the other half of the authority question, What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means, The Canon, What We Believe (Article 1), The Church, Who Believes What, Lines Drawn, 2 Timothy 3 deep dive, and Bellarmine's On the Unwritten Word in full. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Bellarmine translated from the Latin of the Opera Omnia; Chrysostom and the Fathers from the public-domain NPNF and ANF.