Bacon 🦬

Roman Catholics never seem to understand the doctrine of sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is not the belief that Holy Scripture is the only authority, nor that an individual can infallibly interpret the Scriptures. Rather, it is the doctrine that Holy Scripture is the only infallible authority and therefore has supreme authority over the church. It is not the only authority. The church has real authority, along with other forms of authority in the Christian life. Those who hold to sola scriptura also maintain that Scripture is to be understood within the life of the church. It was given to the church. It guards and defines the boundaries of the church. It shapes the life of the church. The church receives it, interprets it, and works through it, not as a single infallible institution, but as a body that is accountable to the Word. A central problem in Roman Catholic argumentation is their equivocation on the word infallible. They blur the distinction between infallible and inerrant, and then build an entire doctrine on that confusion. Infallible means unable to err by nature. It is not merely that something happens to be correct in a given instance. It means it cannot be wrong. Holy Scripture is infallible because it is the very Word of God. God cannot err, and therefore His Word cannot err. Everything Scripture says carries full authority because it is true without any possibility of error. Human beings, however, can make inerrant statements without being infallible. “Jesus Christ is the Messiah” is an inerrant statement. “My name is Joseph Spurgeon” is an inerrant statement. Even something like the table of contents of Scripture can be correct. The church can recognize the canon without error. But none of that makes the church infallible. It simply means that, at times, it has spoken truly. Infallibility is not something that comes and goes. It is not something that appears in rare moments and then disappears. If a person or institution is infallible, that is a property of what they are, not a temporary condition they enter into under certain circumstances. That is exactly where the Roman doctrine of papal infallibility breaks down. It claims the Pope is infallible only in specific moments, under carefully defined conditions. That is not infallibility. That is a redefinition of the term to protect a doctrine that cannot stand on its own. And historically, this was not some universally held belief quietly passed down from the apostles. In the Middle Ages, the Franciscans, particularly in their disputes over poverty, began pressing arguments that would effectively bind the Pope to prior authoritative statements. They were attempting to lock in earlier papal rulings so that a later pope could not overturn them. In response, Pope John XXII rejected those claims outright. He saw exactly what was happening. To grant that kind of infallibility would place the pope in submission to prior declarations in a way that undermined his own authority. He resisted it, and the idea was not accepted as settled doctrine at the time. Only much later, under very different pressures, was papal infallibility formally defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. It was not the clear, consistent teaching of the church through the ages. It was a deformation, argued for, resisted, and finally imposed. Sola scriptura cuts through all of this confusion. It locates infallibility where it actually belongs, in the Word of God. Scripture alone cannot err. Scripture alone carries absolute authority. The church has real authority, but it is always a derived and accountable authority. It can speak truly, but it is never incapable of error. Everything must be judged by the Word of God, because only the Word of God is infallible.