By Scripture Alone

By Scripture Alone

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 22, 2017

Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:14-17; Matthew 22:34-40

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Poor old Martin Luther. He knew that his soul needed salvation. He did everything the Roman Catholic Church of his day, his church, told him he had to do to procure it. Nothing worked. He was still convinced that he deserved nothing but eternal damnation because he couldn’t possibly do enough good things to make up for his sin, whatever he thought his sin was. His church, the only church of any consequence in western Europe in his day, had all kinds of things it told people to do to save their souls. Mostly it said be a good Catholic. Do what we tell you to do, and don’t do what we tell you not to do, and you’ll be fine. So brother Martin did what his church told him to do, and he didn’t do what his church told him not to do; and still his soul was not at peace. He still feared eternal torment in hell. Last week we talked about how he found the solution to his crisis in the New Testament writings of St. Paul, especially in the book of Romans. He found that salvation doesn’t come from anything we do or don’t do. It comes from God as a free and unmerited gift of grace. The Bible did for him what his church could not do. It assured him of God’s love and forgiveness. In other words, it assured him of God’s grace. He found an assurance of salvation not in the church but in the Bible.

Luther’s finding of an assurance of salvation not in the church but in the Bible led him to what we can call the second great insight of the Protestant Reformation. We talked about the first great insight last week. It is “by faith alone.” It is the understanding that grace comes freely from God not as a reward for our good works. The second great insight of the Protestant Reformation is “by scripture alone.” Sola Scriptura, the early Reformers said in Latin. By scripture alone. By scripture alone do we find the truth. In the scriptures alone do we find the means of salvation. Everything necessary for salvation is there in the Bible. Truth is in the Bible, and nothing is true that is not grounded in the Bible. That’s what the Reformers proclaimed. It has been a foundational confession of Protestant Christianity ever since.

It is perhaps hard for us Protestants to understand just how revolutionary the proclamation “by scripture alone” was when the Reformers first made it. Yet it was revolutionary. It was revolutionary because it contradicts one of the central teachings of Catholic theology. The Roman Catholic Church taught in Luther’s time and (in somewhat modified form) teaches today that it is what it calls the depository of the faith. The content of the faith and the truths of the faith are found in the Church. In Roman Catholic theology the traditions of the Church are an central source for finding the truths of the faith. Yes, the Bible is part of the Catholic tradition, but it is not all of the Catholic tradition. Because the Bible is a part of the Catholic tradition but not all of it, the Bible is one place where we can look to find divine truth, but it is not the only place where we can look for such truth. We look to the Church for truth, not just to the Bible. And because the Church is the depository of the faith we must understand that the Bible says what the Church says it says. The Church has always directed Catholic Christians to look to the Church for truth and not to go off reading the Bible on their own. That way, the Church teaches, lies error. You avoid error by listening to what the Church says is true and then believing it.

That surely is what Martin Luther was taught as a child and later as a monk. Yet he did not find the assurance of salvation he needed in the teachings of the Church. He found it in the Bible. But how could that be? The Church is the depository of the faith. The Church holds the truth. The Church knows what’s right, what’s true. The Church guards against falsehood. Yet the Church’s truth didn’t take away Luther’s dread over eternal damnation. The Bible did that, not the Church. Something was wrong. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Yet Luther couldn’t deny his own experience of salvation, and because he couldn’t deny his experience of salvation he had to deny one of the primary teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. He had to deny that the Christian faith was grounded primarily in the teachings of the Church. No, Luther discovered that the Christian faith is founded in the Bible not in the Church. The Church said, and says, we have what you need for salvation. Luther said no, you don’t. The Bible does. Luther went on to say that the faith is grounded in the Bible alone. In scripture alone.

When the Reformers reached that conclusion they overthrew the existing religious order in Europe. If people don’t need the Church to be saved that power, importance, and role of the Church in the life of faith are greatly diminished. The power, importance, and role of the Bible greatly increased. Luther wanted ordinary people to read the Bible more than listen to some priest from the pulpit. So he did what Wycliffe had done in England before him. He translated the Bible into the language of the people. The Church used a Latin Bible that relatively few people could read and understand. Luther translated it into German so that anyone who could read or who heard it read aloud could understand it. He translated both Testaments. In doing so he essentially created what became high literary German.

The Church taught, and teaches, that the priest stands between the people and God and mediates between them. Luther said no, every Christian can have a direct, personal relationship with God. And the primary way we tend that relationship is through studying the Bible. The Church taught, and teaches, that people need the guidance of the Church in order to understand—and not misunderstand—the Bible. Luther said no, each Christian can read and understand it on her own. Luther never went as far as some churches do today when they call themselves “Bible churches” rather than Christian churches, but he elevated the role of the Bible in the life of faith in dramatic ways.

Luther and others Reformers after him said “by scripture alone.” By that they meant that all we need for salvation is the Bible. God’s truth is in the Bible and not anywhere else. That’s what they said, although they didn’t entirely mean it. Luther and others held on to some things that aren’t really biblical. The best example if infant baptism. No one ever baptizes an infant in the Bible. Adult believers are baptized in the Bible, but not infants. Perhaps Luther and the others held on to infant baptism because they still believed that the soul of a child or even of a baby who dies unbaptized can’t get to heaven. Not even the Roman Catholic Church teaches that today, but it was a common belief in Luther’s time. Lutherans and all other reformed traditions other than Unitarianism also kept the traditional understanding of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity has a few relatively weak biblical roots, but it is never really developed there. The phrase “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” appears only once in the Bible, at Matthew 28:19. Yet Trinity is so essential to that other foundational Christian confession, that of Incarnation, that the Reformers kept Trinity despite it’s tenuous connection to the Bible. So they said by scripture alone, but they never quite went as far in their thought as that phrase suggests they might have.

So here we are 500 years later. Like Luther we believe that everything that is necessary for salvation, or for understanding the dynamics of salvation, can be found in the Bible. In some ways the Protestant focus on the Bible has problems. The Bible is an extremely complex book, and it’s not as easy to understand as on its surface it often appears to be. Still, the Protestant proclamation by scripture alone is very good news. The Bible is indeed something that anyone who’s literate can read. It has been translated into virtually every human language that there is. In the Bible everyone can have access to the foundational truths of both the Jewish and Christian religions. We may disagree on whether or to what extent the Bible is the inspired word of God as our passage from 1 Timothy says it is, but we all agree that our Christian faith is grounded in it and could not exist without it. I believe that it is useful for all of us to read the Bible with the help of a good guide of some sort. That’s why I wrote my book Liberating the Bible. Yet we also believe that reading the Bible is a worthwhile activity for every Christian. We don’t look for divine truth much of anywhere else. We look for it in scripture. In scripture alone.

Yet the complexity of the Bible is why I included the reading from Matthew in this morning’s service. It is Matthew’s version of the Great Commandment, the commandment to love God, neighbor, and self with our whole being. Matthew has Jesus say the “the Law and the Prophets” depend on that great commandment of love. OK, but what are the Law and the Prophets? They are the two parts of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, that were already considered to be sacred scripture in the first century. Jesus tells us here that all scripture depends on the commandment of a threefold love, love of God, neighbor, and self. And indeed they do. There are certainly passages in the Bible that don’t sound much like they’re directing us to love God, neighbor, and self. But I once read that the great rabbis of the Jewish tradition say that everything in the Bible is about love; and if you can’t see how some passage is about love, keep working at it until you discover how it is. That’s good advice for us Christians too. We say our faith is guided by scripture alone, and for us our understanding of scripture must be guided by Jesus’ great commandment of love. By scripture alone means by love alone. I don’t know if Luther would have put it quite that way. Probably not, if only because he was such a horrible anti-Semite. But for us, today, by scripture alone must mean by love alone. That’s what Jesus says in Matthew. I pray that we will take his word to heart.

So there we have one of the Reformation’s foundational principles. By scripture alone. Most Protestant churches haven’t ever lived that notion to the full. Most, including the Congregationalists, baptize infants, which isn’t biblical. Still, we know that the Bible is our surest guide to the Christian faith. It gives us most of all Jesus’ commandment of love. If we will always remember to interpret the Bible in the light of that great commandment we can’t go wrong. May we always live by that overarching truth of the Bible. For us by scripture alone must be by love alone. May it be so. Amen.