This is slightly off-topic, as it relates more to the Magisterium than to tradition per se.
Once upon a time I was an evangelical missionary, a member of a non-denominational pentecostal church. The church had quite a few missionaries working around the globe.
One night, when I was back in the States on furlough, I attended a meeting of the Church’s missions comittee where each of the missionaries was asked to present an update on his or her work.
One of the church’s missionaries was a pastor in Brazil who worked with his association’s Bible School/Seminary. Unbeknownst to himself or any 'sides me at the meeting, he gave one of the greatest arguments in favor of the teaching Magisterium (and hence against sola scriptura) I’ve ever heard from the lips of an evangelical.
As justification for the necessity of the Bible school, and hence his labors, he told stories of several new converts who, in the zeal of their newfound faith would grab up their Bibles and run off to the four corners to preach Christ, tossing in, out of the naivete of their nascent faith, some of the strangest doctrines you ever heard based on their private readings of the Bibles they’d been handled.
Hence, the necessity of the Bible school, to give these Christian pups a proper grounding in the Scriptures equivalent to the zeal in their souls.
What? I thought. Scripture Alone wasn’t working? These zealous preachers were being guided by the Holy Spirit into full-blown cacophanies of heterodoxy.
Apparently. And then he gave some examples of the specific errors which his work at the Bible school had to correct. Not a one of these converts, despite their Bibles and the guidance of the Spirit, had arrived at an understanding of the deity of Christ, of the Holy Trinity, of the propitiation of Christ’s blood, or even salvation by faith alone.
So they were corraled into the Bible school to be trained up in the way the denomination would have them go. They emerged some two years later. firm in the faith they’d learned not from the Scriptures, but passed on to them by word of mouth from teachers who had, likewise, learned their faith from others before them. Not a one of them in all that time, professions of belief in the Scriptures Alone notwithstanding, had learned their doctrines from the Scriptures. Instead, after having had the faith handed on to them by teachers and preachers appointed in their church, they were sent out to preach the gospel and guide others into the Truth in their turn.
We’re fast approaching the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses. And I venture to assert that in the half-millenium since then there hasn’t been a single Protestant who has learned his doctrine direct from the Scriptures in the privacy of his own study.
Leastwise, not a one who didn’t need to be straightened out afterwards.
Of course, the more astute among Protestants acknowledge all this. Such Protestants therefore argue that it’s not the individual who is guided into all truth through Scripture Alone, but it’s the church which is guided by the Holy Spirit as it reflects on the teachings of the Scriptures.
But then, how does that differ in any substantive way from the Catholic doctrine of the Magisterium?
