I’ve often heard Catholic apologists talk about the ‘material sufficiency’ of the Bible, affirming that the Bible holds everything that we need, explicitly or implicitly, for our salvation. This is of course opposed to formal sufficiency, found within sola scriptura which says everything needed for our salvation is clearly and explicitly given, and no interpreter is required.
That’s a very extreme form of sola scriptura–what some modern Protestant apologists dismissively call “sola scriptura.”
The more traditional, classic Protestant position (as found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, for instance) is that “a due use of the ordinary means” is sufficient to give us clarity on all necessary points of doctrine.
I would argue that “formal sufficiency” is really “material sufficiency” minus a confidence in the authority of the Church. The heretical aspect of sola scriptura, in other words, does not consist so much in what is affirmed about Scripture (though Reformed Protestants do often make flawed claims about Scripture, such as that it is self-attesting and self-interpreting) but in what is denied about the Church.
Anyway, I have two questions regarding this:
- How far back does this belief in material sufficiency go? I’ve read that Cardinal John Henry Newman and Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) accepted it. I think Cardinal Newman is the earliest I’ve heard though. I believe this position of material sufficiency is taken by Catholic apologists in order to account for the wealth of early church fathers that seem to account for at least some degree of sufficiency found in scripture
Material sufficiency–i.e., that all necessary doctrine is found in Scripture–is indeed affirmed by several of the Fathers. I believe that Augustine both affirms and denies it, in different places. He’s often annoying like that:shrug:. Actually, his apparent inconsistency points to the fact that the Fathers didn’t think about this in terms of Scripture vs. tradition. Augustine can quite easily say in one place that Scripture contains all doctrine and in another say that infant baptism doesn’t need Scriptural evidence because it’s part of tradition (it’s notable that the Fathers are most likely to appeal to extra-Scriptural tradition on liturgical issues).
But is a ‘material sufficiency’ view found in any of the Catholic councils, particularly Trent for example?
Trent certainly does not affirm it. It appears at first glance to deny it, but it uses the formula “et . . . et” (both/and) rather than “partim . . partim” (partly/partly). I believe that the latter was used in an early draft and then changed, but perhaps I remember wrongly. So Trent leaves a door open for material sufficiency, while appearing to affirm a “two-source theory.”
Can we find material sufficiency in the teachings of the earlier theologians like St Thomas Aquinas?
It’s pretty standard among the scholastic theologians, actually. They are academics, treating Scripture as the ultimate theology textbook, although of course they read Scripture within the limits laid down by the Church. (See Aquinas, ST I, Question 1, especially
article 10, reply to objection 1).
A very influential account of medieval views on this point is that of Heiko Oberman, a great Protestant scholar who was the teacher of my own doctoral advisor. Oberman distinguished between what he called “Tradition I” (holding to material sufficiency, with tradition as the interpreter of Scripture) and “Tradition II” (holding to a two-source theory, in which Scripture and Tradition are two distinct sources of revelation). He argued that T1 was held by the theologians and T2 by the canon lawyers, for the most part. (Something that people who aren’t scholars of medieval church history often don’t realize is that canon law was an independent discipline, which in the Middle Ages tended to bear primary responsibility for issues of ecclesiology and church authority.) I think that this generally holds up, although Oberman does need to be used with caution on these matters due to his strong Protestant bias (seen best in his essay “Quo Vadis, Petre,” a rather testy response to Vatican II–his reading of the Fathers in that essay is typical Protestant propaganda and I find his take on Irenaeus particularly unconvincing). Oberman’s ideas have more recently been taken up by the Reformed author Keith Mathison, who is the originator of the sola scriptura/solo scriptura distinction which you will often find Reformed apologists making.
