Hi tranc7,
Plenty of good arguments against sola scriptura and other Protestant nonsense have been offered here. In addition, I would recommend reading
this article by Thomas Storck for a brief review of them.
Ultimately, though, to accept Protestantism, you have to believe that over a millennium’s worth of Christians got just about everything wrong, and that God allowed them to get everything wrong (and very likely be damned for it), until Martin Luther came along and set us all straight. If that’s not monstrous hubris, I don’t know what it is.
There’s also the problem, also alluded to here, that sola scriptura has not in fact given us the one true way of understanding the word of God. It’s given us hundreds, possibly even thousands, of different, conflicting hermeneutics. Is our God a God of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty? Because that’s exactly what Protestantism has given us.
Finally, there’s the problem of Protestantism’s intellectual origins. Here I’ll go into a little historical diatribe, because Luther’s original works were situated in a larger, centuries-old philosophical tradition. Thomas Aquinas and the other Scholastics were big on natural theology, i.e., efforts to discern God and the good through the exercise of reason. By and large they were successful: the Thomist synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelianism is profoundly integrative and coherent.
The problem is that this synthesis was unpopular in some intellectual circles of the day because Aristotle’s works had been reintroduced in the West by way of the Muslim philosopher Averroes, whom Aquinas cited frequently in Summa Theologica. As you know, this was in the late 13th century, when the Muslims had for some time been kicking Christendom’s butts in the Crusades. So this association was naturally unpopular. The Thomist synthesis was, moreover, very complicated and cumbersome, and there was a desire to return to a more sincere and authentic Christian practice, stripped down of its philosophical trappings.
So Ockham came along and basically declared the whole of classical essentialism false, allowing him to jettison all that philosophical junk and strip down Christian theology considerably. The problem is that classical essentialism is
obviously true. Rejecting it and embracing Ockham’s nominalism leads you to the ridiculous conclusion that words like “man” and “cat” are completely meaningless, so that I am no more necessary related to my coworker than a tomato is to a skyscraper. In other words, it turned our understanding of creation from a rational, orderly, harmonious order of being into a total chaos, a mess of radically particularized entities floating freely through the void. It also destroys the basis for all knowledge, since it denies that intuition can be trusted. (Michael Allen Gillespie draws a straight line from Ockhamite nominalism through the ages to Nazism and Stalinism).
Luther was a nominalist, and the reason he believed sola scriptura was because he believed it was impossible for man to know anything about God except what God revealed to him directly (i.e., because reason was insufficient to discern truth). Hence, the Scriptures, which were the collected record of God’s revelation.
Again, the problem is that nominalism is false and ridiculous, and obviously so. If sola scriptura only makes sense in that context, it follows sola scriptura is bogus.
For more reading in this regard, I recommend (a) Michael Allen Gillespie’s
The Theological Origins of Modernity and (b) Edward Feser’s
The Last Superstition.
*
Which leads me to my next point.
by your post, Can I respectfully ask if you can clear them up.
