What really baffles me how Simka is a staunch advocate of SS and has explicitly said it was practiced in the early church as a doctrine,yet has yet to confirm when,where and by whose authority it was declared a doctrine?
Once again, you misinterpret for your own purposes what I have said. If I applied the term “doctrine” to SS, it was used as a synonym for “teaching”. I make no claim that any authority ever formally declared SS to be official church doctrine. But that hardly invalidates it as a worthwhile practice.
So let me try once more to clarify where I stand.
I have learned that, in the very early days of Christianity – that is, in the generations immediately following the apostolic era – after the Apostles themselves had all died – there was a common practice among church leaders and teachers to insist that all tenets of the faith were to be subject to the test of Scripture (the inspired, written Word of God). If the teaching, or tenet of faith was found to be in conflict with Scripture, that teaching or tenet of faith was to be rejected.
I don’t pretend to know whether this practice of the early church (of identifying Scripture as the ultimate authority) was ever given a name, if it was ever recognized as a “doctrine”, or if it was ever anything more than “common practice”. In the days when proclaiming this teaching met with no effective opposition, it met with tacit approval throughout the church. There was never any need to give it a name, or a title, or to identify it formally as a doctrine. “Scripture over everything else” was simply the way things were done.
Of course, at the same time, there were also important traditions within the church, many widely held as important, widely taught as useful standards for Christian living. Some were even held to have Apostolic origin.
(One example that comes to mind is the traditional date for celebrating Easter. Two different arms of the church identified two different dates, and each claimed Apostolic authority for its tradition.)
But these traditions never rose to the level of doctrinal authority, which had been reserved for Scripture alone. No early church father ever appealed to tradition to resolve any doctrinal issue.
(I could quote you paragraph after paragraph from early writings, but short of laying the entire documents before you, you will accuse me of taking such citations out of context, so I cannot see the point. You can read for yourself the recorded writings of Cyprian, Origen, Hippolytus, Athanasius, Firmilian, and Augustine, to name a few. Taken in context, their views are consistent with Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote: “We make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings.”)
Over time, widespread acceptance of this common practice gradually began to diminish. I cannot tell you what the precise time-frame or schedule was. But by the 16th century it had reached a point where advocates within the church sought to draw it back to its former standard. They claimed that the church had fallen away from its former reliance on Scripture, and had been elevating its traditions to authority over Scripture, which in turn had led to acceptance of practices which were contradictory to Scripture. One area more than any other was of special concern, and that was the church’s teaching on the requirements for salvation. I cannot tell you at what point in time, or by whom, the Latin name, “sola Scriptura” was first applied to the reformers’ position. But the name was a suitable summary of the position it represented. Its fundamental teaching was that, as in days of old, the church should again acknowledge that Scripture contains all the knowledge necessary for salvation and Christian living.
The church said “No.”