What Do We Mean by Sola Scriptura?

Sometimes during a discussion of what the basis of one's Christian faith is the subject of sola scriptura will come up. What is meant by that term is the scriptures only. In other words, the basis of one's faith can only be found in the scriptures and nowhere else.

Sometimes an objection to that premise is raised. It will be pointed out that the scriptures, specifically the New Covenant scriptures, or New Testament, didn't exist when the church was established. It would be decades before it would begin to be written, and that the New Testament in the form we have it woudn't be compiled and collated until well into the second century A.D., implying that the scriptures aren't as authoritative or important as we usually think. After all, if the early Christians could survive without them, maybe we make too much of them. So the question is, is that true? A second question is, upon what basis or foundation was the church established, anyway?

Concerning the concept of the scriptures only, it seems to me that the gist of what the new covenant scriptures teach is merely the written form of what the first century Christians had heard orally through Spirit led people, and that our advantage is in having all of it in written form, while some parts of the Roman Empire may not have heard all of the Spirit's truth by the end of the first century.

To put it another way, to say that the early Christians didn't have the new covenant scriptures is certainly true, at least in the form we have them today, but that does not mean they didn't have any gospel or doctrinal truths to guide them, incomplete as they might have been from time to time and /or place to place. Those very truths are what led them to Christ, the basis of their faith, in the first place. We surely don't mean to imply that because they didn't have the new covenant scriptures they were woefully lacking in gospel truths. Those truths, orally given, provided the foundation for their faith. Alexander Campbell called it their testimony. And as Hebrews 2:3,4 points out, that testimony was not without Holy Spirit confirmation. So when many of these same eye-witness testifiers began to write down what would later become the New Testament, their validity had already been established by God. So too the authority of what they wrote by the Holy Spirit.

So for us to talk of the scriptures only really means to confine ourselves to what the first century Christians had likely heard orally, and to not accept as equal to scripture anything not found there, whether it be someone's opinions, deductions, inferences, or, God forbid, claims of new revelations from God.

It further seems to me that the new covenant scriptures themselves give some indication of an (at that time) future transition from oral transmission to written form, such as:

Romans 10:8-15, which indicates the original transmission by way of oral testimony.

John 21:25, which indicates that John did not write down everything he knew but edited his gospel to tell the story the way he, or the Spirit, wanted it told. That means that John's disciples very likely heard much more from John's mouth than what we read from John's pen. Does that mean they had something we need but don't have? No, but it does indicate that they had more than we have. So why don't we have more writings from John's disciples? One reason may be the same as why books like the gospel of Barnabas were eventually discarded, i.e., they were not as trustworthy as John's writings.

1 Thessalonians 2:13 and 2 Peter 3:15,16, which seems to indicate a growing acceptance of the apostolic writings as being on a par with the old covenant scriptures, being inspired by God, and valuable for the edification of the disciples.

2 Timothy 3:16,17 and 2 Peter 1:3, both of which indicate we have all the scriptures we need, (interesting that this was written before the last scriptures were written!) But that doesn't mean we have all the oral teachings there were. There could have been countless more that merely reinforced what they had been taught and knew. If we consider the fact that there is a certain amount of repetitiveness even in the New Testament, such as the same or similar stories being told in more than one Gospel and very similar themes covered in both Romans and Galatians, it is likely that the oral transmission was even more repetitive, especially if this repetitveness came from various parts of the Roman Empire that may have had only limited contact with each other.

Does that mean the entire New Testament might be an edited version of the oral teachings the early Christians had? Quite possibly, I think. And not only that, it has been said that were it not for the specific problems some early churches had that Paul addressed, the new covenant scriptures might have been much shorter than what they ended up being! Even so, they still provide, as Paul says in Ephesians 2:20, the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. This is nothing to set aside lightly.

The point of all this is simply that those who might wish to minimize the importance of the new covenant scriptures simply because the church was established without them for decades are making a serious mistake. What the early Christians had orally we have in written form, and it is probable that the oral form was even more voluminous in total than the likely edited written form we now possess. That would be a good reason to cherish the written form all the more, since that is all we have. In some of the scriptures listed above both Peter and Paul point out that this is all we need. Surely we don't need less.

You may be wondering why a Christian would want to minimize the scriptures, anyway. The reason generally is a misguided attempt to eliminate legalism. But legalism is usually based on someone's opinions and interpretations being held as equal to scripture, or even as overruling it and not the actual scriptures themselves. The mishandling of scripture leads to legalism. The proper handling of it cannot, and will in fact defeat this and all other errors.

Surely avoiding legalism is a lofty goal, but the only way to do that is to hold closely to scripture as God given, and to it alone. Minimizing or devaluing scripture for any reason leaves one with no basis for his faith, for without the testimony of the eye-witnesses we have nothing.