GroshLink

Thank-you to my campus ministry friend who passed along Sola Scriptura or Scriptura Solo? -- a URC pastor's blog post which discusses the use of creeds, confessions, and the role of the church. The topic of primary authority and our interpretative responses as individuals within a particular context to primary authority has become a topic of conversation which has occupied me over the past 2 months.  Alvin Kimel's Sola Scriptura post at Pontifications has also been of particular interest, note: it delves into Sola Scriptura in relationship to the Anglican Communion.

Here's a quote from Sola Scriptura or Scriptura Solo?

Sola Scriptura can easily be misunderstood to mean, "me-and-my-own-interpretation-of the-Bible-is-authoritative." The question we must ask is: should the Bible be read and interpreted with the church or apart from the church?

American biblicism answers that question a little differently the Protestant Reformers. The early-American biblicists, for example, demonstrated their misunderstanding of Sola Scriptura by adopting a subjective method of interpretation. Creeds, confessions, and historical theology were thrown out in order to proclaim the primacy of the Bible and re-establish pure Apostolic Christianity. In the book I mentioned in the previous post, Nathan Hatch notes that “[a]ny number of denominations, sects, movements, and individuals between 1780 and 1830 claimed to be restoring a pristine biblical Christianity free from all human devices.” The early-American biblicists held suspect doctrines and systems of theology developed by men, and viewed them as a likely perversion of genuine biblical truth. Men like Alexander Campbell, for example, vigorously sought to read the Bible as if he had no theological presuppositions whatsoever . . .

Alvin Kimel at Pontifications:

We need, in other words, an authoritative tradition to guide us in the proper intepretation of Holy Scripture. Lancelot Andrewes sought to find this authoritative tradition in the creeds and councils; but this recognition of a truly authoritative tradition can and will never be established within Anglicanism precisely because Anglicanism, along with all other Protestant churches, has denied the infallibility of the Church (see especially Articles XIX and XXI).

And so we come to our present crisis. We may disagree with the recent decisions of our ECUSA bishops; but these bishops are simply acting upon the central Protestant principle of private judgment, a judgment now liberated into the seductive freedom of modernity.

In responding to this crisis, it is tempting for the orthodox Anglican to invoke the example and confession of Martin Luther: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” But what if Luther is the problem? What if the Reformation was founded on a terrible blunder?

I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it on a previous post, but I appreciate John Stackhouse's modification of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral to a Protestant (Christian) tetralectic, http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=3925.   Anyone have some thoughts on the topic to help refine my thinking/conversation?