Richard Swinburne vs. Sola Scriptura

The slogan of Protestant confessions, “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself” (e.g. Article 1 of the Westminster Confession) is quite hopeless. The Bible does not belong to an obvious genre which provides rules for how overall meaning is a function of meaning of individual books. We must have a preface. And if not a preface in the same volume, a short guide by the same author issued in the same way as the Bible, providing disambiguation and publicly seen by the intended audience to do so. Such a guide would be an extension of the original work. And that said, there is of course such a guide. It is the Church’s creeds and other tradition of public teaching of  items treated as central to the Gospel message . . . the Bible. . . . must therefore be interpreted in the light of the Church’s teaching as a Christian document. (Richard Swinburne, Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy [Oxford: Clarendon, 1992], 177).