Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Peter Enns on the Problematic Nature of Sola Scriptura

I have addressed the overwhelming biblical evidence against the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura many times on this blog, exegeting texts such as 2 Tim 3:16-17; 1 Cor 4:6 and other passages. In his recent book Peter Enns commented on this practice/doctrine thusly:

The long Protestant quest to get the Bible right has not led to greater and greater certainty about what the Bible means. Quite the contrary. It has led to a staggering number of different denominations and subdenominations that disagree sharply about how significant portions of the Bible should be understood. I mean, if the Bible is our source of sure knowledge about God, how do we explain all this diversity? Isn't the Bible supposed to unify us rather than divide us?

In a sense , the fact that churches continue being preoccupied with correct thinking is perfectly understandable: holding to what you know is part o the Protestant DNA, passed down to contemporary evangelicalism and fundamentalism via the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. But the preoccupation is also inexcusable, because we only need to google "churches in my area" to see that this road of getting the Bible right has led, if not to a complete dead end, then at least to an endless traffic circle.


The struggle between fundamentalists and modernists over the Bible has also revealed an odd fact lying just below the surface. Even though these two groups see the Bible in polar opposite ways, they share the same starting point: ay book worthy of being called God's word would need to talk about the past accurately. The modernists, looking at things like the problems with Genesis, concluded that the Bible wasn't, after all, a supernatural book that told us reliable facts about the past. (Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires our Trust More than Our “Correct” Beliefs [Harper One, 2016], 52)