In response to an Evangelical who is questioning the doctrine of sola scriptura, Reformed Baptist, James White, commented as follows:
Never does he [God] hold us accountable for the traditions of men. (source)
Firstly, the term "traditions of men" is just White trying to poison the well; those who hold to extra-biblical sources, whether written or oral, do not believe they are "traditions of men" (cf. Mark 7/Matt 15 and the Koran rule; Col 2:8, etc), but God-inspired traditions.
Furthermore, the New Testament does affirm that non-inscripturated revelation was inspired by God (e.g., 1 Thess 2:13; 2 Thess 2:15; 3:6; cf. 1 Cor 11:23f; 15:1-4). As with the event recorded in Matt 22 (which White briefly touched upon before these comments), Christ was living during a time of inscripturation, so sola scriptura was not operative during His time(!) One opponent of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura wrote in response to White himself:
Evangelical James White admits: “Protestants do not assert that Sola Scriptura is a valid concept during times of revelation. How could it be, since the rule of faith to which it points was at the very time coming into being?” (“A Review and Rebuttal of Steve Ray's Article Why the Bereans Rejected Sola Scriptura,” 1997, on web site of Alpha and Omega Ministries). By this admission, White has unwittingly proven that Scripture does not teach Sola Scriptura, for if it cannot be a “valid concept during times of revelation,” how can Scripture teach such a doctrine since Scripture was written precisely when divine oral revelation was being produced? Scripture cannot contradict itself. Since both the 1st century Christian and the 21st century Christian cannot extract differing interpretations from the same verse, thus, whatever was true about Scripture then also be true today. If the first Christians did not, and could not extract sola scriptura from Scripture because oral revelation was still existent, then obviously those verses could not, in principle, be teaching Sola Scriptura, and thus we cannot interpret them as teaching it either. (“Does Scripture teach Sola Scriptura?” in Robert A. Sungenis, ed. Not by Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura [2d ed: Catholic Apologetics International: 2009], pp. 101-53, here p. 118 n. 24]
One final example of the Bible holding the people of God accountable for (inspired/non-inscriptured) tradition, consider 2 Chron 29:25:
He stationed the Levites in the house of the Lord with cymbals, with harps, and with lyres, according to the command of David and Gad the king's seer, and of Nathan the prophet; for the command was from the Lord through the prophets. (NASB [1995])
In this passage, we learn the following:
(1) Firstly, David, Gad, and Nathan were dead for about 250 years at this point; however, (2) they passed on a "command . . . from the Lord" which was prescribed by God's prophets on how worship to be conducted in the temple (hardly a minor issue; the worship of God is a central issue in theology) and (3) such a prescription and commandment is nowhere found in the entirety of the Bible.
So what we have here is a clear OT refutation of the Sola Scriptura principle. Other OT texts refer to the non-canonical written and non-inscripturated oral tradition of prophets and seers that were held to be as authoritative as inscripturated revelation: e.g. 2 Chron 9:29; 12:15; 33:18-19; 35:4; 1 Sam 9:9; Isaiah 30:10; Jer 26:18; Zech 1:4-6; 7:7; 8:9.
As with many apologists for sola scriptura, White is on an exegetical fishing trip, but not only does he lack fishing poles, he doesn’t even know how to fish in the first place. As with his (eisegetical) interpretation of Heb 10:29 (among many other texts), his exegesis (actually, eisegesis) is driven to protect Reformed theology; not to accurately represent the biblical texts themselves.
