As far as I
can ascertain, I am the Latter-day Saint apologist who has written the most
against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. See, for e.g., my lengthy essay:
In a recent
book by Karen Armstrong, in the chapter “Sola Scriptura,” she wrote the
following, which shows how, in spite of the so-called perspicuity of scripture
and other tenets the Reformers and their followers accepted, they were more
than willing to condemn each other with an anathema for disagreeing on issues
such as the nature of the Eucharist as well as physically persecute Anabaptists
for daring to reject infant baptism, and so forth:
The Reformation, it has been said, signalled
a resurgence of the left hemisphere of the brain, which, as we have seen, had
begun in Europe during the thirteenth century. The Eucharistic quarrels represented
a flight from the metaphorical to a literalistic mode of thought. The reformers
were grappling with the implausible doctrine of transubstantiation, an unhappy attempt
by medieval theologians to make sense of the Eucharist in Aristotelian terms,
which was never accepted by Greek Christian. IT claimed that when the priest spoke
the words of consecration, the ‘substance’ (the underlying reality) of the
bread and wine literally because the
body and blood of Christ, while leaving their ‘accidents’ (their outward
appearance) intact.
Transubstantiation represented an ‘unskilful’
flight from metaphor, the natural model of expression of the brain’s right
hemisphere which sees the interconnectedness of things. Metaphor links the
whole of one thing with the whole of another so that we see both differently. When
we can a man a wolf, the wolf becomes more human and a man more animal, and
when we say that a human being is divine, we gain a new understanding of both
humanity and divinity. The metaphoric insight occurs before the information is
processed in the left hemisphere. Traditional Catholic ritual was deliberately
metaphorical, implicit and indecipherable, enabling participants tacitly to
glimpse the unity of reality. The Reformation, however, heralded the triumph of
the written Word and a preference for clarity and definition. Christ’s words
would not mean that the bread could only be
a loaf—a mode of thought that resulted in an emphasis on the word rather than
the image, on the literal rather than the metaphorical, and an insistence on
the explicit meaning of scripture. Instead of ‘cracking open’ the words of
scripture to glimpse something Beyond, like Ambrose of Milan, the reformers
abandoned the traditional four ‘senses’, focusing instead on the literal,
historical reading. Allegory was permitted only if it did not jeopardise the
plain meaning of the text—a decision that would subject the Western Christians
mind to a tension that would soon become intolerable.
The new literalism was also evident in the
reformers’ vehement disagreement about infant baptism, which the Anabaptists,
the more radical reformers, claimed was ‘unscriptural’. True, there was no
explicit mention of this practice in the New Testament, but it had been accepted,
for different reasons, by both Eastern and Western Christians who had felt free
to improvise and innovate. But the reformers debated this issue with an anger
and self-righteousness that embedded them in the ego that the art of scripture obliged
them to transcend. Konrad Grebel denounced the baptism of children as ‘a
senseless, blasphemous abomination, against all scripture’, while Felix Mantz
declared that it was ‘against God, an insult to Christ, and a trampling
underfoot of his own true eternal word’. For Hans Hut it was an immoral ‘defrauding
of simple people, a cunning trick on all Christendom, and an arch-rogue’s cover
for all the godless’, while Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine monk
condemned it as ‘the pope’s greatest and first abomination’.
The reformers seem to have forgotten Valla’s
warning about the fallibility of proof texts: the warring parties all cited
scriptural maxims to incriminate their opponents, who, of course, hurled back
other texts to endorse their own position . . . .The Reformers all revered
Augustine, but seem to have forgotten his insistence that scripture taught
nothing but charity. ‘Beware of Zwingli and avoid his books as the hellish
poison of Satan,’ Luther warned his colleagues, ‘for the man is completely perverted
and has completely lost Christ’.
Luther claimed that the Bible had only one
meaning. ‘In the whole of scripture, there is nothing else but Christ, either
in plain words or involved words’. But he soon became aware that some books of
the Bible were more Christological than others. His solution was to create a ‘canon
within the canon’, privileging books that supported his own theology. Here he
clashed with the Wittenberg theologian Andreas Karlstadt, who objected strongly
to Luther’s marginalisation of the Epistle of James which challenged his doctrine
of justification by faith alone. ‘Take the case, my brothers, of someone who
has never done a single good act but claims that he has faith. Will that faith
save him’ James had asked. Could faith save a man who did nothing to help those
who lacked the necessities of life? ‘If good works do not go with it’, James
had concluded, faith is ‘quite dead’. (Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts [London: The
Bodley Head, 2019], 304-5)
