While a defender in the formal sufficiency of the Bible, Hal Hougey wrote the following which shows how Sola Scriptura is, to be blunt, useless:
The Silence of Consensus
The OT contains the
Law of Moses, a legal code which attempted to regulate almost every problem
which might ever arise in the nation of Israel. The NT is quite different. IT
is the dynamic word for a living church. Most of it was written in response to
particular needs, problems, or questions as they arose in the early church.
Therefore, if a
matter was not a problem or need in the early church, we should not expect that
it would ever come under consideration in the NT. This could be called a “Silence
of Consensus,” meaning that agreement on, and support for, a given position was
so nearly universal that no request was ever made to one of the NT writers for
clarification.
On the other hand, if
someone questioned a practice it would become the subject of instruction, and
appear in the NT record. The Corinthian church, for example, had some questions
about marriage, and they wrote to Paul for some guidance (1 Co 7). If they had
not raised the question, Paul would not have penned the seventh chapter of First
Corinthians. But they did, and he did.
Some other problem
areas that probably faced the NT church:
·
Infanticide (common in the Roman world)
·
Using addictive drugs (documented among pagans before Christ)
·
Gambling
·
Instrumental music in worship
·
Military service
·
Plurality of elders in local church
·
Polygamy
·
Slave trading: buying, selling, owning.
Apparently the early
church had reached a consensus on most of these. Therefore, there was no need
for the NT writers to deal with them. But some of these topics have moral or theological
implications. Yet none of them is a subject explicitly dealt with in the NT.
The early church must have applied broad general principles to these problems
in seeking their solutions.
To use the absence of
instruction as a justification for doing something other than what the first
century church did, might be a dangerous presumption. Can we really justify
dumping a universal practice of the early church simply because there was no specific
reference to it?
We live in a very
different world from that in which the early church lived, and we face problems
they did not. It is reasonable to expect, then, that we might have some
problems or questions for which we would like some answers, but with which the
NT does not deal specifically or directly.
Below are some
contemporary problems with which we must deal.
·
Surrogate motherhood
·
Sperm banks
·
Artificial insemination
·
Genetic engineering
·
Contraception
·
Heroic measures to prolong life
·
“Pulling the plug” on brain-dead persons
·
Voting; holding political office
·
Military service
·
Nuclear war
Instead of consensus,
there is much debate on them. (Today’s church has even lost the consensus the
early church enjoyed on the items on the first list, and some of them are also
controversial today.) We, also, must apply broad general biblical principles to
all of these subjects, using care as we seek to “handle correctly the word of
truth” (2Tm 2:15). (Hal Hougey, The Quest for Understandable Hermeneutics [Concord,
Calif.: Manna, 1997], 160-61)
